(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to The Cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington. For AWS's Marketplace Seller Conference. It's the big news within the Amazon partner network, combining with marketplace, forming the Amazon partner organization. Part of a big reorg as they grow to the next level, NextGen cloud, mid-game on the chessboard. Cube's got it covered. I'm John Furry, your host at Cube. Great guests here from Data bricks. Both cube alumni's. Jack Anderson, GM and VP of the Databricks partnership team for AWS. You handle that relationship and Joel Minick vice president of product and partner marketing. You guys have the keys to the kingdom with Databricks and AWS. Thanks for joining. Good to see you again. >> Thanks for having us back. >> Yeah, John, great to be here. >> So I feel like we're at Reinvent 2013. Small event, no stage, but there's a real shift happening with procurement. Obviously it's a no brainer on the micro, you know, people should be buying online. Self-service, Cloud Scale. But Amazon's got billions being sold through their marketplace. They've reorganized their partner network. You can see kind of what's going on. They've kind of figured it out. Like let's put everything together and simplify and make it less of a website, marketplace. Merge our partner organizations, have more synergy and frictionless experiences so everyone can make more money and customer's are going to be happier. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you're running relationship. You're in the middle of it. >> Well, Amazon's mental model here is that they want the world's best ISVs to operate on AWS so that we can collaborate and co architect on behalf of customers. And that's exactly what the APO and marketplace allow us to do, is to work with Amazon on these really, you know, unique use cases. >> You know, I interviewed Ali many times over the years. I remember many years ago, maybe six, seven years ago, we were talking. He's like, "we're all in on AWS." Obviously now the success of Databricks, you've got multiple clouds, see that. Customers have choice. But I remember the strategy early on. It was like, we're going to be deep. So this is, speaks volumes to the relationship you have. Years. Jack, take us through the relationship that Databricks has with AWS from a partner perspective. Joel, and from a product perspective. Because it's not like you guys are Johnny come lately, new to the scene. >> Right. >> You've been there, almost president creation of this wave. What's the relationship and how does it relate to what's going on today? >> So most people may not know that Databricks was born on AWS. We actually did our first $100 million of revenue on Amazon. And today we're obviously available on multiple clouds. But we're very fond of our Amazon relationship. And when you look at what the APN allows us to do, you know, we're able to expand our reach and co-sell with Amazon, and marketplace broadens our reach. And so, we think of marketplace in three different aspects. We've got the marketplace private offer business, which we've been doing for a number of years. Matter of fact, we were driving well over a hundred percent year over year growth in private offers. And we have a nine figure business. So it's a very significant business. And when a customer uses a private offer, that private offer counts against their private pricing agreement with AWS. So they get pricing power against their private pricing. So it's really important it goes on their Amazon bill. In may we launched our pay as you go, on demand offering. And in five short months, we have well over a thousand subscribers. And what this does, is it really reduces the barriers to entry. It's low friction. So anybody in an enterprise or startup or public sector company can start to use Databricks on AWS, in a consumption based model, and have it go against their monthly bill. And so we see customers, you know, doing rapid experimentation, pilots, POCs. They're really learning the value of that first, use case. And then we see rapid use case expansion. And the third aspect is the consulting partner, private offer, CPPO. Super important in how we involve our partner ecosystem of our consulting partners and our resellers that are able to work with Databricks on behalf of customers. >> So you got the big contracts with the private offer. You got the product market fit, kind of people iterating with data, coming in with the buyers you get. And obviously the integration piece all fitting in there. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so those are the offers, that's current, what's in marketplace today. Is that the products... What are people buying? >> Yeah. >> I mean, I guess what's the... Joel, what are people buying in the marketplace? And what does it mean for them? >> So fundamentally what they're buying is the ability to take silos out of their organization. And that is the problem that Databricks is out there to solve. Which is, when you look across your data landscape today, you've got unstructured data, you've got structured data, you've got real time streaming data. And your teams are trying to use all of this data to solve really complicated problems. And as Databricks, as the Lakehouse Company, what we're helping customers do is, how do they get into the new world? How do they move to a place where they can use all of that data across all of their teams? And so we allow them to begin to find, through the marketplace, those rapid adoption use cases where they can get rid of these data warehousing, data lake silos they've had in the past. Get their unstructured and structured data onto one data platform, an open data platform, that is no longer adherent to any proprietary formats and standards and something they can, very much, very easily, integrate into the rest of their data environment. Apply one common data governance layer on top of that. So that from the time they ingest that data, to the time they use that data, to the time they share that data, inside and outside of their organization, they know exactly how it's flowing. They know where it came from. They know who's using it. They know who has access to it. They know how it's changing. And then with that common data platform, with that common governance solution, they'd being able to bring all of those use cases together. Across their real time streaming, their data engineering, their BI, their AI. All of their teams working on one set of data. And that lets them move really, really fast. And it also lets them solve challenges they just couldn't solve before. A good example of this, you know, one of the world's now largest data streaming platforms runs on Databricks with AWS. And if you think about what does it take to set that up? Well, they've got all this customer data that was historically inside of data warehouses. That they have to understand who their customers are. They have all this unstructured data, they've built their data science model, so they can do the right kinds of recommendation engines and forecasting around. And then they've got all this streaming data going back and forth between click stream data, from what the customers are doing with their platform and the recommendations they want to push back out. And if those teams were all working in individual silos, building these kinds of platforms would be extraordinarily slow and complex. But by building it on Databricks, they were able to release it in record time and have grown at a record pace to now be the number one platform. >> And this product, it's impacting product development. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, this is like the difference between lagging months of product development, to like days. >> Yes. >> Pretty much what you're getting at. >> Yes. >> So total agility. >> Mm-hmm. >> I got that. Okay, now, I'm a customer I want to buy in the marketplace, but you got direct Salesforce up there. So how do you guys look at this? Is there channel conflict? Are there comp programs? Because one of the things I heard today in on the stage from AWS's leadership, Chris, was up there speaking, and Mona was, "Hey, he's a CRO conference chief revenue officer" conversation. Which means someone's getting compensated. So, if I'm the sales rep at Databricks, what's my motion to the customer? Do I get paid? Does Amazon sell it? Take us through that. Is there channel conflict? Or, how do you handle it? >> Well, I'd add what Joel just talked about with, you know, with the solution, the value of the solution our entire offering is available on AWS marketplace. So it's not a subset, it's the entire Data Bricks offering. And- >> The flagship, all the, the top stuff. >> Everything, the flagship, the complete offering. So it's not segmented. It's not a sub segment. >> Okay. >> It's, you know, you can use all of our different offerings. Now when it comes to seller compensation, we view this two different ways, right? One is that AWS is also incented, right? Versus selling a native service to recommend Databricks for the right situation. Same thing with Databricks, our sales force wants to do the right thing for the customer. If the customer wants to use marketplace as their procurement vehicle. And that really helps customers because if you get Databricks and five other ISVs together, and let's say each ISV is spending, you're spending a million dollars. You have $5 million of spend. You put that spend through the flywheel with AWS marketplace, and then you can use that in your negotiations with AWS to get better pricing overall. So that's how we view it. >> So customers are driving. This sounds like. >> Correct. For sure. >> So they're looking at this as saying, Hey, I'm going to just get purchasing power with all my relationships. Because it's a solution architectural market, right? >> Yeah. It makes sense. Because if most customers will have a primary and secondary cloud provider. If they can consolidate, you know, multiple ISV spend through that same primary provider, you get pricing power. >> Okay, Joel, we're going to date ourselves. At least I will. So back in the old days, (group laughter) It used to be, do a Barney deal with someone, Hey, let's go to market together. You got to get paper, you do a biz dev deal. And then you got to say, okay, now let's coordinate our sales teams, a lot of moving parts. So what you're getting at here is that the alternative for Databricks, or any company is, to go find those partners and do deals, versus now Amazon is the center point for the customer. So you can still do those joint deals, but this seems to be flipping the script a little bit. >> Well, it is, but we still have vars and consulting partners that are doing implementation work. Very valuable work, advisory work, that can actually work with marketplace through the CPPO offering. So the marketplace allows multiple ways to procure your solution. >> So it doesn't change your business structure. It just makes it more efficient. >> That's correct. >> That's a great way to say it. >> Yeah, that's great. >> Okay. So, that's it. So that's just makes it more efficient. So you guys are actually incented to point customers to the marketplace. >> Yes. >> Absolutely. >> Economically. >> Economically, it's the right thing to do for the customer. It's the right thing to do for our relationship with Amazon. Especially when it comes back to co-selling, right? Because Amazon now is leaning in with ISVs and making recommendations for, you know, an ISV solution. And our teams are working backwards from those use cases, you know, to collaborate and land them. >> Yeah. I want to get that out there. Go ahead, Joel. >> So one of the other things I might add to that too, you know, and why this is advantageous for companies like Databricks to work through the marketplace. Is it makes it so much easier for customers to deploy a solution. It's very, literally, one click through the marketplace to get Databricks stood up inside of your environment. And so if you're looking at how do I help customers most rapidly adopt these solutions in the AWS cloud, the marketplace is a fantastic accelerator to that. >> You know, it's interesting. I want to bring this up and get your reaction to it because to me, I think this is the future of procurement. So from a procurement standpoint, I mean, again, dating myself, EDI back in the old days, you know, all that craziness. Now this is all the internet, basically through the console. I get the infrastructure side, you know, spin up and provision some servers, all been good. You guys have played well there in the marketplace. But now as we get into more of what I call the business apps, and they brought this up on stage. A little nuanced. Most enterprises aren't yet there of integrating tech, on the business apps, into the stack. This is where I think you guys are a use case of success where you guys have been successful with data integration. It's an integrators dilemma, not an innovator's dilemma. So like, I want to integrate. So now I have integration points with Databricks, but I want to put an app in there. I want to provision an application, but it has to be built. It's not, you don't buy it. You build, you got to build stuff. And this is the nuance. What's your reaction to that? Am I getting this right? Or am I off because, no one's going to be buying software like they used to. They buy software to integrate it. >> Yeah, no- >> Because everything's integrated. >> I think AWS has done a great job at creating a partner ecosystem, right? To give customers the right tools for the right jobs. And those might be with third parties. Databricks is doing the same thing with our partner connect program, right? We've got customer partners like Five Tran and DBT that, you know, augment and enhance our platform. And so you're looking at multi ISV architectures and all of that can be procured through the AWS marketplace. >> Yeah. It's almost like, you know, bundling and un bundling. I was talking about this with, with Dave Alante about Supercloud. Which is why wouldn't a customer want the best solution in their architecture? Period. In its class. If someone's got API security or an API gateway. Well, you know, I don't want to be forced to buy something because it's part of a suite. And that's where you see things get sub optimized. Where someone dominates a category and they have, oh, you got to buy my version of this. >> Joel and I were talking, we were actually saying, what's really important about Databricks, is that customers control the data, right? You want to comment on that? >> Yeah. I was going to say, you know, what you're pushing on there, we think is extraordinarily, you know, the way the market is going to go. Is that customers want a lot of control over how they build their data stack. And everyone's unique in what tools are the right ones for them. And so one of the, you know, philosophically, I think, really strong places, Databricks and AWS have lined up, is we both take an approach that you should be able to have maximum flexibility on the platform. And as we think about the Lakehouse, one thing we've always been extremely committed to, as a company, is building the data platform on an open foundation. And we do that primarily through Delta Lake and making sure that, to Jack's point, with Databricks, the data is always in your control. And then it's always stored in a completely open format. And that is one of the things that's allowed Databricks to have the breadth of integrations that it has with all the other data tools out there. Because you're not tied into any proprietary format, but instead are able to take advantage of all the innovation that's happening out there in the open source ecosystem. >> When you see other solutions out there that aren't as open as you guys, you guys are very open by the way, we love that too. We think that's a great strategy, but what am I foreclosing if I go with something else that's not as open? What's the customer's downside as you think about what's around the corner in the industry? Because if you believe it's going to be open, open source, which I think open source software is the software industry, and integration is a big deal. Because software's going to be plentiful. >> Sure. >> Let's face it. It's a good time to be in software business. But Cloud's booming. So what's the downside, from your Databricks perspective? You see a buyer clicking on Databricks versus that alternative. What's potentially should they be a nervous about, down the road, if they go with a more proprietary or locked in approach? >> Yeah. >> Well, I think the challenge with proprietary ecosystems is you become beholden to the ability of that provider to both build relationships and convince other vendors that they should invest in that format. But you're also, then, beholden to the pace at which that provider is able to innovate. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think we've seen lots of times over history where, you know, a proprietary format may run ahead, for a while, on a lot of innovation. But as that market control begins to solidify, that desire to innovate begins to degrade. Whereas in the open formats- >> So extract rents versus innovation. (John laughs) >> Exactly. Yeah, exactly. >> I'll say it. >> But in the open world, you know, you have to continue to innovate. >> Yeah. >> And the open source world is always innovating. If you look at the last 10 to 15 years, I challenge you to find, you know, an example where the innovation in the data and AI world is not coming from open source. And so by investing in open ecosystems, that means you are always going to be at the forefront of what is the latest. >> You know, again, not to date myself again, but you look back at the eighties and nineties, the protocol stacked with proprietary. >> Yeah. >> You know, SNA and IBM, deck net was digital. You know the rest. And then TCPIP was part of the open systems interconnect. >> Mm-hmm. >> Revolutionary (indistinct) a big part of that, as well as my school did. And so like, you know, that was, but it didn't standardize the whole stack. It stopped at IP and TCP. >> Yeah. >> But that helped inter operate, that created a nice defacto. So this is a big part of this mid game. I call it the chessboard, you know, you got opening game and mid-game, then you get the end game. You're not there at the end game yet at Cloud. But Cloud- >> There's, always some form of lock in, right? Andy Jazzy will address it, you know, when making a decision. But if you're going to make a decision you want to reduce- You don't want to be limited, right? So I would advise a customer that there could be limitations with a proprietary architecture. And if you look at what every customer's trying to become right now, is an AI driven business, right? And so it has to do with, can you get that data out of silos? Can you organize it and secure it? And then can you work with data scientists to feed those models? >> Yeah. >> In a very consistent manner. And so the tools of tomorrow will, to Joel's point, will be open and we want interoperability with those tools. >> And choice is a matter too. And I would say that, you know, the argument for why I think Amazon is not as locked in as maybe some other clouds, is that they have to compete directly too. Redshift competes directly with a lot of other stuff. But they can't play the bundling game because the customers are getting savvy to the fact that if you try to bundle an inferior product with something else, it may not work great at all. And they're going to be, they're onto it. This is the- >> To Amazon's credit by having these solutions that may compete with native services in marketplace, they are providing customers with choice, low price- >> And access to the core value. Which is the hardware- >> Exactly. >> Which is their platform. Okay. So I want to get you guys thought on something else I see emerging. This is, again, kind of Cube rumination moment. So on stage, Chris unpacked a lot of stuff. I mean this marketplace, they're touching a lot of hot buttons here, you know, pricing, compensation, workflows, services behind the curtain. And one of those things he mentioned was, they talk about resellers or channel partners, depending upon what you talk about. We believe, Dave and I believe on the Cube, that the entire indirect sales channel of the industry is going to be disrupted radically. Because those players were selling hardware in the old days and software. That game is going to change. You mentioned you guys have a program, let me get your thoughts on this. We believe that once this gets set up, they can play in this game and bring their services in. Which means that the old reseller channels are going to be rewritten. They're going to be refactored with this new kinds of access. Because you've got scale, you've got money and you've got product. And you got customers coming into the marketplace. So if you're like a reseller that sold computers to data centers or software, you know, a value added reseller or VAB or business. >> You've got to evolve. >> You got to, you got to be here. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys working with those partners? Because you say you have a product in your marketplace there. How do I make money if I'm a reseller with Databricks, with Amazon? Take me through that use case. >> Well I'll let Joel comment, but I think it's pretty straightforward, right? Customers need expertise. They need knowhow. When we're seeing customers do mass migrations to the cloud or Hadoop specific migrations or data transformation implementations. They need expertise from consulting and SI partners. If those consulting and SI partners happen to resell the solution as well. Well, that's another aspect of their business. But I really think it is the expertise that the partners bring to help customers get outcomes. >> Joel, channel big opportunity for Amazon to reimagine this. >> For sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, to your comment about how do resellers take advantage of that, I think what Jack was pushing on is spot on. Which is, it's becoming more and more about the expertise you bring to the table. And not just transacting the software. But now actually helping customers make the right choices. And we're seeing, you know, both SIs begin to be able to resell solutions and finding a lot of opportunity in that. >> Yeah. And I think we're seeing traditional resellers begin to move into that SI model as well. And that's going to be the evolution that this goes. >> At the end of the day, it's about services, right? >> For sure. Yeah. >> I mean... >> You've got a great service. You're going to have high gross profits. >> Yeah >> Managed service provider business is alive and well, right? Because there are a number of customers that want that type of a service. >> I think that's going to be a really hot, hot button for you guys. I think being the way you guys are open, this channel, partner services model coming in, to the fold, really kind of makes for kind of that Supercloud like experience, where you guys now have an ecosystem. And that's my next question. You guys have an ecosystem going on, within Databricks. >> For sure. >> On top of this ecosystem. How does that work? This is kind of like, hasn't been written up in business school and case studies yet. This is new. What is this? >> I think, you know, what it comes down to is, you're seeing ecosystems begin to evolve around the data platforms. And that's going to be one of the big, kind of, new horizons for us as we think about what drives ecosystems. It's going to be around, well, what's the data platform that I'm using? And then all the tools that have to encircle that to get my business done. And so I think there's, you know, absolutely ecosystems inside of the AWS business on all of AWS's services, across data analytics and AI. And then to your point, you are seeing ecosystems now arise around Databricks in its Lakehouse platform as well. As customers are looking at well, if I'm standing these Lakehouses up and I'm beginning to invest in this, then I need a whole set of tools that help me get that done as well. >> I mean you think about ecosystem theory, we're living a whole nother dream. And I'm not kidding. It hasn't yet been written up and for business school case studies is that, we're now in a whole nother connective tissue, ecology thing happening. Where you have dependencies and value proposition. Economics, connectedness. So you have relationships in these ecosystems. >> And I think one of the great things about the relationships with these ecosystems, is that there's a high degree of overlap. >> Yeah. >> So you're seeing that, you know, the way that the cloud business is evolving, the ecosystem partners of Databricks, are the same ecosystem partners of AWS. And so as you build these platforms out into the cloud, you're able to really take advantage of best of breed, the broadest set of solutions out there for you. >> Joel, Jack, I love it because you know what it means? The best ecosystem will win, if you keep it open. >> Sure, sure. >> You can see everything. If you're going to do it in the dark, you know, you don't know the outcome. I mean, this is really kind of what we're talking about. >> And John, can I just add that when I was at Amazon, we had a theory that there's buyers and builders, right? There's very innovative companies that want to build things themselves. We're seeing now that that builders want to buy a platform. Right? >> Yeah. >> And so there's a platform decision being made and that ecosystem is going to evolve around the platform. >> Yeah, and I totally agree. And the word innovation gets kicked around. That's why, you know, when we had our Supercloud panel, it was called the innovators dilemma, with a slash through it, called the integrater's dilemma. Innovation is the digital transformation. So- >> Absolutely. >> Like that becomes cliche in a way, but it really becomes more of a, are you open? Are you integrating? If APIs are connective tissue, what's automation, what's the service messages look like? I mean, a whole nother set of, kind of thinking, goes on in these new ecosystems and these new products. >> And that thinking is, has been born in Delta Sharing, right? So the idea that you can have a multi-cloud implementation of Databricks, and actually share data between those two different clouds, that is the next layer on top of the native cloud solution. >> Well, Databricks has done a good job of building on top of the goodness of, and the CapEx gift from AWS. But you guys have done a great job taking that building differentiation into the product. You guys have great customer base, great growing ecosystem. And again, I think a shining example of what every enterprise is going to do. Build on top of something, operating model, get that operating model, driving revenue. >> Mm-hmm. >> Yeah. >> Whether, you're Goldman Sachs or capital one or XYZ corporation. >> S and P global, NASDAQ. >> Yeah. >> We've got, you know, the biggest verticals in the world are solving tough problems with Databricks. I think we'd be remiss because if Ali was here, he would really want to thank Amazon for all of the investments across all of the different functions. Whether it's the relationship we have with our engineering and service teams. Our marketing teams, you know, product development. And we're going to be at Reinvent. A big presence at Reinvent. We're looking forward to seeing you there, again. >> Yeah. We'll see you guys there. Yeah. Again, good ecosystem. I love the ecosystem evolutions happening. This NextGen Cloud is here. We're seeing this evolve, kind of new economics, new value propositions kind of scaling up. Producing more. So you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on the Cube and taking the time. Joel, great to see you at the check. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Okay. Cube coverage here. The world's changing as APN comes together with the marketplace for a new partner organization at Amazon web services. The Cube's got it covered. This should be a very big, growing ecosystem as this continues. Billions of being sold through the marketplace. And of course the buyers are happy as well. So we've got it all covered. I'm John Furry. your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon web services, marketplace seller event. Really the big news here is the combination of the partner network with marketplace to one organization called the Amazon web services partner organization. Again, great news. Things are coming together, getting simplified and I'm John furry host of the cube. You've got a great guest here. Trish TRO head of worldwide Alliance at Wiz the fastest growing software company in history. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you so much. And thanks for having us. >>So we were talking on camera. You had a little insight to a AWS. You jumped on this company. Oh my God. Amazing team. Take us through the story real quick. It's worth noting Wiz the company fastest growth. We're seeing take us through the quick soundbite. >>Sure. So the quick soundbite. So I was at AWS and my husband shared an article with me on cnbc.com about Wiz. They just done a big funding raise and he's like, you really have to read this. And I read it. And I said, oh my God, every single customer that I've met with the last year and a half has this problem. I have to find a way to be there. I don't care if I have to sweep the floors, lucky enough, they needed someone to run channels and alliances. So I did not have to sweep the floors, but for me, you know, when I think about our success, it's really this convergence of a series of things it's it's right time. Right? COVID forced everybody to the cloud, probably a little faster than they were ready to, you know, right market. And we have this convergence of the incredible product market fit, helping customers accelerate their cloud journey securely. And then I can't say enough about the team. You know, I thought it was fascinating, you know, as great as our product is when I got on board, everyone kept telling me, you know, they bought our product because of the team. And I was like, okay, cool. What about the product? And then I met the team and I understood. So jumped >>On one off one rocket ship. Yeah. To go onto another one. Yeah. You like the rocket, you like to ride those big, fast growth companies. You >>Know, I, I wish I was the kind of person where, you know, I just, I need excitement. Right? I'm I love to build. And I've had really good luck that I've always been able to find myself in a place, whether it's at a massive company or a startup to find myself as a builder, which has always been awesome. >>Well, tr it's great to have you on the cube. And a little fun fact is your sister was interviewed here on the cube in 2019 by myself. And so we have the first sisters, both cube alumni. Congratulations. >>I think that's, you know, honestly of all the accomplishments in my career, that's definitely one. I gotta make sure I get a plaque for that. You >>Will get a VIP sticker too. Yes, we, we all >>Sticker. Let's not get crazy now. >>All right. We'll designate in the front page. We'll have a very big story. L fund all good. We'd love the queue. We'd love to get the insight. So I wanna get your thoughts. Okay. You you've seen the Amazon side. You've been on that side. Now you're another side of the table with a partner growing. We're here to seller our conference. Big mission here is let's make things simpler and easier to procure software since you're already fast growing, what's in it for the customer to work through AWS, to get Wiz. Obviously you guys got a lot of demand. Yeah. A lot of money flowing through. You guys have a direct sales force. Are you going through the marketplace? What's the relationship between Wiz and Aish marketplace. >>So huge, honestly, and it's been a huge contributor to our success. We were lucky because we're, we were born during COVID, we're born in the cloud company. We got to build it from the ground up. This wasn't something that we had to go and figure out how to integrate into our existing ecosystem. Our ecosystem is actually built around the marketplace motion. You know, it's, it's interesting as you know, coming from AWS and now being on the other side, you know, something we really put a focus on is, you know, I see a lot of the companies that I was working with, you know, cloud was very much this thing. That's kind of in a silo and it's its own box and it competes internally. And really when you, you get deeper and deeper into the marketplace, it becomes about how do I use the cloud to really accelerate what I'm doing and to integrate it across my different channels. And for us, you know, AWS is our deepest relationship on the partner side. We invested heavily early and often, and it's been amazing. You >>Know, tr I was talking one of the data brick guys as well, and other companies that are big successes. This is a unique time here at the marketplace. We're on the ground floor. You can see here, we're at the, there's no stage. It's the smaller Q small venue, very intimate event. But it reminds me of 2013 when reinvent was starting to get traction second year, small, intimate, little bit bigger, obviously, but this is gonna feel like it's gonna explode. And you mentioned that you guys are building emotions around the ecosystem of the marketplace because you were born, born in the cloud. And COVID, so it's almost like if you're a startup today, why wouldn't you be in the marketplace first? Why even have that motion? So reminds me of the old days of you're a startup. Why not use the cloud? Why build a data center? >>No, and I think that's a really great analogy, you know, at least from what I've seen, it's, it's super interesting as a startup, because part of when you come out with a new technology in a perfect world, customers would already know what you were gonna make and have funding allocated for it. And we would all have this much easier sales cycle. That's not how it works. The customers, you know, as much as they might wanna get your solution, they have real things like budgets to deal with. And so it's really cool because when you work with the marketplace, it's a pool of funding that the customer has allocated on the customer side. It burns down their commit with the, with their different contracts. So that's usually powerful for them, right? Being able to consolidate your it, spend, reduce your overall total cost of ownership is, is usually powerful to the customer. And it on our side is a startup. So not only are they the financial benefits, it also helps you elevate the conversation. You know, a lot of times in the security industry, it's really all about like speeds and beads. That's how we sell cyber crime is 300% on the rise and stuff like that. Right. But being able to kind of get above that and help the customer, you know, have that financial conversation is, is really helpful too. >>So if I'm a startup, I'm a company, what would be the playbook for me and say, you know what, I'm gonna go all in, in the marketplace, I'm just gonna build the best kick ass product. Okay. I got product market fit. I'm gonna focus all my creative energy on building the best tech with the best, best team. All my friends and colleagues, and none of this non says go to market direct Salesforce, go all in on AWS. I know the product market fits there. What's the playbook. What do I do? Do just list it. >>So list, I think this is one of the mistakes that a lot of companies make when, when they first start out with the marketplace, right? They're like I will get to the marketplace and then AWS will sell my solution. I'm done the marketplace really? >>Where's the money back up the truck, come on. >>Exactly. Right? Like they have all these customers, they should just all come to me. Right. And I think that's one of the mistakes that organizations stumble on initially, cuz they go to the marketplace and then AWS is not selling their solution for them immediately. And they're like, the marketplace is a failure and it's really not. It's just the beginning of that. Being able to go into the marketplace, being able, honestly, to set expectations internally and understanding the journey that really comes into play here. You know, building, you know, one of the things that I talk to a lot about my team with is like building success within the sales reps and helping them be big advocates and champions for the marketplace. And the other thing is like, don't assume people know, I can't tell you. I feel like my, my real job at Wiz is I'm like the marketplace evangelist and cheap cuz that's all I do is talk about why they should use the marketplace and how it can solve all these different problems. Don't assume that people know how to do these things. Like you have to keep reiterating the message. You have to find sellers that are ready for it. And then you have to really, you have to teach them how to do it and then align your sales process accordingly. Like confidentiality come up a whole bunch at this conference today. It's important. You need it. >>It's huge. How big is your sales force right now? >>On >>The direct side. >>On the direct side, I think we're like a hundred or something like >>That. So you have, you have people out there on the streets knocking on doors selling. How's that comp decision go internally as you guys have that, what's the, what's the uptake in the marketplace for you guys right now? Is it high? Is it it's >>Been really high honestly. Yeah. It's and we've been really great. We have some incredible champions internally who are really great about sharing their experience, helping other sellers understand like we've, we've honestly had amazing co-sell stories at AWS where they've been so supportive and helpful. And it's amazing. Like we've had so many sellers that have done their first marketplace transaction ever. And now it's like for some of our sellers, they're at the point where they're like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna not do a marketplace transaction. It's just, it's so much easier. Take us >>For the procurement benefits. Take, walk me through what happens on the procurement side. What's the benefits for using the marketplace as you, as the procurement process goes through? >>Oh, from a, from a procurement side, right? It's like, it's simple, right? Like you, you essentially click a button and it's done like from the seller's side, like imagine not having to like chase down 15 different signatures and make sure nobody's on vacation. Right? So it just takes this really convoluted ti process that they would normally deal with. It makes it a lot simpler on the customer side. Right. Being able to have one consolidated is super powerful, burning down against commit, super powerful. And I think that's something that's really helped. Our sellers too, is being able, like we, we spend a tremendous amount of resources on educating our sellers. Not only about how it's gonna help them, but also how it's gonna help the customer too, >>Too. So good internally for you guys frictionless easier, better, better. Sounds like a better path >>On that. Oh, I won't say frictionless. I mean we're, we're about a year into this, but it wasn't so much frictionless, but it's not a hassle itself. Right. It's not a hassle. And it's all about >>On scale one to 10, 10 being frictionless. Would you get a, an eight or >>I'd say like an eight. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Cool. But it's important for organizations to understand that, right? Like that just because there's a little bit of friction at first. Like the most important thing I told my team is they were like, look like, well, why doesn't everybody wanna do this? This is so easy. And a, a good seller will take the hard time every way when they know what the defined outcome is. Yeah. The marketplace to them feels like a shortcut at first. Yeah. So a very much helps them become like, Hey look, this isn't a shortcut. This is gonna help you. Like, this is a good thing. And once you get that adoption like that, that's where the primary friction is. They almost go, is this, is this too good to be true? This can't be real. >>It, it, it almost sounds too good to be true when you think about, okay, so lemme take, I'm gonna put them a sales rep for a second. Like I'm selling WIS and I go and knock on a door and there's a company and I get an, a champion inside the company and says, oh, I love this product. I wanna buy it. I gotta get my PO approved and I gotta go get, I tell my boss about it. Does it go through that kind of normal kind of normal sales motion where you got buy in and now they gotta commit and close and get contract or they just go to the person who runs the account, click the button, like, like, is there, I mean, I'd like to see that shortcut happen. Like so on the customer side, what, what do you see as the process? Is it just go to the console and hit by and >>You know, depends on the customer honestly, and kind of where they are in their cloud journey. You know, really mature customers tend to have a little bit more of a mature process, you know, earlier customers, it tends to be a little less, let's say structured, but no, it's definitely not. The customer just clicks the button and it's done. That would be quite nice. We're just not there yet, but it's definitely a much simpler process cuz you know, you think about it on the customer side when they decide they wanna buy something, especially something new, they don't have allocated funding for us. They have to go build all this justification for funding. They still have to do that. Right. But then now there's a pot of money that they can go to and be able to retire against. There, there, it does help in that sense. A >>Lot. Chris, Chris grew has talked about on his keynote, the buyer journey survey. That seems to be on the, on the customer side. Yeah. Having those processes where they can forecast against it, they kind of know what they're getting. That's that's that's sounds like a great thing that's happening. I wanna get back to this comp issue again. Cause this came up. I heard that a lot. We talked with Chris about the competing thing. That's not an issue in my mind, but I think the factor to me, if I'm looking at this is that if you get the comp right, they can sell it at Amazon. You get comped, your sales people get comped goes through the marketplace. How do you look at that? How do company her look? How do they look at the comp what's what's the deciding factor or is it a non-issue what's the, what's the core. >>So I'm opportunity. I'm gonna be honest. I think I got a little lucky because I think the getting alignment at the executive level that this was something we should do to be totally honest here. Wasn't wasn't super hard. When we presented a clear plan, how we were gonna do it, what other companies were doing, what it did for their business to our executives. We do, we get some pushback. Sure. Healthy questions. Sure. But like it, it really >>Was it margin related or more like operational costs. >>It wasn't even margin related. It was again, more of like, is this, this feels too good to be true kind of thing. So it was more like proving it to them. Like no, like it really can be that easy. Yeah. And then on the, the comp side, right. For us, we look at it as like cost of sales. So yeah. You know, we, we treat it the same way. We treat all other channels and we wanted to make sure for our reps that, you know, when we think about the channel, whether, you know, from, especially with marketplace, like it can't be harder for them to do a marketplace transaction or less incentive for them to do that than a direct one that doesn't incentivize the right behaviors. >>So it's more of an indirect channel play. >>Yeah. So it's all for us. It was about aligning the right incentives to drive the right behaviors. It wasn't, it actually was a pretty short discussion on the confidentiality. Everyone was like, no, this, this makes sense. We should do that. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's an easy, easy, but you have to be organized for it. Like, like Chris said, don't put the toe in the water. Right. Put your flagship offering in there, make it valuable. And then the flag wheel gets going, the Amazon sales people can sell it. Right. They get calm. That's always a good thing. >>Yeah. And I think that's something that was really interesting. Like when we started on the marketplace journey, like I said, it's not just, you get in a marketplace and you're done, you know, Chris talked a lot about ISV accelerate and you know, how you elevate yourself within that program, doing things with ACE, like putting in different opportunities to, to start to essentially build that groundswell to drive co-sell it's, it's gets that first step into it. But there's so much more that, that we're still discovering and learning today is we're building it >>Out. And you said you had some good co-sell examples. >>Oh yeah. So we've had some great Cosell. >>What's your best one. Best one to >>Share. Oh, so my favorite one, I won't say the customer name, but we were in the final stages and a customer was really like, oh, like this is a lot of money. I'm really nervous. And the, they, I think what's crazy is that at AWS you have a different relationship with customers. Like you are truly a trusted advisor and rightfully so. Yeah. AWS really does a great job with making sure their account teams do what's best for the customer. And so an AWS seller or technical resource on an account says, Hey, no, this is the right thing for your business. That is huge for the customer. So we at Wiz actually spend a lot of time investing in enabling and educating the AWS account teams. So they feel comfortable when they get into that situation where the customers nervous of being saying like, no, this is you need to do this. This is >>Gonna be, you carry a lot of weight with the customers. >>Absolutely. >>And so you almost have to treat them like a lunch and learn, get 'em up, find, share. So it's kind of like an indirect relationship for you, but for them it's a part, you know, this is basically a channel. >>Yeah. And I think that's the thing that, that really is something we we've really heavily invested in is, is building. I like call the ground game within AWS. Right? Yeah. Making sure we spend time with enabling their reps. We enable their technical teams lunch and learns, right? Like there's so much energy at AWS to really invest in technical solutions that help their customers. Awesome. Which you don't always find that a lot of partners honestly. >>Well, Trish, great. Great to have you on sharing the AWS relationship story with WIS, gotta ask you, what's it like to be working for the fastest growing startup? What's it like? It's, it's, it's pretty fun. >>You know, it's, let's say I don't ever wake up on a day and say, man, I just wish I had more things to do. No, it's, it's been an incredible journey. The people, you know, my favorite part of a startup is, you know, getting to do this with a bunch of really incredible, awesome people. It's, it's the most fun thing in the world. We've, I've learned more in the last, you know, we like to joke that we're a five year old company and a one year old company at the exact same time. Yeah. And what's cool is we get to learn and, and I I've learned so much this year. >>When was the company officially >>Formed? It was officially formed before. Like, so it was officially formed in February, 2020. We started officially operating in the January following 21. So 21. Yep. >>Yeah. So one and a half years, >>One and a half years. Isn't that crazy? Great. >>And a hundred million ARR already. Yeah. Hitting that. >>Yep. It's been a, a wild journey. I I'll put it that way >>Is the, what's the success of the businesses? It, the onboarding the, is it the business model of freemium? What's the product market fit dynamic. Why is so fast? I mean, that's the needs there? Pandemic fresh, clean piece, piece of paper doing it, right. What's the, why is it? Why is that going so fast? >>Well, I think about this, I've been in the security industry for too many years. And when you think about normal security products, like there's so much time to value, you have to deploy all this infrastructure and then you gotta wait till something happens that you find that's scary, that will excite the customer. Right? It's, it's, it's a lot of time to show value. What blew my mind is the way that we approach our, the problem that we're solving is essentially immediate time to value. So the customer connects within minutes, they're immediately presented with here's your, your top risks. And then they can take action on them. Right? Like it's not just, here's these big threats and detecting, it's actually giving, empowering the customer to go and, and fix things. That's that's powerful for them. Yeah. Yeah. >>So, and the renewals are there coming in, people like the product, >>I mean, we've only been around for a year and a half, so there aren't that many renewals yet, but let's say we have extremely strong renewal rate from our customer base. >>Yeah. I mean you can have when you have a great product. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on sharing. What's your assessment so far of the database marketplace kind of reorg with APN partner network to have one organization. What does that mean to the, to the market? What does that what's that tell you? >>So I was really excited. So we're actually built this way. So I run both our channels and alliances organization and it was, it was great because it allows these two things to work together and, and very well. And AWS, I think, is realizing the power of bringing those two groups together. So when I saw that, I was like, that's gonna be great. It's gonna make it simpler, easier. And at least for us, it's been really powerful. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. We'll get you that plaque shortly. >>I thought I was getting a sticker too. >>Don't forget the sticker. Oh, the sticker definitely guaranteed. And we'll give you a VIP icon on our cube alumni network. All >>Right. I like that. >>Thanks for coming out. Alls great stuff. Thanks. Awesome. Thanks for having all best growing company history here on the cube, bringing all the action again, the new flywheel is gonna be procured through the marketplaces. This is obvious how it all kind of works and forms. It's kind of happening in real time. Cube's got you covered on the ground floor here in Seattle with more coverage after the short break.

>>Hello everyone. I'm John furry with the cube. We're here, live on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the Bellevue Hilton for thes marketplace seller conference. It's kind of like the one and a half inaugural event. They have their first event in 2019, and now with the pandemic, they're re rebooting it, but it's really all about AWS's marketplace and partner network coming together, creating an experience for how people will be buying software and how people will be selling through with their ecosystem. I'm Jennifer, the cube we're here with Megan. Fontain, who's the VP of cloud seek. Who's a seller and partner of AWS making great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thank you so much. It's, it's nice to be back in person and it's great to be with you. >>So watching the progression of how Amazon web services is evolving the marketplace and the partner network, you're starting to see some patterns. One is, I'll say they have their own stuff, and they're addressing that in the room, but they're really letting the thousand flowers bloom in the ecosystem. You hear that every year reinvent, even when Andy Jesse who's now the CEO of Amazon would say, no, we want the best of breed. Best product wins. Adam. Celeste's the same view, new leadership here, the combination of APN partner network with the marketplace now partner organization, APO is the big news. They're open. They're building an API service layer between their old marketplace to create this new model here. What's your, what's your, what's your take? What's your seller view? >>Yeah, so our marketplace and APN journey started with AWS about three years ago. And I think something that was the most profound to me out of the keynote this morning was that Chris Gus, who runs the API organization for ISVs talked about marketplace as the automation layer for how AWS will partner going forward. So an independent software vendor likes, we see that as opening up the door for two things. One, we get to leverage the great global scale and platform of AWS, but then secondly, it really brings together this idea that we will sell together to the end customer through the marketplace. And we will also sell as partners through co-sell and APM. >>You know, I love these kind of new, new development models around channel partners, ISVs at the end of the day, buyers are buying software. Yes. And they're cloud they're on a cloud journey. You're the VP of cloud at the company, your company seek take a minute to explain what your company's known for, what you guys do, your relationship with the market. You're an ISV. Yeah. Where are you guys? Cuz you guys ha have a good thing going on here. What do you guys do? What are you known for >>Sure. So seek is market leading software for advanced analytics for the manufacturing industry. So we're squarely in that industry. ISV, we sell SAS solutions to business buyers who want two things. One is they want technology that they can deploy quickly in their organizations drive that great business value ROI that drives the next level of investment in technology seeks unique offering in marketplace is that we've solved a lot of the challenges around that operational data in manufacturing. So manufacturing the industry, it's going through massive transformation, supply chain, disruption, or coming out of that, the globalization of manufacturing. And yet they have data that they've stored for 20, 30 years, that they're still in the first generation of trying to gain insights from. So that's why seek exists. It's really to bring the insights outta that data and then help the manufacturing customers we work with. Get to the cloud. >>What's interesting. I like your perspective and I want to follow up on that because data analytics used to be this thing. Well, I got a database. Yeah. You hosted on some storage and you got structured data, unstructured data. Okay. You got scale. But now you've got data platforms. You've got data mesh. I think Gardner actually has a different term, but gets a whole nother conversation. Data platforms are diverse. Yeah. They're pervasive. They're part of core infrastructure in cloud. It's not like a point solution anymore. It's gotta be integrated and customers are trying to work on, this is one of the hardest problems today. Yeah. In cloud transformation is the data layer, the relationship to other services. Yeah. >>So the Dataverse common data models. How APIs will interact with data. The trend there though is something that it is the ecosystem that will bring value to customers because no database is gonna serve every need. Right. And you think about the data layer. It really has to solve the problems whereby any application, any user, any insight can be generated almost seamlessly. And we're really on the first wave of that journey. But I think a, an element for seek that we certainly understand with our customers is that data alone is not an end objective, right? If it doesn't lead to a decision and an action and a workflow that humans can take to go drive and improvement in their business process, then you haven't tapped into the, you know, value of that technology >>When a buyer comes to the marketplace. Yeah. And they see your listing and solutions. Yes. What are they getting? What are they, what, what are they buying? >>So for seek, we've radically simplified that we, we really embrace this idea of simplification. We just sell, seek. So we have one seat listing in the AWS marketplace, all applications of seek they're all available there. We really leaned into the enterprise procurement models. So private offers are how we do the most of our business on marketplace. And it really went from a stage of experimentation where couple of customers, you know, what is this marketplace? Maybe we'll buy a few of our business applications there all the way through to now we're starting to see the demand side come through for customers where it's not just their security software or their DevOps or infrastructure software. They wanna buy solutions like seek including line of business buyers through a common catalog in the marketplace. >>Great. So I wanna ask you, cuz I want to give you the opportunity to give the pitch, the customer watching right now. Yeah. What's the pitch. Why seek, why this listing? Why should they hit the purchase button? I wish it was that easy. Why should they, why should they what's the pitch? Sure. >>So the first thing is seek through marketplace is a five clicks on three screens procurement experience. So compare that to months and months of back and forth with contracts and purchase orders and vendor set up, this is five less than five minutes, few screens, couple of clicks. And you can buy a multi-year subscription of seek to cover your entire enterprise. The second pitch is that it's a SaaS application that now can be deployed within hours. And then your users, your insights, your value is starting within the first couple hours. This is not a heavy lift it project. That's gonna take months. And then lastly seek specifically. So seek, because we're validated in the marketplace has been well architected for AWS cloud. We have that, you know, stamp of credibility. And we are leading in this space for manufacturing organizations who want cloud native secure software for analytics on their operational data. >>That's awesome. And customers have the challenge when they think about data, the use case security, yes governance, there's a variety of different use cases. What are you seeing as the top three use cases for C? >>So on the there's two lines of that question. The first is really the line of business use cases. And those are all about what outcome are we gonna drive? Are we gonna approve efficiency in your factory? Are we gonna reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Those are the kinds of use cases on the business side that that seek works with our customers on, on the it side. They wanna know that we can access data securely, that we can be part of an ecosystem where they can bring in aerations and algorithms and machine learning and new applications. And they also wanna know that we are sustainable. So meaning that we're driving constant innovation that is easy for them to consume and to gain access, to, to drive the next level of >>Improvement. My final AWS marketplace seller question is, yeah. How does the procurement process through marketplace help you and your customers what's in it for them? What value do the, does the customer get going through AWS procuring? >>So there's really really three. The first is you get a validated set of a catalog of solutions, right? That AWS says, you know, we undergo a rigorous process technically and commercially to be in the marketplace. The second thing for procurement effect of for procurement professionals is that they can leverage their cloud committed spend with AWS. So as they commit more expense and spend with AWS, now these marketplace purchases can be credited to that committed expense. We found that brings it and the business together with procurement to really work more collectively on that. And then the third piece is, imagine buying software where you don't need legal, you know, back and forth, back and forth because we're using a standard doula that thousands of other software companies are using in the marketplace today. >>I thought the keynote had a great line. We are not just a website of a catalog. We are a API service layer. Yes. With automation, more like a C I C D pipe lining. Yes. Of software. Yeah. And we are hearing more and more about software supply chain, more about scaling. This is kind of the future of procurement. Why wouldn't you buy direct, pick a few buttons and assemble your solutions at scale. >>There's some amount of tenant consequences that we've really learned as well. It brings it and the business closer together. So the it person wants to know, well, what is this seek, you know, piece of my AWS invoice. And so they get more engaged earlier in the process with procurement, with the business. And we've actually found that it brings internally for our customers, more people to the seat at the table around what are the applications and how will they govern them across the enterprise. >>Megan, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me here at the, at the conference, the seller S marketplace. I have to ask you, we were talking before we came on camera, you made a comment. I'd like you to share this comment with some commentary. You said I'm the VP of cloud transformation. And in the future that might title might not exist. Explain what you mean there, cuz I think this is kind of a telling moment about where we are at this point in the industry. >>Sure. So maybe it's, maybe it's funny to sort of envision a future where your role doesn't exist. But I think, you know, it's a to innovators do that, right? And for us we're a software company. That's going through the transition on-prem to SAS, you know, cloud native sets of applications, but in the pretty near term fore, really the next two years, all of our business will be SaaS and cloud. And so we won't need a separate VP or a separate team or separate function. It will just be how the business operates. >>Megan, thanks for running cue, Meghan bine, who is SI, she's a cloud VP of cloud transformation, VP of cloud, and she's successful. The title will go away and she'll move on to some other great valuable things like running the business. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Okay. This is a cube here in Seattle. We're covering the eights marketplace seller conference. Part of APN merging with Amazon marketplace now called the APO Amazon partner organization. I'm John ER, with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for the Avis marketplace seller conference, part of the APN partner network merging with the marketplace to form the Amazon partner organization. I'm John furrier, host of the cube Walter Wall coverage today, Christian Gor cash, who is the VP of alliances at Kong Inc. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. Really glad to be here. Corke exactly. Yeah. It's awesome. >>So Kong we've been following you guys for while Docker Kong cube. You've been part of our cube conversation. Also part of our, our startup showcase fast growing startup, you know, working on stuff that everyone loves APIs. I mean, APIs are so popular now that they now a security concern, right? Yeah. So like it gets squat there everywhere. I won't say API sprawl, but APIs are the connections and that are, is the web. That is the cloud. Okay. Now with cloud native developers who are now in the front lines have taken over it, everyone knows DevOps dev SecOps is now the new it and it's the developers security and data they're below they're the new ops, right? So, so this is where microservices come in, open source service MES new automation is coming down the pike. That's super valuable to businesses as they look at cloud native architecture, what are you guys doing in there? Take a minute to explain Kong's value proposition, the hot products, and then why you're here. >>Yeah. So, you know, I joined Kong now or three years ago, you know, we were still just reaching our hundred employees, mark, which is very important, very startup, but even back then, you know, Kong was relatively well known in industry, you know, so we have one of the most, well the most popular open source project in API gateway area. So con API gateway, you know, we cross now 300 million downloads, even more important is just the scale it, which the product's been used. So between our open source community and enterprise customers, we are now crossing like 11 trillion transactions per month. Now just give you comparison. Like this is like 18, 19 times more than Netflix per month. You know? So for any company that has a technology that operates it at scale, you need to hit few things outta the park. You know, as he mentions cloud data developers, they want simplicity. You know, they want automation. They also want performance and scale and security, which are all critical, you know, to how Kong, you know, start as opensource project. Now, of course we have the whole suite of enterprise products. We also have our con service mesh offering as well as our cloud offerings. >>Yeah. And this is how open source is doing it now, obviously, you know, I, I still remember, I still tell the story to the young startups. Hey, I, there was proprietary software when I was in college. Open source is now everything. Now you've got, got cloud scale. So the dynamic between open source, which has become the software industry open source success doesn't mean it's it's game over. It's the beginning. The commercialization that you guys have gone through is super important. Trillions of transactions. Now you have enterprises working with you. What's the big advantage of the seller relationship that you have with Amazon? Why are customers using it? What are they buying it for? Give the pitch of con for the marketplace customer. >>Yeah, it's actually, we are relatively new in AWS marketplace. You know, so our first transaction that we ever done was actually in July and 2021. So we are just over a year, you know, that journey, you know, when I look what Chris gross talked today, he was talking about, you know, Hey, just publishing marketplace, not enough. You know, you need to understand what's your value proposition. You need to make sure your operations already, your sales is ready. Everything is, is set. And we kind of did this for the first year and a half is spend a lot of time improving our integration with AWS overall, all the first party services relevant to con we also understood, well, what does it take to kind of fine tune our value proposition? We have like three specific sales place. And you know, when we launch our flagship product con connect enterprise and got our first transaction, that was great milestone for, for star like Kong. But then what we've seen is just that work that we've done before really paid off. I mean right now, >>Like what we'll give example. >>Yeah. So, you know, we are focusing on as measure three sales place. Money is we are focused, specific on helping customers who are modernizing and, and their application going to the cloud. And you have a lot of these, you know, lifting shift and are rearchitect and modernized, but most of the attentions on the workloads, what about the connections? You know, so a monolith application had to authentic all the users understand wheres the network and so on. When you build those, when you now decouple this built like 1,000 thousand microservices, you don't want to repeat this for every microservice. So that's where K brings the whole suite from, you know, service match to the API gate to help manage the journey and really support this environment. And we spend a lot of time to just fine tune that message. So that customers understood where, you know, how can we help them on their journey beyond what, for instance, cloud native or AWS API gateway offers them. So we can really help them from day one on the journey and accelerate. And >>I think I it's a no, it's a no braining for a customer to buyer or to come into the marketplace and say, click, I'm gonna buy some data analytics services. I'm gonna buy gateway through Kong. But when they start getting into these microservices, this automation opportunity there, there's more behind the curtain for them with Kong. So I have to ask you with the keynote we heard from Chris, the leader of the marketplace. Now he said that he wants the ISVs to be more native in the cloud. That probably resonates with you. You, >>You guys well with con's relatively simple because we were built at cloud native, you know, so very briefly the whole story of Congo. This is before Ajo, our founders were actually running the, the very popular API exchange col mesh shape. And they had to build their own gateway just to handle the scale and was built on cloud native technologies. And then when everybody's calling you, what are you using to running? This are using PGS. And so else, no, we built ourselves, oh, how can we get our hands on? That's how con actually >>Came to. And that's how the big winners usually happen too. They start build their own, solve their own problem because it's a big scale problem. Exactly. No one's had that problem. >>Yeah. And what we have seen, especially what was very, you know, through, through the pandemic, what we have seen. And it's interesting, you know, being in a startup doing pandemic is like, whoa, will the life just shut down or what we're doing? You know? But actually what we have seen customers prioritize the new business capability. For instance, you have a large parental companies that overnight, they have to understand where the assets are. Yeah. Or banks who are like 45 days of, you know, approving process for the loans. They need to reduce it for a day or two. >>Yeah. And they're adding more developers, too, exactly. To build the modern application. So they need to have that infrastructure as code aspect. Correct. >>And they >>Need in place. >>Yeah. I need to like you have, you know, I don't think that many customers still have waterfall cycles, but they have, have pre pretty long developers development cycles. And now you need to, you know, do this multiple times a day. That's >>Interesting. We talked to a lot of cloud architects and C CIO C says, and you know, the executive just hire more developers take that hill, build. It just don't build a new app. It's not that easy boss. When, when the cloud architect says we have to be fully operationally ready with cloud native infrastructure's code. So with that, you're seeing a lot more enterprises come in now that are more savvy. They getting better. We're seeing Kubernetes more and more. You're seeing containerization. You're seeing that cloud native enterprise acceptance. What does that mean for you guys in the marketplace, as you look at the value proposition, how are you guys working with the marketplace today and where do you see customers buying in the future? >>Yeah, so we as mentioned, you know, we, we are now a year into that journey. We already seen tremendous benefits just in terms of reducing the friction. You know, the whole procurement, you know, you come as a startup with some, some of the largest companies in the world, they used to buy five, 10 billion in software and they have all these processes and you're like, well, but we only have like two people in finance. Sorry. How can you, and where marketplace can really, really helps us is, you know, improve this experience, both sides because they understand like we are fast moving company. They, they want us because of our speed and, and innovation that we, the product's strong. Yeah. They don't want us to get bogged down in all these pro procurement processes either. And so, so that's the first benefit. We also are working very hard to make sure that the customers can provision Kong in AWS and automate across the board. So essentially reducing their time to value dramatically. Yeah. And another thing that we found tremendously beneficial for us is a startup is the whole concept of a standard marketplace contract. Yeah. So instead of us coming with our little MSA or come like 50 page MSA from companies, we now have a middle ground. So we can just agree. You know, there's some differences, some specifics to qu software and it's tremendously reduced costs on both sides. >>Great. For you guys great for the buyers. Yeah. You get deployed services. They're not just buying, they're managing and deploying. Yeah, >>Exactly. Great. >>Quick, final question. Put a plugin for the company. What are you working on now? What's the big news. What's the con update? >>Well, that's an interesting part because I can't tell you because next week we have our con summit. Oh right. In San Francisco. The cubes not so 28, 20 ninth. Yeah. We, we we'll, I think we are gonna fix that in the future. But anyway, this is the first time after pandemic to do this in person, we have number of very exciting announcement, our Kong products, as well as you may hear some news about our AWS partnership, >>We like con we believe that DevOps has happened. Dev sec ops, whatever you gonna call it, dev is now the developers they're in the front lines. They're in the C I CD pipeline. They're shifting left. That's the new they took over it. That's what DevOps does. It's not a title. Now you have security and data ops behind the scenes. That's gonna be middleware. That's gonna have tons of microservices. So more, more, more action coming, all API based. >>Exactly. And the more, you know, the more complexity we can take away from that, the better we, you know, the >>Whole community. Thank you. Spending the time to come on the cube here at the, a us marketplace seller conference. What do you think about the APN merging with the marketplace formed the P the Amazon partner organization. Thumbs up, thumbs down. What's your heard? >>It's excellent. We have a great friend in AP, a great friend, us marketplace. Now both of them work together with huge. >>Fantastic. Yes. Thanks for okay. Cube coverage here in Seattle. I'm John furier APN marketplace together. APOs the new organization making it easier. Of course, we got all the coverage here. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington, AWS's marketplace seller conference. It's the big news within the Amazon partner network, combining with marketplaces, forming the Amazon partner organization, part of a big reorg as they grow the next level NextGen cloud mid-game on the chessboard. Cube's got cover. I'm John fur, host of Cub, a great guests here from data bricks, both cube alumnis, Jack Anderson, GM of the and VP of the data bricks partnership team. For ADOS, you handle that relationship and Joel Minick vice president of product and partner marketing. You guys are the, have the keys to the kingdom with data, bricks, and AWS. Thanks for joining. Thanks for good to see you again. Thanks for >>Having us back. Yeah, John, great to be here. >>So I feel like we're at reinvent 2013 small event, no stage, but there's a real shift happening with procurement. Obviously it makes it's a no brainer on the micro, you know, people should be buying online self-service cloud scale, but Amazon's got billions being sold to their marketplace. They've reorganized their partner network. You can see kind of what's going on. They've kind of figured it out. Like let's put everything together and simplify and make it less of a website marketplace merge our partner to have more synergy and friction, less experiences so everyone can make more money and customer's gonna be happier. >>Yeah, that's right. >>I mean, you're run relationship. You're in the middle of it. >>Well, Amazon's mental model here is that they want the world's best ISVs to operate on AWS so that we can collaborate and co architect on behalf of customers. And that's exactly what the APO and marketplace allow us to do is to work with Amazon on these really, you know, unique use cases. >>You know, I interviewed Ali many times over the years. I remember many years ago, I think six, maybe six, seven years ago, we were talking. He's like, we're all in ons. Obviously. Now the success of data bricks, you've got multiple clouds. See that customers have choice, but I remember the strategy early on. It was like, we're gonna be deep. So this is speaks volumes to the, the relationship you have years. Jack take us through the relationship that data bricks has with AWS from a, from a partner perspective, Joel, and from a product perspective, because it's not like you got to Johnny come lately new to the new, to the scene, right? We've been there almost president creation of this wave. What's the relationship and has it relate to what's going on today? >>So, so most people may not know that data bricks was born on AWS. We actually did our first 100 million of revenue on Amazon. And today we're obviously available on multiple clouds, but we're very fond of our Amazon relationship. And when you look at what the APN allows us to do, you know, we're able to expand our reach and co-sell with Amazon and marketplace broadens our reach. And so we think of marketplace in three different aspects. We've got the marketplace, private offer business, which we've been doing for a number of years. Matter of fact, we we're driving well over a hundred percent year over year growth in private offers and we have a nine figure business. So it's a very significant business. And when a customer uses a private offer that private offer counts against their private pricing agreement with AWS. So they get pricing power against their, their private pricing. >>So it's really important. It goes on their Amazon bill in may. We launched our pay as you go on demand offering. And in five short months, we have well over a thousand subscribers. And what this does is it really reduces the barriers to entry it's low friction. So anybody in an enterprise or startup or public sector company can start to use data bricks on AWS and pay consumption based model and have it go against their monthly bill. And so we see customers, you know, doing rapid experimentation pilots, POCs, they're, they're really learning the value of that first use case. And then we see rapid use case expansion. And the third aspect is the consulting partner, private offers C P O super important in how we involve our partner ecosystem of our consulting partners and our resellers that are able to work with data bricks on behalf of customers. >>So you got the big contracts with the private offer. You got the product market fit, kind of people iterating with data coming in with, with the buyers you go. And obviously the integration piece all fitting in there. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So that's that those are the offers that's current and what's in marketplace today. Is that the products, what are, what are people buying? I mean, I guess what's the Joel, what are, what are people buying in the marketplace and what does it mean for >>Them? So fundamentally what they're buying is the ability to take silos out of their organization. And that's, that is the problem that data bricks is out there to solve, which is when you look across your data landscape today, you've got unstructured data, you've got structured data, you've got real time streaming data, and your teams are trying to use all of this data to solve really complicated problems. And as data bricks as the lake house company, what we're helping customers do is how do they get into the new world? How do they move to a place where they can use all of that data across all of their teams? And so we allow them to begin to find through the marketplace, those rapid adoption use cases where they can get rid of these data, warehousing data lake silos they've had in the past, get their unstructured and structured data onto one data platform and open data platform that is no longer adherent to any proprietary formats and standards and something. >>They can very much, very easily integrate into the rest of their data environment, apply one common data governance layer on top of that. So that from the time they ingest that data to the time they use that data to the time they share that data inside and outside of their organization, they know exactly how it's flowing. They know where it came from. They know who's using it. They know who has access to it. They know how it's changing. And then with that common data platform with that common governance solution, they'd being able to bring all of those use cases together across their real time, streaming their data engineering, their BI, their AI, all of their teams working on one set of data. And that lets them move really, really fast. And it also lets them solve challenges. They just couldn't solve before a good example of this, you know, one of the world's now largest data streaming platforms runs on data bricks with AWS. >>And if you think about what does it take to set that up? Well, they've got all this customer data that was historically inside of data warehouses, that they have to understand who their customers are. They have all this unstructured data, they've built their data science model, so they can do the right kinds of recommendation engines and forecasting around. And then they've got all this streaming data going back and forth between click stream data from what the customers are doing with their platform and the recommendations they wanna push back out. And if those teams were all working in individual silos, building these kinds of platforms would be extraordinarily slow and complex, but by building it on data bricks, they were able to release it in record time and have grown at, at record pace >>To not be that's product platform that's impacting product development. Absolutely. I mean, this is like the difference between lagging months of product development to like days. Yes. Pretty much what you're getting at. Yeah. So total agility. I got that. Okay. Now I'm a customer I wanna buy in the marketplace, but I also, you got direct Salesforce up there. So how do you guys look at this? Is there channel conflict? Are there comp programs? Because one of the things I heard today in on the stage from a Davis's leadership, Chris was up there speaking and, and, and moment I was, Hey, he's a CRO conference, chief revenue officer conversation, which means someone's getting compensated. So if I'm the sales rep at data bricks, what's my motion to the customer. Do I get paid? Does Amazon sell it? Take us through that. Is there channel conflict? Is there or an audio lift? >>Well, I I'd add what Joel just talked about with, with, you know, what the solution, the value of the solution our entire offering is available on AWS marketplace. So it's not a subset, the entire data bricks offering and >>The flagship, all the, the top, >>Everything, the flagship, the complete offering. So it's not, it's not segmented. It's not a sub segment. It's it's, you know, you can use all of our different offerings. Now when it comes to seller compensation, we, we, we view this two, two different ways, right? One is that AWS is also incented, right? Versus selling a native service to recommend data bricks for the right situation. Same thing with data bricks. Our Salesforce wants to do the right thing for the customer. If the customer wants to use marketplace as their procurement vehicle. And that really helps customers because if you get data bricks and five other ISVs together, and let's say each ISV is spending, you're spending a million dollars, you have $5 million of spend, you put that spend through the flywheel with AWS marketplace. And then you can use that in your negotiations with AWS to get better pricing overall. So that's how we, >>We do it. So customers are driving. This sounds like, correct. For sure. So they're looking at this as saying, Hey, I'm gonna just get purchasing power with all my relationships because it's a solution architectural market, right? >>Yeah. It makes sense. Because if most customers will have a primary and secondary cloud provider, if they can consolidate, you know, multiple ISV spend through that same primary provider, you get pricing >>Power, okay, Jill, we're gonna date ourselves. At least I will. So back in the old days, it used to be, do a Barney deal with someone, Hey, let's go to market together. You gotta get paper, you do a biz dev deal. And then you gotta say, okay, now let's coordinate our sales teams, a lot of moving parts. So what you're getting at here is that the alternative for data bricks or any company is to go find those partners and do deals versus now Amazon is the center point for the customer so that you can still do those joint deals. But this seems to be flipping the script a little bit. >>Well, it is, but we still have VAs and consulting partners that are doing implementation work very valuable work advisory work that can actually work with marketplace through the C PPO offering. So the marketplace allows multiple ways to procure your >>Solution. So it doesn't change your business structure. It just makes it more efficient. That's >>Correct. >>That's a great way to say it. Yeah, >>That's great. So that's so that's it. So that's just makes it more efficient. So you guys are actually incented to point customers to the marketplace. >>Yes, >>Absolutely. Economically. Yeah. >>E economically it's the right thing to do for the customer. It's the right thing to do for our relationship with Amazon, especially when it comes back to co-selling right? Because Amazon now is leaning in with ISVs and making recommendations for, you know, an ISV solution and our teams are working backwards from those use cases, you know, to collaborate, land them. >>Yeah. I want, I wanna get that out there. Go ahead, Joel. >>So one of the other things I might add to that too, you know, and why this is advantageous for, for companies like data bricks to, to work through the marketplace, is it makes it so much easier for customers to deploy a solution. It's, it's very, literally one click through the marketplace to get data bricks stood up inside of your environment. And so if you're looking at how do I help customers most rapidly adopt these solutions in the AWS cloud, the marketplace is a fantastic accelerator to that. You >>Know, it's interesting. I wanna bring this up and get your reaction to it because to me, I think this is the future of procurement. So from a procurement standpoint, I mean, again, dating myself EDI back in the old days, you know, all that craziness. Now this is all the, all the internet, basically through the console, I get the infrastructure side, you know, spin up and provision. Some servers, all been good. You guys have played well there in the marketplace. But now as we get into more of what I call the business apps, and they brought this up on stage little nuance, most enterprises aren't yet there of integrating tech on the business apps, into the stack. This is where I think you guys are a use case of success where you guys have been successful with data integration. It's an integrator's dilemma, not an innovator's dilemma. So like, I want to integrate, so now I have integration points with data bricks, but I want to put an app in there. I want to provision an application, but it has to be built. It's not, you don't buy it. You build, you gotta build stuff. And this is the nuance. What's your reaction to that? Am I getting this right? Or, or am I off because no, one's gonna be buying software. Like they used to, they buy software to integrate it. >>Yeah, >>No, I, cause everything's integrated. >>I think AWS has done a great job at creating a partner ecosystem, right. To give customers the right tools for the right jobs. And those might be with third parties, data bricks is doing the same thing with our partner connect program. Right. We've got customer, customer partners like five tra and D V T that, you know, augment and enhance our platform. And so you, you're looking at multi ISV architectures and all of that can be procured through the AWS marketplace. >>Yeah. It's almost like, you know, bundling and unbundling. I was talking about this with, with Dave ante about Supercloud, which is why wouldn't a customer want the best solution in their architecture period. And it's class. If someone's got API security or an API gateway. Well, you know, I don't wanna be forced to buy something because it's part of a suite and that's where you see things get suboptimized where someone dominates a category and they have, oh, you gotta buy my version of this. Yeah. >>Joel, Joel. And that's Joel and I were talking, we're actually saying what what's really important about Databricks is that customers control the data. Right? You wanna comment on that? >>Yeah. I was say the, you know what you're pushing on there we think is extraordinarily, you know, the way the market is gonna go is that customers want a lot of control over how they build their data stack. And everyone's unique in what tools are the right ones for them. And so one of the, you know, philosophically I think really strong places, data, bricks, and AWS have lined up is we both take an approach that you should be able to have maximum flexibility on the platform. And as we think about the lake house, one thing we've always been extremely committed to as a company is building the data platform on an open foundation. And we do that primarily through Delta lake and making sure that to Jack's point with data bricks, the data is always in your control. And then it's always stored in a completely open format. And that is one of the things that's allowed data bricks to have the breadth of integrations that it has with all the other data tools out there, because you're not tied into any proprietary format, but instead are able to take advantage of all the innovation that's happening out there in the open source ecosystem. >>When you see other solutions out there that aren't as open as you guys, you guys are very open by the way, we love that too. We think that's a great strategy, but what's the, what am I foreclosing? If I go with something else that's not as open what what's the customer's downside as you think about what's around the corner in the industry. Cuz if you believe it's gonna be open, open source, which I think opens our software is the software industry and integration is a big deal, cuz software's gonna be plentiful. Let's face it. It's a good time to be in software business, but cloud's booming. So what's the downside from your data bricks perspective, you see a buyer clicking on data bricks versus that alternative what's potentially is should they be a nervous about down the road if they go with a more proprietary or locked in approach? Well, >>I think the challenge with proprietary ecosystems is you become beholden to the ability of that provider to both build relationships and convince other vendors that they should invest in that format. But you're also then beholden to the pace at which that provider is able to innovate. And I think we've seen lots of times over history where, you know, a proprietary format may run ahead for a while on a lot of innovation. But as that market control begins to solidify that desire to innovate begins to, to degrade, whereas in the open format. So >>Extract rents versus innovation. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>But >>I'll say it in the open world, you know, you have to continue to innovate. Yeah. And the open source world is always innovating. If you look at the last 10 to 15 years, I challenge you to find, you know, an example where the innovation in the data and AI world is not coming from open source. And so by investing in open ecosystems, that means you were always going to be at the forefront of what is the >>Latest, you know, again, not to date myself again, but you look back at the eighties and nineties, the protocol stacked for proprietary. Yeah. You know, SNA at IBM deck net was digital, you know, the rest is, and then TCP, I P was part of the open systems, interconnect, revolutionary Oly, a big part of that as well as my school did. And so like, you know, that was, but it didn't standardize the whole stack. It stopped at IP and TCP. Yeah. But that helped interoperate, that created a nice defacto. So this is a big part of this mid game. I call it the chessboard, you know, you got opening game and mid game. Then you got the end game and we're not there. The end game yet cloud the cloud. >>There's, there's always some form of lock in, right. Andy jazzy will, will address it, you know, when making a decision. But if you're gonna make a decision you want to reduce as you don't wanna be limited. Right. So I would advise a customer that there could be limitations with a proprietary architecture. And if you look at what every customer's trying to become right now is an AI driven business. Right? And so it has to do with, can you get that data outta silos? Can you, can you organize it and secure it? And then can you work with data scientists to feed those models? Yeah. In a, in a very consistent manner. And so the tools of tomorrow will to Joel's point will be open and we want interoperability with those >>Tools and, and choice is a matter too. And I would say that, you know, the argument for why I think Amazon is not as locked in as maybe some other clouds is that they have to compete directly too. Redshift competes directly with a lot of other stuff, but they can't play the bundling game because the customers are getting savvy to the fact that if you try to bundle an inferior product with something else, it may not work great at all. And they're gonna be they're onto it. This is >>The Amazon's credit by having these, these solutions that may compete with native services in marketplace, they are providing customers with choice, low >>Price and access to the S and access to the core value. Exactly. Which the >>Hardware, which is their platform. Okay. So I wanna get you guys thought on something else. I, I see emerging, this is again kind of cube rumination moment. So on stage Chris unpacked, a lot of stuff. I mean this marketplace, they're touching a lot of hot buttons here, you know, pricing compensation, workflows services behind the curtain. And one of the things he mentioned was they talk about resellers or channel partners, depending upon what you talk about. We believe Dave and I believe on the cube that the entire indirect sales channel of the industry is gonna be disrupted radically because those players were selling hardware in the old days and software, that game is gonna change. You know, you mentioned you guys have a program, want to get your thoughts on this. We believe that once this gets set up, they can play in this game and bring their services in which means that the old reseller channels are gonna be rewritten. They're gonna be refactored with this new kinds of access. Cuz you've got scale, you've got money and you've got product and you got customers coming into the marketplace. So if you're like a reseller that sold computers to data centers or software, you know, value added reseller or V or business, >>You've gotta evolve. >>You gotta, you gotta be here. Yes. How are you guys working with those partners? Cuz you say you have a part in your marketplace there. How do I make money? If I'm a reseller with data bricks with eight Amazon, take me through that use case. >>Well I'll let Joel comment, but I think it's, it's, it's pretty straightforward, right? Customers need expertise. They need knowhow. When we're seeing customers do mass migrations to the cloud or Hadoop specific migrations or data transformation implementations, they need expertise from consulting and SI partners. If those consulting SI partners happen to resell the solution as well. Well, that's another aspect of their business, but I really think it is the expertise that the partners bring to help customers get outcomes. >>Joel, channel big opportunity for re re Amazon to reimagine this. >>For sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, to your comment about how to resellers take advantage of that, I think what Jack was pushing on is spot on, which is it's becoming more about more and more about the expertise you bring to the table and not just transacting the software, but now actually helping customers make the right choices. And we're seeing, you know, both SI begin to be able to resell solutions and finding a lot of opportunity in that. Yeah. And I think we're seeing traditional resellers begin to move into that SI model as well. And that's gonna be the evolution that >>This gets at the end of the day. It's about services for sure, for sure. You've got a great service. You're gonna have high gross profits. And >>I think that the managed service provider business is alive and well, right? Because there are a number of customers that want that, that type of a service. >>I think that's gonna be a really hot, hot button for you guys. I think being the way you guys are open this channel partner services model coming in to the fold really kind of makes for kind of that super cloudlike experience where you guys now have an ecosystem. And that's my next question. You guys have an ecosystem going on within data bricks for sure. On top of this ecosystem, how does that work? This is kinda like hasn't been written up in business school and case studies yet this is new. What is this? >>I think, you know, what it comes down to is you're seeing ecosystems begin to evolve around the data platforms and that's gonna be one of the big kind of new horizons for us as we think about what drives ecosystems it's going to be around. Well, what is the, what's the data platform that I'm using and then all the tools that have to encircle that to get my business done. And so I think there's, you know, absolutely ecosystems inside of the AWS business on all of AWS's services, across data analytics and AI. And then to your point, you are seeing ecosystems now arise around data bricks in its Lakehouse platform, as well as customers are looking at well, if I'm standing these Lakehouse up and I'm beginning to invest in this, then I need a whole set of tools that help me get that done as well. >>I mean you think about ecosystem theory, we're living a whole nother dream and I'm, and I'm not kidding. It hasn't yet been written up and for business school case studies is that we're now in a whole nother connective tissue ecology thing happening where you have dependencies and value proposition economics connectedness. So you have relationships in these ecosystems. >>And I think one of the great things about relationships with these ecosystems is that there's a high degree of overlap. Yeah. So you're seeing that, you know, the way that the cloud business is evolving, the, the ecosystem partners of data bricks are the same ecosystem partners of AWS. And so as you build these platforms out into the cloud, you're able to really take advantage of best of breed, the broadest set of solutions out there for >>You. Joel, Jack, I love it because you know what it means the best ecosystem will win. If you keep it open. Sure. You can see everything. If you're gonna do it in the dark, you know, you don't know the outcome. I mean, this is really kind we're talking about. >>And John, can I just add that when I was in Amazon, we had a, a theory that there's buyers and builders, right? There's very innovative companies that want to build things themselves. We're seeing now that that builders want to buy a platform. Right? Yeah. And so there's a platform decision being made and that ecosystem gonna evolve around the >>Platform. Yeah. And I totally agree. And, and, and the word innovation get kicks around. That's why, you know, when we had our super cloud panel was called the innovators dilemma with a slash through it called the integrated dilemma, innovation is the digital transformation. So absolutely like that becomes cliche in a way, but it really becomes more of a, are you open? Are you integrating if APIs are the connective tissue, what's automation, what's the service message look like. I mean, a whole nother set of kind of thinking goes on and these new ecosystems and these new products >>And that, and that thinking is, has been born in Delta sharing. Right? So the idea that you can have a multi-cloud implementation of data bricks, and actually share data between those two different clouds, that is the next layer on top of the native cloud >>Solution. Well, data bricks has done a good job of building on top of the goodness of, and the CapEx gift from AWS. But you guys have done a great job taking that building differentiation into the product. You guys have great customer base, great grow ecosystem. And again, I think in a shining example of what every enterprise is going to do, build on top of something operating model, get that operating model, driving revenue. >>Yeah. >>Well we, whether whether you're Goldman Sachs or capital one or XYZ corporation >>S and P global NASDAQ, right. We've got, you know, these, the biggest verticals in the world are solving tough problems with data breaks. I think we'd be remiss cuz if Ali was here, he would really want to thank Amazon for all of the investments across all of the different functions, whether it's the relationship we have with our engineering and service teams. Yeah. Our marketing teams, you know, product development and we're gonna be at reinvent the big presence of reinvent. We're looking forward to seeing you there again. >>Yeah. We'll see you guys there. Yeah. Again, good ecosystem. I love the ecosystem evolutions happening this next gen cloud is here. We're seeing this evolve kind of new economics, new value propositions kind of scaling up, producing more so you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on the Cuban, taking time. Chill. Great to see you at the check. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Going. Okay. Cube coverage here. The world's changing as APN comes to give the marketplace for a new partner organization at Amazon web services, the Cube's got a covered. This should be a very big growing ecosystem as this continues, billions of being sold through the marketplace. Of course the buyers are happy as well. So we've got it all covered. I'm John furry, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for AWS's marketplace seller conference. The big news here is that the Amazon partner network and marketplace coming together and reorganizing into one organization, the AIST partner organization, APO bringing together the best of the partnership and the marketplace to sell through. It's a sellers company. This is the second year, but technically with COVID, I call it a year and a half. This is the cube. I'm John for your host. Got a great guest, Leah for sale vice president of business development at four square. Leah, thanks for coming on the cube. Look great. Yeah. >>Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me here. >>So four square, everyone, and that has internet history knows you. You check in you'd become the mayor of a place right back in the day, all fun. It was a great app and I think it was competitor go sold the Facebook, but that was the beginning of location data. Now you got Uber apps, you got all apps, location, everywhere. Data is big here in the marketplace. They sell data, they got a data exchange, Chris head of marketplaces. Like we have all these things we're gonna bring 'em together, make it simpler. So you're on the data side. I'm assuming you're selling data and you're participating at the data exchange. What is Foursquare doing right now? Yeah, >>Exactly. So we are part of the data exchange. And you mentioned checking in. So we, we are really proud of our roots, the, the four square app, and that's kind of the basis still of our business. We have a hundred million data points, which are actually places of interest across the world 200 countries. And we are we're in the business of understanding whereplace are and how people move through those places over time. And >>What's the value proposition for that data. You're selling the data. >>We are selling the data and we're selling it. You can think about use cases. Like how can I improve the engagement with my app through location data? So for example, next door, as a customer of ours, everyone knows next door. When a new business comes online, they wanna make sure that business is a real business. So they use our places to ensure that the address of that business is accurate. >>So how did you, how do you guys get your data? Because if you don't have the first party app, you probably had critical mass of data. Yeah. But then do other people use your data and then re contribute back in kinda like, well, Stripe is for financial. You guys are plugging in yeah. To >>Apps. A great question. So we still do have our consumer apps. We're still proud of those. It's still a basis of our company really. Okay. So, but we take that data. So our first party data, we also, for all the web, we have some partners integrate our SDK. And so we're pulling in all that data from various sources and then scrubbing it and making sure we have the most unique. >>So you guys still have a business where the app's working. Yep. Okay. But also let's just say, I wanna have a cube app. Yeah. And I want to do a check in button. Yep. So rather than build checking in, could I OEM you could four square is that you >>Could, and we could help you understand where people are checking in. So we know someone's here at the Hilton and Bellevue, we know exactly where that place is. You building the Cub app. You could say, I'm gonna check in here and we are verified. We know that that's the >>Right place. So that's a good for developer if they're building an app. >>Absolutely. So we have an SDK that any developer can integrate. >>Great. Okay. So what's the relationship with the marketplace? Take us through how Foursquare works with AWS marketplace. >>Sure. So we are primarily integrated with ADX, which is sort of a piece of marketplace it's for data specifically, we have both of our main products, which are places that POI database and visits, which is how people move through those places over time. So we're able to say these are the top chains in the country. Here's how people move throughout those. And both those products are listed on ADX. >>So if I'm in Palo Alto and I go to Joe in the juice yeah. You know that I kind of hang in one spot or is it privacy there? I mean, how do you know like what goes on? Well, >>We know somebody does that. We don't >>Know that you do that. So >>We ensure, you know, we're very privacy centric and privacy focused. We're not gonna, we don't tell anybody at you >>Yourself it's pattern data. It is. >>Okay. So it's normalized data, right? Over time groups of people, >>How they, how are people using the data to improve processes, user experience? What are some of the use cases? >>So that example, nextdoor, that's really a use case that we see a lot and that's improving their application. So that nextdoor app to ensure that the ACC, the data's accurate and that as you, as a user, you know, that that business is real. Cuz it's verified by four wear. Another one is you can use our data to make business decisions around where you're gonna place your next loca. You know, your next QSR. So young brands is a customer of ours. Those are, those guys are pizza hut KFC. They work with us to figure out where they should put their next KFC. Yeah. >>I mean retail location, location, location. Yeah. >>Right. Yeah. People are still, even though e-commerce right. People still go into stores >>And still are. Yeah. There's, there's, there's probably lot, a lot of math involved in knowing demographics patterns. Volume. >>Yeah. Some of our key customers are really data scientists. Like the think about cus with businesses that have true data science companies. They're really looking at that. >>Yeah. I mean in, and out's on the exit for a reason. Right. They want in and out. Yeah. So they wanna put it inland. >>Right. And we can actually tell you where that customer from in and out where they go next. Right. So then, you know, oh, they go to this park or they go somewhere and we can help you place your next in and out based on that visitation. >>Yeah. And so it's real science involved. So take us through the customers. You said data scientists, >>Mostly data scientists is kind of a key customer data science at a large corporation, like a QSR that's >>Somebody. Okay. So how is the procurement process on the marketplace? What does the buyer get? >>So what we see the real value is, is because they're already a customer of Amazon. That procurement is really easy, right? All the fulfillment goes through Amazon, through ADX. And what you're buying is either at API. So you can, that API can make real time calls or you're buying a flat file, like an actual database of those hundred points of interest. >>And then they integrate into their tool set. Right. They can do it. So it's pretty data friendly in terms of format. >>You can kind of do whatever you want with it. We're gonna give you that as long as you're smart enough to figure out what to do. Do we have a >>Lot of, so what's your experience with AWS marketplace? I mean, obviously we, we see a lot of changes. They had a reorg partner network merging with marketplace. You've been more on the data exchange, Chris kind of called that out. It's yeah. It's kind of a new thing. And, and he was hinting at a lot of confusion, but simplifying things. Yeah. What's your take of the current AWS marketplace >>Religions? I actually think ADX because our experience has primarily been ADX. I think they've done a really good job. They've really focused on the data and they understand how CU, how, you know, people like us sell our data. It hasn't been super confusing. We've had a lot of support. I think that's what Amazon gives you. You have to put a lot of effort into it, but they're also, they also give you a lot of support. >>Yeah. And, and I think data exchange is pretty significant to the strategic. It is >>Mission. It is. We feel that. Yeah. You know, we feel like they really value us as a partner. >>What's the big thing you're seeing out there right now in data, because like you're seeing a lot more data exchanges going on. There's always been data exchange, but you're seeing a lot more exchanges between companies. So let's just take partners. You're seeing a lot more people handle front end of a, a supply chain and you got more data exchanges. What's the future of data exchanges. If you had to kind of, you know, guess given your history in, in the industry. Yeah. What's the next around the corner trend? >>I think. Well, I think there's a, has to be consolidation. I know everyone's building one, but there's probably too many. I know from our experience, we can't support all of them. We're not a huge company. We can't support Amazon and X and Y and Z. Like it's just too many. So we kind of put all of our eggs in a couple baskets. So I think there'll be consolidation. I think there has to be just some innovation on what data products are, you know, for us, we have these two, it's an API and a flat file. I think as exchanges think about, you know, expanding what are the other types of data products that can help us build? >>Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's, you know, we see, we cover a lot of on the cube is edge. You know, you got, yeah. Amazon putting out new products in regions, you got new wavelength out there, you got regions, you got city level connectivity, data coming from cars. So a lot more IOT data. How do you guys see that folding into your vision of data acquisition and data usage, leverage, reuse, durability. These >>Are, yeah. I mean, we're, we are keeping an eye on all of that. You know, I think we haven't quite figured out how we wanna allocate resources against it, but you know, it's definitely, it's a really interesting space to be in. Like, I don't think data's going anywhere and I think it's really just gonna grow and how people use it's >>Gonna expand. Okay. So if I'm a customer, I go to the marketplace, I wanna buy four square data. What's the pitch. >>We can help you improve your business decisions or your applications through location data. We know where places are and how people move through the world over time. So we can tell you we're, we're sure that this is the Hilton in Bellevue. We know that, that we know how many people are moving through here and that's really the pitch. >>And they use that for whatever their needs are, business improvement, user experience. Yeah. >>Those are really the primary. I mean, we also have some financial use cases. So hedge funds, maybe they're thinking about yeah. How they wanna invest their money. They're gonna look at visits over time to understand what people are doing. Right. The pandemic made that super important. >>Yeah. That's awesome. Well, this is great. Great success story. Congratulations. And thanks for sharing on the cube. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. My final question is more about kind of the future. I wanna get your thoughts because your season pro, when you have the confluence of physical and digital coming together. Yeah. You know, I was just talking with a friend about FedEx's earnings, comparing that to say, AWS has a fleet of delivery too. Right? Amazon, Amazon nots. So, but physical world only products location matters. But then what about the person when they're walking around the real world? What happens when they get to the metaverses or, you know, they get to digital, they tend an event. Yeah. How do you see that crossroad? Cuz you have foot in both camps. We do, you got the app and you got the physical world it's gonna come together. Is there thoughts around, you can take your course care hat off and put your industry hat on. Yeah. You wanna answer that? Not officially on behalf of Foursquare, but I'm just curious, this is a, this is the confluence of like the blending of physical and digital. >>Yeah. I know. Wow. I admittedly haven't thought a whole lot about that. I think it would be really weird if I could track myself over time and the metaverse I mean, I think, yeah, as you said, it's >>It's, by the way, I'm not Bo on the metaverse when it's blocked diagrams, when you have gaming platforms that are like the best visual experience possible, right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think we'll see, I don't, I don't know that I have a >>Prediction, well hybrid we've seeing a lot of hybrid events. Like this event is still intimate VIP, but next year I guarantee it's gonna be larger, much larger and it's gonna be physical and face to face, but, but digital right as well. Yeah. Not people experiencing the, both that first party, physical, digital hybrid. Yeah. And it's interesting something that we track a lot >>Of. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think we'll have a, well, I think we'll, there's something there for us. I think that those there's a play there as we watch kind >>Of things change. All right, Leah, thank you for coming on the Q appreciate so much it all right. With four Graham, John fur a year checking in with four square here on the cube here at the Amazon web services marketplace seller conference. Second year back from the pandemic in person, more coverage after this break.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to everyone, to "theCUBE's" coverage here in Seattle, Washington for Amazon Web Services Partner Marketplace Seller Conference, combining their partner network with Marketplace forming a new organization called AWS Partner Organization. This is "theCUBE" coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got great "Cube" alumni here from Zscaler, a very successful cloud company doing great work. Stelio D'Alo, senior director of cloud business development and Raveesh Chugh, VP of Public Cloud Partnerships at Zscaler. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks having us, John. >> So we've been doing a lot of coverage of Zscaler, what a great success story. I mean, the numbers are great. The business performance, it's in the top two, three, one, two, three in all metrics on public companies, SaaS. So you guys, check. Good job. >> Yes, thank you. >> So you guys have done a good job. Now you're here, selling through the Marketplace. You guys are a world class performing company in cloud SaaS, so you're in the front lines doing well. Now, Marketplace is a procurement front end opportunity for people to buy. Hey, self-service, buy and put things together. Sounds novel, what a great concept. Great cloud life. >> Yes. >> You guys are participating and now sellers are coming together. The merger of the public, the partner network with Marketplace. It feels like this is a second act for AWS to go to the next level. They got their training wheels done with partners. Now they're going to the next level. What do you guys think about this? >> Well, I think you're right, John. I think it is very much something that is in keeping with the way AWS does business. Very Amazonian, they're working back from the customer. What we're seeing is, our customers and in general, the market is gravitating towards purchase mechanisms and route to market that just are lower friction. So in the same way that companies are going through their digital transformations now, really modernizing the way they host applications and they reach the internet. They're also modernizing on the purchasing side, which is super exciting, because we're all motivated to help customers with that agility. >> You know, it's fun to watch and again I'm being really candid and props to you guys as a company. Now, everyone else is kind of following that. Okay, lift and shift, check, doing some things. Now they go, whoa, I can really build on this. People are building their own apps for their companies. Going to build their own stuff. They're going to use piece parts. They're going to put it together in a really scalable way. That's the new normal. Okay, so now they go okay, I'm going to just buy through the market, I get purchasing power. So you guys have been a real leader with AWS. Can you share what you guys are doing in the Marketplace? I think you guys are a nice example of how to execute the Marketplace. Take us through. What are you guys offering there? What's the contract look like? Is it multi-pronged? What's the approach? What do customers get if they go to the marketplace for Zscaler? >> Yeah, so it's been a very exciting story and been a very pleasing one for us with AWS marketplace. We see a huge growth potentially. There are more than 350,000 customers that are actively buying through Marketplace today. We expect that number to grow to around a million customers by the next, I would say, five to ten years and we want to be part of this wave. We see AWS Marketplace to be a channel where not only our resalers or our channel partners can come and transact, but also our GSIs like Accenture want to transact through this channel. We are doing a lot, in terms of bringing new customers through Marketplace, who want to not only close their deals, but close it in the next few hours. That's the beauty of Marketplace, the agility, the flexibility in terms of pricing that it provides to ISVs like us. If a customer wants to delay their payments by a couple of quarters, Marketplace supports that. If a customer wants to do monthly payments, Marketplace supports that. We are seeing lot of customers, big customers, that have signed EDPs, enterprise discount plans with AWS. These are multi-year cloud commits coming to us and saying we can retire our EDPs with AWS if we transact your solution through AWS Marketplace. So what we have done, as of today, we have all of our production services enabled through AWS Marketplace. What that means for customers, they can now retire their EDPs by buying Zscaler products through AWS Marketplace and in return get the full benefit of maximizing their EDP commits with AWS. >> So you guys are fully committed, no toe on the water, as we heard. You guys are all in. >> Absolutely, that's exactly the way to put it. We're all in, all of our solutions are available in the marketplace. As you mentioned, we're a SaaS provider. So we're one of the vendors in the Marketplace that have SaaS solutions. So unlike a lot of customers and even the market in general, associate the Marketplace for historical reasons, the way it started with a lot of monthly subscriptions and just dipping your toe in it from a consumer perspective. Whereas we're doing multimillion dollar, multi-year SaaS contracts. So the most complicated kinds of transactions you'd normally associate with enterprise software, we're doing in very low friction ways. >> On the Zscaler side going in low friction. >> Yep, yeah, that's right. >> How about the customer experience? >> So it is primarily the the customer that experiences. >> Driving it? >> Yeah, they're driving it and it's because rather than traditional methods of going through paperwork, purchase orders- >> What are some of the things that customers are saying about this, bcause I see two benefits, I'll say that. The friction, it's a channel, okay, for Zscaler. Let's be clear, but now you have a customer who's got a lot of Amazon. They're a trusted partner too. So why wouldn't they want to have one point of contact to use their purchasing power and you guys are okay with that. >> We're absolutely okay with it. The reason being, we're still doing the transaction and we can do the transaction with our... We're a channel first company, so that's another important distinction of how people tend to think of the Marketplace. We go through channel. A lot of our transactions are with traditional channel partners and you'd be surprised the kinds of, even the Telcos, carrier providers, are starting to embrace Marketplace. So from a customer perspective, it's less paperwork, less legal work. >> Yeah, I'd love to get your reaction to something, because I think this highlights to me what we've been reporting on with "theCUBE" with super cloud and other trends that are different in a good way. Taking it to the next level and that is that if you look at Zscaler, SaaS, SaaS is self-service, the scale, there's efficiencies. Marketplace first started out as a self-service catalog, a website, you know, click and choose, but now it's a different. He calls it a supply chain, like the CICD pipeline of buying software. He mentions that, there's also services. He put the Channel partners can come in. The GSIs, global system integrators can come in. So it's more than just a catalog now. It's kind of self-service procurement more than it is just a catalog of buy stuff. >> Yes, so yeah, I feel CEOs, CSOs of today should understand what Marketplace brings to the bear in terms of different kinds of services or Zscaler solutions that they can acquire through Marketplace and other ISV solutions, for that matter. I feel like we are at a point, after the pandemic, where there'll be a lot of digital exploration and companies can do more in terms of not just Marketplace, but also including the channel partners as part of deals. So you talked about channel conflict. AWS addressed this by bringing a program called CPPO in the picture, Channel Partner Private Offers. What that does is, we are not only bringing all our channel partners into deals. For renewals as well, they're the partner of record and they get paid alongside with the customer. So AWS does all the heavy lifting, in terms of disbursements of payments to us, to the channel partner, so it's a win-win situation for all. >> I mean, private offers and co-sale has been very popular. >> It has been, and that is our bread and butter in the Marketplace. Again, we do primarily three year contracts and so private offers work super well. A nice thing for us as a vendor is it provides a great amount of flexibility. Private Offer gives you a lot of optionality, in terms of how the constructs of the deal and whether or not you're working with a partner, how the partner is utilizing as well to resell to the end user. So, we've always talked about AWS giving IT agility. This gives purchasing and finance business agility. >> Yeah, and I think this comes up a lot. I just noticed this happening a lot more, where you see dedicated sessions, not just on DevOps and all the goodies of the cloud, financial strategy. >> Yeah. >> Seeing a lot more conversation around how to operationalize the business transactions in the cloud. >> Absolutely. >> This is the new, I mean it's not new, it's been thrown around, but not at a tech conference. You don't see that. So I got to ask you guys, what's the message to the CISOs and executives watching the business people about Zscaler in the Marketplace? What should they be looking at? What is the pitch for Zscaler for the Marketplace buyer? >> So I would say that we are a cloud-delivered network security service. We have been in this game for more than a decade. We have years of early head start with lots of features and functionality versus our competitors. If customers were to move into AWS Cloud, they can get rid of their next-gen firewalls and just have all the traffic routed through our Zscaler internet access and use Zscaler private access for accessing their private applications. We feel we have done everything in our capacity, in terms of enabling customers through Marketplace and will continue to participate in more features and functionality that Marketplace has to offer. We would like these customers to take advantage of their EDPs as well as their retirement and spend for the multi-commit through AWS Marketplace. Learn about what we have to offer and how we can really expedite the motion for them, if they want to procure our solutions through Marketplace >> You know, we're seeing an ability for them to get more creative, more progressive in terms of the purchasing. We're also doing, we're really excited about the ability to serve multiple markets. So we've had an immense amount of success in commercial. We also are seeing increasing amount of public sector, US federal government agencies that want to procure this way as well for the same reasons. So there's a lot of innovation going on. >> So you have the FedRAMP going on, you got all those certifications. >> Exactly right. So we are the first cloud-native solution to provide IL5 ATO, as well as FedRAMP pie and we make that all available, GSA schedule pricing through the AWS Marketplace, again through FSIs and other resellers. >> Public private partnerships have been a big factor, having that span of capability. I got to ask you about, this is a cool conversation, because now you're like, okay, I'm selling through the Marketplace. Companies themselves are changing how they operate. They don't just buy software that we used to use. So general purpose, bundled stuff. Oh yeah, I'm buying this product, because this has got a great solution and I have to get forced to use this firewall, because I bought this over here. That's not how companies are architecting and developing their businesses. It's no longer buying IT. They're building their company digitally. They have to be the application. So they're not sitting around, saying hey, can I get a solution? They're building and architecting their solution. This is kind of like the new enterprise that no one's talking about. They kind of, got to do their own work. >> Yes. >> There's no general purpose solution that maps every company. So they got to pick the best piece parts and integrate them. >> Yes and I feel- >> Do you guys agree with that? >> Yeah, I agree with that and customers don't want to go for point solutions anymore. They want to go with a platform approach. They want go with a vendor that can not only cut down their vendors from multi-dozens to maybe a dozen or less and that's where, you know, we kind of have pivoted to the platform-centric approach, where we not only help customers with Cloud Network Security, but we also help customers with Cloud Native Application Protection Platform that we just recently launched. It's going by the name of the different elements, including Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Identity Event Management and so we are continuously doing more and more on the configuration and vulnerability side space. So if a customer has an AWS S3 bucket that is opened it can be detected and can be remediated. So all of those proactive steps we are taking, in terms of enhancing our portfolio, but we have come a long way as a company, as a platform that we have evolved in the Marketplace. >> What's the hottest product? >> The hottest product? >> In Marketplace right now. >> Well, the fastest growing products include our digital experience products and we have new Cloud Protection. So we've got Posture and Workload Protection as well and those are the fastest growing. For AWS customers a strong affinity also for ZPA, which provides you zero trust access to your workloads on AWS. So those are all the most popular in Marketplace. >> Yeah. >> So I would like to add that we recently launched and this has been a few years, a couple of years. We launched a product called Zscaler Digital X, the ZDX. >> Mm-hmm. >> What that product does is, let's say you're making a Zoom call and your WiFi network is laggy or it's a Zoom server that's laggy. It kind of detects where is the problem and it further tells the IT department you need to fix either the server on which Zoom is running, or fix your home network. So that is the beauty of the product. So I think we are seeing massive growth with some of our new editions in the portfolio, which is a long time coming. >> Yeah and certainly a lot of growth opportunities for you guys, as you come in. Where do you see Zscaler's big growth coming from product-wise? What's the big push? Actually, this is great upside for you here. >> Yeah. >> On the go to market side. Where's the big growth for Zscaler right now? So I think we are focused as a company on zero trust architecture. We want to securely connect users to apps, apps to apps, workloads to workloads and machines to machines. We want to give customers an experience where they have direct access to the apps that's hidden from the outside world and they can securely connect to the apps in a very succinct fashion. The user experience is second to none. A lot of customers use us on the Microsoft Office 365 side, where they see a lag in connecting to Microsoft Office 365 directly. They use the IE service to securely connect. >> Yeah, latency kills. >> Microsoft Office 365. >> Latency kills, as we always say, you know and security, you got to look at the pattern, you want to see that data. >> Yeah, and emerging use cases, there is an immense amount of white space and upside for us as well in emerging use cases, like OT, 5G, IOT. >> Yeah. >> Federal government, DOD. >> Oh god, tactical edge government. >> Security at the edge, absolutely, yeah. >> Where's the big edge? What's the edge challenge right now, if you have to put your finger on the edge, because right now that's the hot area, we're watching that. It's going to be highly contested. It's not yet clear, I mean certainly hybrid is the operating model, cloud, distributing, computing, but edge has got unique things that you can't really point to on premises that's the same. It's highly dynamic, you need high bandwidth, low latency, compute at the edge. The data has to be processed right there. What's the big thing at the edge right now? >> Well, so that's probably an emerging answer. I mean, we're working with our customers, they're inventing and they're kind of finding the use cases for those edge, but one of the good things about Zscaler is that we are able to, we've got low latency at the edge. We're able to work as a computer at the edge. We work on Outpost, Snowball, Snowcone, the Snow devices. So we can be wherever our customers need us. Mobile devices, there are a lot of applications where we've got to be either on embedded devices, on tractors, providing security for those IOT devices. So we're pretty comfortable with where we are being the- >> So that's why you guys are financially doing so well, performance wise. I got to ask you though, because I think that brings up the great point. If this is why I like the Marketplace, if I'm a customer, the edge is highly dynamic. It's changing all the time. I don't want to wait to buy something. If I got my solution architects on a product, I need to know I'm going to have zero trust built in and I need to push the button on Zscaler. I don't want to wait. So how does the procurement side impact? What have you guys seen? Share your thoughts on how Marketplace is working from the procurement standpoint, because it seems to me to be fast. Is that right, or is it still slow on their side? On the buyer side, because this to me would be a benefit to developers, if we say, hey, the procurement can just go really fast. I don't want to go through a bunch of PO approvals or slow meetings. >> It can be, that manifests itself in several ways, John. It can be, for instance, somebody wants to do a POC and traditionally you could take any amount of time to get budget approval, take it through. What if you had a pre-approved cloud budget and that was spent primarily through AWS Marketplace, because it's consolidated data on your AWS invoice. The ability to purchase a POC on the Marketplace could be done literally within minutes of the decision being made to go forward with it. So that's kind of a front end, you know, early stage use case. We've got examples we didn't talk about on our recent earnings call of how we have helped customers bring in their procurement with large million dollar, multimillion dollar deals. Even when a resaler's been involved, one of our resaler partners. Being able to accelerate deals, because there's so much less legal work and traditional bureaucratic effort. >> Agility. >> That agility purchasing process has allowed our customers to pull into the quarter, or the end of month, or end of quarter for them, deals that would've otherwise not been able to be done. >> So this is a great example of where you can set policy and kind of create some guard rails around innovation and integration deals, knowing if it's something that the edge is happening, say okay, here's some budget. We approved it, or Amazon gives credits and partnership going on. Then I'd say, hey, well green light this, not to exceed a million dollars, or whatever number in their range and then let people have the freedom to execute. >> You're absolutely right, so from the purchasing side, it does give them that agility. It eliminates a lot of the processes that would push out a purchase in actual execution past when the business decision is made and quite frankly, to be honest, AWS has been very accommodative. They're a great partner. They've invested a lot in Marketplace, Marketplace programs, to help customers do the right thing and do it more quickly as well as vendors like us to help our customers make the decisions they need to. >> Rising tide, a rising tide floats all boats and you guys are a great example of an independent company. Highly successful on your own. >> Yep. >> Certainly the numbers are clear. Wall Street loves Zscaler and economics are great. >> Our customer CSAT numbers are off the scale as well. >> Customers are great and now you've got the Marketplace. This is again, a new normal. A new kind of ecosystem is developing where it's not like the old monolithic ecosystems. The value creation and extraction is happening differently now. It's kind of interesting. >> Yes and I feel we have a long way to go, but what I can tell you is that Zscaler is in this for the long run. We are seeing some of the competitors erupt in the space as well, but they have a long way to go. What we have built requires years worth of R&D and features and thousands of customer's use cases which kind of lead to something what Zscaler has come up with today. What we have is very unique and is going to continuously be an innovation in the market in the years to come. In terms of being more cloud-savvy or more cloud-focused or more cloud-native than what the market has seen so far in the form of next-gen firewalls. >> I know you guys have got a lot of AI work. We've had many conversations with Howie over there. Great stuff and really appreciate you guys participating in our super cloud event we had and we'll see more of that where we're talking about the next generation clouds, really enabling that new disruptive, open-spanning capabilities across multiple environments to run cloud-native modern applications at scale and secure. Appreciate your time to come on "theCUBE". >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, I totally appreciate it. Zscaler, leading company here on "theCUBE" talking about their relationship with Marketplace as they continue to grow and succeed as technology goes to the next level in the cloud. Of course "theCUBE's" covering it here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (peaceful electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, I'm Lisa Martin. This is day four for theCUBE. We have two live sets, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Dave two live sets, 100 guests on theCUBE for AWS Re:Invent 2021. >> Not all at the same time. >> Not all-- That's a good, he brings up a good point, not all at the same time, we are pleased to welcome Gretchen Peri who's going to be sitting down and chatting with Dave with me next. She is from Slalom, at the US State Local and Education, SLED leader. We're going to be talking about Slalom and AWS digital innovation in the public sector. Gretchen, it's a pleasure to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> For the audience that might not be familiar with Slalom before we dig into AWS and SLED in particular, talk to us about Slalom and what it is that you guys do. >> I'd love to. So Slalom's a modern business and technology consulting firm. We're headquartered in Seattle Washington, we have about 11,000 employees across 40 markets globally. And what's different about Slalom is we're local model firm, so our consultants live and work in the same locale, which means we're personally invested in our client's outcomes because they impact us directly in the communities in which we live. >> And you've been in a leader in SLED for a long time, talk to us about what's going on on SLED these days. Obviously the last 18, 22 months have been quite dynamic, but what's going on in the market? >> Absolutely. What we're seeing is an extra emphasis on data data data, obviously, data is king and data is queen right now, right? So when the pandemic hit, we saw a ton of digital innovation, as our SLED clients needed to get their services online. That had been going on for a long time but it absolutely accelerated when then pandemic it and then it was a public health hazard, to ask people to come into the location. So what we saw was for constituents, we saw just absolute blast of omni-channel service delivery, so we saw the advent of SMS and chat bots and the more tech services, right? Leveraging AWS Lex and Transcribe and other services of AWS really helped our SLED clients react to the pandemic and respond to make sure that their constituents were receiving the digital services they needed, and their employees were able to be productive at home. >> Well, that was one of the keys the employee productivity, the student productivity, when everything's went remote overnight, one of the most challenging things was the demand for collaboration tools. Then of course, there's security challenges, there was concerns there, but talk to us about, and we've seen so much innovation out of AWS in the last, I mean always, but even what they announced the last couple of days, the innovation flywheel of AWS is probably stronger than ever enabling organizations like SLED, FED, private sector, public sector to be data-driven. >> Absolutely. One thing that's really exciting right now is to see the evolution of how our SLED customers are thinking about data. So we've been working on like integrated visions in SLED for a long time, integrated justice, integrated health care, integrated eligibility, how do we bring all this information together so that we can supply the right information to the right people at the right time to deliver the right outcomes? And AWS has been a huge part of that. It's not the journey to get to the cloud, it's the destination once you get there, right? Because then you can leverage all their AIML tools, IOT, edge, container, blockchain. And so our customers, who have already made that switch to AWS, they're able to take advantage of that. It's not what you can do in the cloud anymore is what you can't do without it really, right? So we're seeing tons of advances, intelligent document processing is one area I'm really excited about for our SLED clients, and working very closely with AWS to make sure that we see our clients adopt that and achieve the value out of it. >> AWS is dominating the IT space, although what five to 15% of IT is in the cloud, which means the vast majority is still on premises. So there's a huge potential for growth. In this sort of wild, wild west that we're in, there are all sorts of different kinds of services and consultancy partners, that are seeking to bridge the gap between the technology that AWS delivers and the outcomes that customers desire. >> Right. >> Now I've had a couple of experiences actually with Slalom folks, that were very, very positive. And what I saw was that the Slalom people were embedded in a way that you don't see some other consultancies embedded. You mentioned that something that piqued my interest, you talked about the local nature, is that your superpower? Because it sure seemed to be powerful to see this person where some of these very, very large global companies had no idea who Slalom was, until they realized that Sally was the one who had the best relationship with the customer. So Sally's a fictitious name that I just came up with, but I want to hear a little more about Slalom and your superpower and your differentiation. 'Cause it's a crowded space, you've got global systems integrators, you got all kinds of people. What makes you special? >> It's really the breadth of professional services that we provide, combined with AWS's cloud technologies and services. What we do I think a little bit differently is whereas AWS works back from the customer, we work back from our customer's vision. And so what we do with our, especially with our SLED clients, but with all of our commercial clients, is we say, what is your business strategy and your business vision, and how do we design the technology solutions, working back from that. So you're able to answer the business questions through data-driven tech technology, that's really important to you. And when we look at that, it's not just generating data to create information to then garner insights, but let's go one step further. And how do we create knowledge and how do we create wisdom this space, right? Where we understand situational awareness, common operating pictures, that's really what we want to do. When we talk about criminal justice and public safety, I love how we're thinking about joining data in new and different ways. It's not necessarily applications anymore, right? How do we create data as a service? How do we create documents as a service? Where we're pulling out the exact information that we need from semi-structured, structured and unstructured data and providing it to the right people to make the right decisions. >> Talk to us about intelligent document processing, a lot of buzz going on with that. What is it? Where are public sector agencies in terms of embracing it, adopting it and having it be part of that vision? >> Yeah, the promise is huge for IDP. What IDP is basically is leveraging AWS AI services to create intelligent automation solutions that help extract information from printed documents, digital documents, paper documents, right? So leveraging AWS services like Amazon Textract, Comprehend, Augmented AI, things like, and Kendra. What that does in combination, is it helps our clients unlock the data from, you can imagine government, it's heavy, heavy documents, and in criminal justice and public safety in particular, these documents represent key milestones and processes, right? So we're never going to get rid of documents in SLED, they're going to be used in perpetuity, it's important for accessibility and practicality and everything else. But what this does is it lets us unlock the data from those kind of stale documents and create it into usable formats for so that people can make decisions. >> That's critical because there's, I mean, we talk about in Amazon, AWS been this week have been talking about it and Dave, we have too. Every company, public sector, private sector, it needs to be a data-driven company, but they need to be able to extract that value from the data and the data isn't just digital. And that's something that, to your point, that's going to be persistent within SLED, they have to be able to extract the value from it quickly. >> Yes. >> To be able to see what new products and services can we deliver? What directions should we be going? And what outcomes should we be driving based on that visibility? And that visibility is critical. >> Exactly. And right now we absolutely have to support our communities. And we have a lot of our slide clients who are talking about this is a time where we don't just respond in a way that helps people kind of navigate this pandemic, we have to build resiliency as well in our communities and we do that through helping people through these hard times and making sure that we're moving our services to places where people can access them, in any language from wherever they are, right? We're having to actually go into people's homes on their couches, to deliver government services. Where we used to bring them into a single location. >> Right. >> Typically public sector has often been seen as lagging behind the private sector in some ways, the pandemic, as I'm sure ignited a fire with, especially with federal acknowledgement of things that need to happen, budgets flowing, are you seeing even more of an awakening from a cloud perspective within public sector? >> We are, we are and we're seeing really interesting initiatives pop up like, behavioral health initiatives, that are meant to address some really serious concerns in our country like nationwide 988 suicide prevention projects, right? And the federal government is providing a lot of funding to states and local governments so that they can help take care of our communities and also make sure that we're moving our services online so everyone can access them. >> I'm curious about that point, the funding. >> Yeah. >> Do you find yourself almost in the position of prize patrol? Where were some of the state local governments aren't necessarily as aware as Slalom might be of programs that are coming down immediately. Is that part of the conversation? >> It is part of the conv-- That's a great point because what we do is we look at what's coming down from the federal government, how is it going to flow to the states? How is it going to land ultimately, and then helping governments come up with a strategy for how to spend that money in the right way is really important, right? And we saw with some of the funding that come out, that there were delays on getting like eviction prevention funding out to folks. And so making sure that we have the technology to support those outcomes. >> It's all about outcomes. >> Yes. >> Speaking of outcomes, something I want to congratulate Slalom on is winning the first ever National Essay Partner of the Year for the US. >> Yes. >> Nice. >> That's awesome, congratulations. >> What does that mean for Slalom and what direction can we expect the Slalom and AWS partnership to go? >> Up and up. >> To the right? >> Yes. For us it's about validating the relationship that we have, right? It's really, when we walk into a client conversation, what we want to do is develop trust that our clients know we're looking for their best interest and their best outcomes. We're not trying to sell them something we're trying to solve their problems together. And it validates that for us, our partnership with AWS obviously is so important. And what we're doing in terms of making sure that we have a strong bench full of certifications and we can go to market together in the right way for our clients. This is a huge award and the recognition is very powerful for us. >> Well, congratulations. And so last question, you mentioned AWS and we always talk about when we talk with them at their event, we talk about their customer obsession, right? They work backwards, as you said, from the customer. And you guys from customer vision. Talk to me about when you go in jointly together, work with the customer, what does that alignment look like? >> Absolutely. So what we typically do is, Slalom will focus on what is the business outcome that we want to generate? And we will help design, how are we going to go about solving that problem? And how is AWS going to help support us with enabling technology? And so we will go into client conversations together, say, what is the outcome we want from this initiative together? And how are both partners going to get aligned to support the client in that conversation, in that product. >> That alignment is (indistinct). Gretchen, thank you for joining Dave and me today, talking about Slalom, what you guys are doing, how you're really helping organizations in SLED transform and not just survive challenging time but really thrive and be data-driven. We appreciate your insights and congratulations again on the National Essay Partner of The Year. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (lively music)

>> announcer: From around the globe. It's the theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here at the DockerCon virtual headquarters, anchor desks here in the Palo Alto Studios were quarantined in this virtual event of DockerCon. I'm John Furrier, host along with Jenny Bertuccio, John Kreisa, Peter McKee, other folks who are moderating and weaving in and out of the sessions. But here we have a live sessions with Justin Graham, Vice President of the Products group at Docker. Justin, thanks for coming in DockerCon virtual '20. >> Absolutely, happy to be here from my home office in Seattle, Washington where it is almost sunny. >> You had a great backdrop traveler saying in the chat you got a bandwidth, a lot of bandwidth there. Looking good, some island. What a day for Docker global event. 77,000 people registered. It's just been an awesome party. >> It's been great, I could hardly sleep last night. I was up at 5:00 this morning. I was telling my son about it at breakfast. I interrupted his Zoom school. And he talked a little bit about it, so it's been awesome. I've been waiting for this interview slot for the most of the day. >> So yeah, I got to tell the kids to get off, download those gigabytes of new game updates and get off Netflix, I hear you. But you got good bandwidth. Let's get into it, I love your position. VP of Product at a company that's super technical, a lot of software, a lot of cloud. You've got a good view of the landscape of what the current situation is relative to the product, the deals that are going on with this new announced here, sneak Microsoft expansion, multiple clouds as well as the roadmap and community interaction. So you got a lot going on, you've got your fingers in all the action. When you get the keys to the kingdom, as we say in the product side of things, what's the story today from your perspective around DockerCon? What's the most important thing people should know about of what's going on with this new Docker? Obviously, ease of use, we've heard a lot about. What's going on? >> So I'll start with people. We are hyper focused on helping developers and development teams build and ship applications. That's what we're focused on. That's what we wake up every day thinking about. And we double click on that a minute in terms of what that means. If you think about where source control ends and having a running application on some production compute in the Cloud on the other end, there's a whole lot that needs to happen in the middle of those two things. And we hear from our development community and we see from those folks, there's a lot of complexity and choices and options and things in the middle there. And we really want to help streamline the creation of those pipelines to get those apps moving to production as fastly, as quickly as possible. >> And you can see it in some of the results and some of the sessions, one session coming up at around four, around how pipelining with Docker help increase the problem solving around curing cancer, really solving, saving people's lives to the front lines with COVID 19 to business value. So you seeing, again Docker coming back into the fold relative to the simple value proposition of making things super easy for developers, but on top of the mega trend of microservices. So, outside of some of these awesome sessions with his learning, the hardcore sessions here at DockerCon around microservices from monitoring, you name it, not a trivial thing cause you've got stateless and state, all kinds of new things are going on with multiple clouds. So not an easy-- >> No. >> road to kind of grok or understand you have to manage that. What are people paying attention to? What is happening? I think, first off I'll say, one of the things that I'm super passionate about is increasing access to technology, so the greatest and best ideas can get bubbled up to the top and expose no matter where they come from, whom they come from, et cetera. And I think one of the things that makes that harder, that makes that complex is just how much developers need to understand or even emerging developers need to understand. Just to even get started. Languages, IDEs, packaging, building where do you ship to? If you pick a certain powder end point, you have to understand networking and storage and identity models are just so much you have to absorb. So we're hyper focused on how can we make that complex super easy. And these are all the things that we get asked questions on. And we get interacted with on our public roadmap in other places to help with. So that's the biggest things that you're going to see coming out of Docker starting now and moving forward. We'll be serving that end. >> Let's talk about some of the new execution successes you guys had. Honestly, Snyk is security shifting left, that's a major, I think a killer win for Snyk. Obviously, getting access to millions of developers use Docker and vice versa. Into the shifting left, you get to security in that workflow piece. Microsoft expanding relationship's interesting as well because Microsoft's got a robust tech developer ecosystem. They have their own tools. So, you see these symbiotic relationship with Docker, again, coming into the fold where there's a lot of working together going on. Explain that meaning, what does that mean? >> So you're on the back of the refocus Docker in our hyperfocus on developers and development teams, one of the core tenants of the how. So before that was the what. This is the how we're going to go do it. Is by partnering with the ecosystem as much as possible and bringing the best of breed in front of developers in a way that they can most easily consume. So if you take the Snyk partnership that was just a match, a match made in developer dopamine as a Sean Connolly, would say. We're hyper focused on developers and development teams and Snyk is also hyperfocused on making it as easy as possible for developers and development teams to stay secure ship, fast and stay secure. So it really just matched up super well. And then if you think, "Well, how do we even get there in the first place?" Well, we launched our public roadmap a few months ago, which was a first that Docker has ever done. And one of the first things that comes onto that public roadmap is image vulnerability scanning. For Docker, at that time it was really just focused on Docker Hub in terms of how it came through the roadmap. It got up voted a bunch, there has been some interaction and then we thought, "Well, why just like checking that box isn't enough," right? It's just checking the box. What can we do that really brings sort of the promise of the Docker experience to something like this? And Sneak was an immediate thought, in that respect. And we just really got in touch with them and we just saw eye to eye almost immediately. And then off off the rest went. The second piece of it was really around, well why just do it in Docker Hub? What about Docker Desktop? It's downloaded 80,000 times a week and it's got 2.2 million active installations on a weekly basis. What about those folks? So we decided to raise the bar again and say, "Hey, let's make sure that this partnership includes "not only Docker Hub but Docker Desktop, so you'll be able, when we launch this, to scan your images locally on Docker Desktop. >> Awesome, I see getting some phone calls and then you got to hit this, hit the end button real quick. I saw that in there. I've got an interesting chat I want to just kind of lighten things up a little bit from Brian Stevenson. He says, "Justin, what glasses are those?" (Justin laughing) So he wants to know what kind of glasses you're wearing. >> They're glasses that I think signal that I turned 40 last year. >> (laughs) I'd say it's for your gaming environments, the blue light glasses. >> But I'm not going to say where they came from because it's probably not going to engender a bunch of positive good. But they're nice glasses. They help me see the computer screen and make sure that I'm not a bad fingering my CLI commands >> Well as old guys need the glasses, certainly I do. Speaking of old and young, this brought up a conversation since that came up, I'll just quickly riff into this cause I think it's interesting, Kelsey Hightower, during the innovation panel talked about how the developers and people want to just do applications, someone to get under the hood, up and down the stack. I was riffing with John Chrysler, around kind of the new generation, the kids coming in, the young guns, they all this goodness at their disposal. They didn't have to load Linux on a desktop and Rack and Stack servers all that good stuff. So it's so much more capable today. And so this speaks to the modern era and the expansion overall of opensource and the expansion of the people involved, new expectations and new experiences are required. So as a product person, how do you think about that? Because you don't want to just build for the old, you got to build for the new as well as the experience changes and expectations are different. What's your thoughts around that? >> Yeah, I think about sort of my start in this industry as a really good answer to that. I mean, I remember as a kid, I think I asked for a computer for every birthday and Christmas from when I was six, until I got one given to me by a friend's parents in 1994, on my way off to boarding school. And so it took that long just for me to get a computer into my hands. And then when I was in school there wasn't any role sort of Computer Science or coding courses until my senior year. And then I had to go to an Engineering School at Rensselaer city to sort of get that experience at the time. I mean, just to even get into this industry and learn how to code was just, I mean, so many things had to go my way. And then Microsoft hired me out of college. Another thing that sort of fell my way. So this work that we're doing is just so important because I worked hard, but I had a lot of luck. But not everybody's going to have some of that, right? Have that luck. So how can we make it just as easy as possible for folks to get started wherever you are. If you have a family and you're working another full time job, can you spend a few hours at night learning Docker? We can help you with that. Download Docker Desktop. We have tutorials, we have great docs, we have great captains who teach courses. So everything we're doing is sort of in service of that vision and that democratization of getting into the ideas. And I love what Kelsey, said in terms of, let's stop talking about the tech and let's stop talking about what folks can do with the tech. And that's very, very poignant. So we're really working on like, we'll take care of all the complexity behind the scenes and all of the VMs and the launching of containers and the network. We'll try to help take care of all that complexity behind the curtain so that you can just focus on getting your idea built as a developer. >> Yeah, and you mentioned Kelsey, again. He got a great story about his daughter and Serverless and I was joking on Twitter that his daughter convinced them that Serverless is great. Of course we know that Kelsey already loves Serverless. But he's pointing out this developer dopamine. He didn't say that's Shawn's word, but that's really what his daughter wanted to do is show her friends a website that she built, not get into, "Hey look, I just did a Kubernetes cluster." I mean it's not like... But pick your swim lane. This is what it's all about now. >> Yeah, I hope my son never has to understand what a service mesh is or proxy is. Right? >> Yeah. >> I just hope he just learn the language and just learns how to bring an idea to life and all the rest of it is just behind me here. >> When he said I had a parenting moment, I thought he's going to say something like that. Like, "Oh my kid did it." No, I had to describe whether it's a low level data structure or (laughs) just use Serverless. Shifting gears on the product roadmap for Docker, can you share how folks can learn about it and can you give some commentary on what you're thinking right now? I know you guys put on GitHub. Is there a link available-- >> Absolutely, available. Github.com/docker/roadmap. We tried to be very, very poignant about how we named that. So it was as easy as possible. We launched it a few months ago. It was a first in terms of Docker publicly sharing it's roadmap and what we're thinking and what we're working on. And you'll find very clear instructions of how to post issues and get started. What our code of conduct is. And then you can just get started and we even have a template for you to get started and submit an issue and talk to us about it. And internally my team and to many of our engineers as well, we triaged what we see changing and coming into the public roadmap two to three times a week. So for a half an hour to 45 minutes at a time. And then we're on Slack, batting around ideas that are coming in and saying how we can improve those. So for everyone out there, we really do pay attention to this very frequently. And we iterate on it and the image vulnerability scannings one of those great examples you can see some other things that we're working on up there. So I will say this though, there has been some continual asks for our Lennox version of Docker Desktop. So I will commit that, if we get 500 up votes, that we will triage and figure out how to get that done over a period of time. >> You heard 500 up votes to triage-- >> 500 >> You as get that. And is there a shipping date on that if they get the 500 up votes? >> No, no, (John laughs) you went to a shipping date yet, but it's on the public roadmap. So you'll know when we're working on it and when we're getting there. >> I want before I get into your session you had with the capital, which is a very geeky session getting under the hood, I'm more on the business side. The tail wind obviously for Docker is the micro services trend. What containers has enabled is just going to continue to get more awesome and complex but also a lot of value and agility and all the things you guys are talking about. So that obviously is going to be a tailwind for you. But as you guys look at that piece of it, specifically the business value, how is Docker positioned? Because a of the use cases are, no one really starts out microservices from a clean sheet of paper that we heard some talks here DockerCon where the financial services company said, "Hey, it's simple stack," and then it became feature creep, which became a monolith. And then they had to move that technical debt into a much more polyglot system where you have multiple tools and there's a lot of things going on, that seems to be the trend that also speaks to the legacy environment that most enterprises have. Could you share your view on how Docker fits into those worlds? Because you're either coming from a simple stack that more often and got successful and you're going to go microservice or you have legacy, then you want to decouple and make it highly cohesive. So your thoughts. >> So the simple answer is, Docker can help on both ends. So I think as these new technologies sort of gain momentum and get talked about a bunch and sort of get rapid adoption and rapid hype, then they're almost conceived to be this wall that builds up where people start to think, "Well, maybe my thing isn't modern enough," or, "Maybe my team's not modern enough," or, "Maybe I'm not moderate enough to use this." So there's too much of a hurdle to get over. And that we don't see that at all. There's always a way to get started. Even thinking about the other thing, and I'd say, one we can help, let us know, ping us, we'll be happy to chat with you, but start small, right? If you're in a large enterprise and you have a long legacy stack and a bunch of legacy apps, think about the smallest thing that you can start with, then you can begin to break off of that. And as a proof of concept even by just downloading Docker Desktop and visual studio code and just getting started with breaking off a small piece, and improve the model. And I think that's where Docker can be really helpful introducing you to this paradigm and pattern shift of containers and containerized packaging and microservices and production run time. >> And certainly any company coming out of his post pandemic is going to need to have a growth strategy that's going to be based on apps that's going to be based on the projects that they're currently working, double down on those and kind of sunset the ones that aren't or fix the legacy seems to be a major Taylor. >> The second bit is, as a company, you're going to also have to start something new or many new things to innovate for your customers and keep up with the times and the latest technology. So start to think about how you can ensure that the new things that you're doing are starting off in a containerized way using Docker to help you get there. If the legacy pieces may not be able to move as quickly or there's more required there, just think about the new things you're going to do and start new in that respect. >> Well, let's bring some customer scenarios to the table. Pretend I'm a customer, we're talking, "Hey Justin, you're looking good. "Hey, I love Docker. I love the polyglot, blah, blah, blah." Hey, you know what? And I want to get your response to this. And I say, "DevOps won't work here where we are, "it's just not a good fit." What do you say when you hear things like that? >> See my previous comment about the wall that builds up. So the answer is, and I remember hearing this by the way, about Agile years ago, when Agile development and Agile processes began to come in and take hold and take over for sort of waterfall processes, right? What I hear customers really saying is, "Man, this is really hard, this is super hard. "I don't know where to start, it's very hard. "How can you help? "Help me figure out where to start." And that is one of the things that we're very very very clearly working on. So first off we just, our docs team who do great work, just made an unbelievable update to the Docker documentation homepage, docs.docker.com. Before you were sort of met with a wall of text in a long left navigation that if you didn't know what you were doing, I would know where to go. Now you can go there and there's six very clear paths for you to follow. Do you want to get started? Are you looking for a product manual, et cetera. So if you're just looking for where to get started, just click on that. That'll give you a great start. when you download Docker Desktop, there's now an onboarding tutorial that will walk you through getting your first application started. So there are ways for you to help and get started. And then we have a great group of Docker captains Bret Fisher, many others who are also instructors, we can absolutely put you in touch with them or some online coursework that they deliver as well. So there's many resources available to you. Let us help you just get over the hump of getting started. >> And Jenny, and on the community side and Peter McKee, we're talking about some libraries are coming out, some educational stuff's coming around the corner as well. So we'll keep an eye out for that. Question for you, a personal question, can you share a proud devOps Docker moment that you could share with the audience? >> Oh wow, so many to go through. So I think a few things come to mind over the past few weeks. So for everyone that has no... we launched some exciting new pricing plans last week for Docker. So you can now get quite a bit of value for $7 a month in our pro plan. But the amount of work that the team had to do to get there was just an incredible thing. And just watching how the team have a team operated and how the team got there and just how they were turning on a dime with decisions that were being made. And I'm seeing the same thing through some of our teams that are building the image vulnerability scanning feature. I won't quote the number, but there's a very small number of people working on that feature that are creating an incredible thing for customers. So it's just how we think every day. Because we're actually almost trying to productize how we work, right? And bring that to the customer. >> Awesome, and your take on DockerCon virtual, obviously, we're all in this situation. The content's been rich on the site. You would just on the captains program earlier in the day. >> Yes. >> Doctor kept Brett's captain taught like a marathon session. Did they grill you hard or what was your experience on the captain's feed? >> I love the captain's feed. We did a run of that for the Docker birthday a few months ago with my co-worker Justin Cormack. So yes, there are two Justin's that work at Docker. I got the internal Justin Slack handle. He got the external, the community Slack Justin handle. So we split the goods there. But lots of questions about how to get started. I mean, I think there was one really good question there. Someone was saying asking for advice on just how to get started as someone who wants to be a new engineer or get into coding. And I think we're seeing a lot of this. I even have a good friend whose wife was a very successful and still is a very successful person in the marketing field. And is learning how to code and wants to do a career switch. Right? >> Yeah. >> So it's really exciting. >> DockerCon is virtual. We heard Kelsey Hightower, we heard James Governor, talk about events going to be more about group conventions getting together, whether they're small, medium, or large. What's your take on DockerCon virtual, or in general, what makes a great conference these days? Cause we'll soon get back to the physical space. But I think the genie's out of the bottle, that digital space has no boundaries. It's limitless and creativity. We're just scratching the surface. What makes a great event in your mind? >> I think so, I go back to thinking, I've probably flown 600,000 miles in the past three years. Lots of time away from my family, lots of time away from my son. And now that we're all in this situation together in terms of being sheltered in place in the global pandemic and we're executing an event that has 10 times more participation from attendees than we had in our in person event. And I sat back in my chair this morning and I was thinking, "Did I really need to fly that 600,000 miles "in the past three years?" And I think James Governor, brought it up earlier. I really think the world has changed underneath us. It's just going to be really hard to... This will all be over eventually. Hopefully we'll get to a vaccine really soon. And then folks will start to feel like world's a little bit more back to "normal" but man, I'm going to really have to ask myself like, "Do I really need to get on this airplane "and fly wherever it is? "Why can't I just do it from my home office "and give my son breakfast and take them to school, "and then see them in the evening?" Plus second, like I mentioned before in terms of access, no in person event will be able to compete ever with the type of access that this type of a platform provides. There just aren't like fairly or unfairly, lots of people just cannot travel to certain places. For lots of different reasons, monetary probably being primary. And it's not their job to figure out how to get to the thing. It's our job to figure out how to get the tech and the access and the learning to them. Right? >> Yeah (murmurs) >> So I'm super committed to that and I'll be asking the question continually. I think my internal colleagues are probably laughing now because I've been beating the drum of like, "Why do we ever have to do anything in person anymore?" Like, "Let's expand the access." >> Yeah, expand the access. And what's great too is the CEO was in multiple chat streams. So you could literally, it's almost beam in there like Star Trek. And just you can be more places that doesn't require that spatial limitations. >> Yeah. >> I think face to face will be good intimate more a party-like environment, more bonding or where social face to face is more impactful. >> We do have to figure out how to have the attendee party virtually. So, we have to figure out how to get some great electronic, or band, or something to play a virtual show, and like what the ship everybody a beverage, I don't now. >> We'll co-create with Dopper theCUBE pub and have beer for everybody if need they at some point (laughs). Justin, great insight. Thank you for coming on and sharing the roadmap update on the product and your insights into the tech as well as events. Appreciate it, thank you. >> Absolutely, thank you so much. And thanks everyone for attending. >> Congratulations, on all the work on the products Docker going to the next level. Microservices is a tailwind, but it's about productivity, simplicity. Justin, the product, head of the product for Docker, VP of product on here theCUBE, DockerCon 2020. I'm John Furrier. Stay with us for more continuous coverage on theCUBE track we're on now, we're streaming live. These sessions are immediately on demand. Check out the calendar. There's 43 sessions submitted by the community. Jump in there, there are own container of content. Get in there, pun intended, and chat, and meet people, and learn. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more after this break. (upbeat music)

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the booth covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of smartsheet engaged here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Anna Griffin. She is the CMO of smartsheet. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thank you, guys for having me appreciate it. So you were your pretty new to this company. Joined in April. I'd love to hear, but you've also had an illustrious career in marketing. You've worked summers and big names, including Apple and Nortel and and Saturn. And you've also worked for Land's end and a whole bunch of different varied career. What attracted you to smart? >>She You know, it was interesting when I first got the call about smartsheet. I had never heard of it. And the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing. I realized it was one of those a category that's just not established, but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing. And we're not even the potential. I mean, it will be the next big thing and, you know, I met with that was intriguing. But then, you know, I met with the executive team, and it was a perfect combination of a killer product, but a killer company. I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is and their authenticity and their passion and their drive and their belief. It's so contagious. There's no way you would not want to be a part of it. So on, then, the privilege to be able to tell this company's story I feel like it is the best kept story. Not only in Seattle, potentially the world on I plan to tell the story and And what a gift it was. A great opportunity is a marketer toe have this type of opportunity. >>Well, we're gonna get into how you're going to tell the story. Okay, See you later. But so now you've been here a few months. It is your first ever engaged. What? What does he what are your impressions? >>Well, I wish I had been thio previous engaged to have something to compare it to. But the fact that this conference has doubled in size 4000 customers here and it's only its third show. I will tell you in the industry I've worked, you know, managing events teams for many, many, many years. Not a lot of conferences grow at this size, and Soto have 4000 customers here who are zealots. They are their passion for the product and what it's doing and what it's doing for there. Not only their companies, but their own personal careers. There isn't an empowerment story through their mouse that will just inspire you. So it's It's incredible. The energy here is really, really especially. >>Feel it, too. Way See >>it a lot of the smaller conferences, early days. That's why they're fun to be. Here were last year, when those 2000 it was adjacent to the to the office across the across the water. Exactly, but it is a really passion community, and, you know, Thio here, literal, literal cheers and claps at features. Well, it's great to see, like copy paste from one road to the other because it's clearly something that means something these people and that they have asked for and the company is delivered and really demonstrates, is listening to engage these crazy people. It's a great asset >>wave. That listening thing is huge, and I feel like that's one of the things. And I think it's why there is a CMO now. That's why I get the privilege to be the first CMO is because the customers said way need more awareness of this company. We need our our executives. We need lines of business leaders. We need i t to know who you are and the magic of what you do. We need awareness is gonna make it that much easier for us to get much wider adoption across these companies. If people know who you are and they know you know what you're capable of. So listening. That is one of the number one things we've heard. It's like awareness. They wanted awareness. So because it'll help make them more successful. So I think that was the catalyst for Okay, let's get a cheap Marty Officer, Let's go build >>that about you. What are you gonna do? What it wanted? Some of your top priority is to tell the story and to build brand awareness. >>Yeah, well, um well, you're the first thing was to really kind of Titan are positioning again. It's a great great products make great brands, and this is a great product company. But man were starting to do so much ward than just killer products. We're really getting into this enablement this, um right, transforming companies. And so I wanted to make sure we're positioned properly. And we're really positioning mawr in a more transformative altitude and the capabilities of what we can do. We have found we've spent way too much time talking about technology versus people versus what technology and people are going to do together. And that is the magic of what smartsheet does. It really takes platform a common platform that basically integrates with the Czech investment that you've already made with the systems of record that you already have pools that data out and then allows the people I work with that data all in a common really time, you know, application. And when you can marry those two things together that tech and people, that's when one plus one equals three. And so we call that that three is what we really call achievement again, Like everybody in our space is work work, work, task management, project management, the capability of smart shit Yeah, we do all that, too. But when you play in that transformative altitude, we're in a bling achievement and it enterprise wide level and achieve it like what your business can achieve. But this is the more special part. And this is where I get excited. Did you feel to tell this story is the achievement happens at a personal level to like again? I'm telling you when I talk to customers and I see what they're doing right, you don't understand. You have changed my career. I'm doing more strategic work. I am. I am seen differently in my company. I champion this, like all of a sudden, I am leading big teams. I went from this to this, and there they're empowerment is so big and so really that last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. And that's what this product does. And so job one was position. That's properly so we can tell that type of story and really put our solutions in that kind of light because that's what it does on then job to is to launch the campaign launches to the world. So we just launched two weeks ago, and it's a slow roll. I mean, we have hundreds of assets, it in place. So if I love seeing us on television, you know I love seeing is deeply in digital. I love some of the new interesting things that that we could do in media. But when our customers are saying that, you know they're seeing it a CMO like you high from it. Yeah, So it's fun. So jump to launch the campaign and the campaign is, well, we call the campaign can do you know we're positioning the brand as the platform for enterprise achievement. Number one Smart sheet is a platform, I think a lot of people, you know as it's grown. I mean, it truly is a platform, and it really is enterprise strong and wide. It's skills which is important, but its scales So everybody and a company can align organizational alignment to truly achieve something bigger aligned organizations do not fill. And so that's the That's the power. But I digress. >>No question that way >>you know, one of the great legs of your of your go to market strategy and your lead jen is your licensing formula, which enables me as the Spartan sheet licensee to engage lots of people, many outside my own, not by my own team, but my own company. And let them have access to this tool. What a smart, smart waiver. Whoever came up with that licensing strategy? What a great way to introduce the opportunity to use this transformational tool to ongoing and broad audience. >>Yes, your table is so exciting. When I was in the interview process and I was riding on a plane and clearly I had met with the company and I heard somebody in front of me was a consultant, one of the consulting firms who had met a complete stranger on the plane. And somehow Smartsheet came up that she was going you got Oh, my gosh, Smartsheet. This is like she was going. This is the best kept secret. We're using it with all of our clients. We heard about it through one of our clients. That wasn't one of them. We'll use it like Oh, my gosh, this is the game changer. I'm like putting >>my here in between the wayward. I put my hand it as it did You just say smart shape. >>Literally six people on the airplane, random people like, Oh, my gosh, we use it to It was the most surreal experience, and that was when I knew, like, Okay, I've got to be a part of this Coast special. Did a lot of people are now just getting that sensation of what this thing is capable of. And, >>well, it's funny to your personal achievement story. Reminds me of any time you know you got a new software company and whether, you know, centered alloy Dorian, Why, when those guys come in, they're making a big bet right there. Some new partner's gonna bet. Bet their career on this new technology. We've heard from a number of people how betting their career internally with smartsheet has changed their position in the company. Yes, for that today, a couple of times. So clearly you know it. It is an enablement platform for someone to, you know, grab on to the to the rocket ship and ride this Marchi wave thio new and bigger, better things, >>but but also her point about just even just participating in the technology. And then they're able to, as you said, work on more strategic work, be able to do more things in their jobs that have been catapulted them to new job. So it's not even necessarily betting on smartsheet bringing in smart cheat. But it is just just using smart sheet and then therefore they have more brain time. Yes, yes, oh, engagement we're talking about, >>right, right? You know, it is because we've been talking a lot about you know, some of the really scary statistics about how disengaged people are at work and how many people are ready to quit their job. And, you know, they've got all these blocks. Is menial roadblocks in their day to day existence that are that are negatively impacting their ability to want to do their job or but actually just want to be there anymore. And so it's It's like seems maybe to the outside, looking in some of these things by seem low value, but they're actually tremendous value. If you're removing these roadblocks so I can get my job done >>totally and love your job, you love your job. But know that the work that you do matters and I think so many people have lost that feeling like there's something about working and I don't know if it's the corporate world. But it has become such a grind, and that rare opportunity would like. I love what I do, and I know that it matters. It's a gift, and this is a platform that enables bad in people. And so I think that's when the fascinating things I've been spending a lot of time on the road with customers and I was at a very big multi national, big global agricultural company. And, um, Singer, Actually, I'm watching WAY Bet with probably 200 different Just what I would call power users across seven different you know, roll types like from I t toe hsc thio, you name it. And, um, every single one of them is like art. We're doing more like we are in power, like the engagement, the employee engagement in that company through the roof because every single person felt like were hurt. I have ownership, you know. I'm doing work. I'm taking it to a new level. And so you know, sure, there is a Thanh of operational efficiencies that are gonna come out of working with smartsheet. But I think the one to watch is what's gonna happen when your workforce is truly engaged and taking ownership of the work. Those were the good. Those are the companies that are going to have a higher retention. They're gonna have you. They're going to see something in that in that talent area. So this is more than just We're getting more work done and return on investment of our our our systems, like you're going to see you know what happens when your when your employees are empowered. >>Well, the word you didn't use his innovation that I firmly believe everyone wants more innovation, their company. >>But how do you do >>it? One of those? I think it's really simple. Lever on that is you just get more people more access to more data and then the ability to do something about it and open it up to all the smart people that see problem to different prisons in different opportunities. And that's where you start to get in. A leverage is amazing talent that you already have inside your four walls. >>But what is interesting about innovation, as I think sometimes the world so over rotates that innovation is gonna be that next killer line of code or it's going to be and they forget that the power of practical innovation like it's that Siri's of small collected things at out up, allowing your entire, you know, employee population to feel like they have the power to innovate us. That every person in the company has the power because the power practical innovation can lead to something Justus Big is the big already. >>Dev. Ops has shown that that's a better way anyway, right in software development, with the grand idea with the market development plan and the product development plan and the three year build cycle that's does not win against constant religious narrative improvement. Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. Yes, >>indeed. So you and you said this earlier and I saw it on your Lincoln to the last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. How do you describe the culture at smart shape now? I mean, we've talked about the evangelical customers Yeah, about with in smartsheet itself. >>It's, um it's pretty special. Know what you're gonna say? Of course. And see him? I was gonna say special, but it is. It is rare when people everyone comes to work with this belief like this true belief that they are They have the power to influence something and touch something that's going to do something great for other people. And I think that's what eyes, the most specialised. They they're not just doing it for themselves. They know they're doing it for others, like they know they love these guys. Every single person in the company loves that customer like the love ability, They love the customer, and they feel like they've got to do their best work so their customer can do something great with it. You know, they really understand that, and that's Ah, it's an incredible place to wanna work when you, when you feel that way but toe love your customers. I think that's why our customers love us back and to be loved. You must first love and because they love you know, it's it's >>rare. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it's a great role and you're in the right place. And I can't talk to you next year and hear more about can do and and all of the wonderful things you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I'm Rebecca Knight. That wraps up the cubes. Interviews. Stay tuned for our rap of engaged 2019 you're watching the Cube

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engaged here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside Jeff Frick. We are joined by Mark Mader. He is the CEO of Smartsheet. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So great job up there on the keynote a bit. We know this is the third annual conference, uh, 4,000 people from 39 different countries. The theme is achieved more and the theme is actually tied to a very special announcement you you've made today about the, about the achieved as one Alliance. So can you tell our viewers a little bit about that? >>Yeah. The cheapest one Alliance is really figuring out how to take the cultural changes that are in flight right now and marrying those with the people and the technology. And we think that it's important as things like concepts that are intimidating people, AI and ML worker replacement. It's like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. These are things where we actually think technology and people should work together as opposed to being a replacement for. And I think there's a lot of education that needs to take place. So we plan on doing is doing research through this Alliance and then publishing that work. Cause I think a huge part of this is educating the market and giving them confidence to take that step. It's a different way to treat people. We're in this weird spot where where there's super low unemployment and yet so many things are services and a lot of your assets walk out the door every single night. >>You hope they come back the next day. So you're trying to give them meaning. You're trying to do more than just kind of the core function of the business. He had a great hackathon, uh, yesterday for good. So it's a really challenging people, challenging time for employers to keep the workforce engaged and you're really trying to help them kind of move some of the roadblocks and made it easier for them to keep those folks engaged. It is Jeff. And what we're seeing is, and you see the studies come out where there's never been a higher percentage of people who feel disconnected from their work. And I don't think that's just giving them good tooling. They actually want to know who is being benefited ultimately, what's the endpoint benefit. And if they can somehow feel connected to something purposeful, that is a mechanism for feeling connected to work. So we want our team, we want our customers showing up to their offices every day or organizations feeling motivated. And I think absent that human dimension, absent knowing who you're helping, I think it makes it feel a bit hollow. So that's one of things about engagement brings this together and you see it firsthand. Very invigorating. >>So talk a little bit about the customers that you had up on the main stage telling their Smartsheet stories. And what are the ones that you find most inspiring and, and most sort of life affirming to you as the CEO of this company? >>Well, the thing that that never gets old for me, Rebecca, is when somebody felt something one day was completely unattainable and then they have that unlocked moment like Holy smokes. I pulled it off and it was even more exciting is when they pull that off with very few resources. They didn't have to go to it at every turn. They didn't have to mobilize on a big budget ask. They just got it done. So one of the real memorable moments from me this year was when I visited Syngenta out in North Carolina and I spoke with the head of health and safety and she said we mobilized on Smartsheet. We enabled all of our team members to submit issues, safety concerns they had. How do you simplify that process of taking a picture of a potential issue, getting into a queue, getting it responded to, they saw a 500% increase in the number of people who were saying, I think that could have use improvement. >>I think that could use improvement and a 65% faster resolution times. So she is convinced that people's lives are being materially impacted to the positive. Because of this. I mean, how can she not feel empowered? That is a pretty big, that's a pretty amazing feeling. So that's one that really stands out to me. In terms of the other customer stories that, you know, one of the things that also struck me was just how adrenaline pumping the main stage show was. Yeah. Talk a little bit about what it means to put up the customers who have these very compelling visually interesting stories from outdoor Clothiers to travel destinations, and also what it means for Smartsheet employees to be in the audience. Hearing these stories about what they're doing to help their customers. I think, I think we all want to wake up every day feeling like whatever we do matters, right? >>Whether that's individually or with your family or with your business, and when you see someone like an arc Terrix or a Spartan race or a Vulcan, which is helping do census on elephants, elephants, and preserving that species coupled right alongside it was Cisco that is protecting our networks, which are more complex than ever before and you're participating in that site. Okay. That can again back to that connectedness. Right. And I think, I think the diversity in who we serve also keeps it interesting. You never know who you're gonna serve next one day at Cisco, the next day it's agriculture, the next day it's saving elephants. That diversity keeps things fresh. >>Mark, one of the things that struck me in the keynote is is there was a story of, of this guy gets his going to fly around the world and England and plane in five days or eight days. Um, but on the, what are the test flights are a significant change. He was trying to fly to Y, there was an equipment failure and he had to divert and you know when you see the screen grabs and people working in Smartsheet, it looks super detailed. It's like a project plan and there's resources that are tied research utilization. But in this case they had to be able to flip on a dime. They had to be completely agile and I think she said that eight teams around the world, I presume where the stops are. That's a really interesting dichotomy of, of the tool that you guys are delivering to, to have the detail to be, you know, numbers focused and AI focused, but at the same time be real in the real world. Stuff doesn't always go as planned, be >>real and do it instantly. So if we have an issue with the plane, we're not going to host a summit to talk about with how to get back on track. We've got to do it now. So the thing that sets also need that example is you're talking about eight to 10 people across multiple continents who have to work right now. There is no mobilization. There is note, as I said, summit and I think being able to do meaningful things quickly, that is a fairly rare combination, right? Very often meaningful stuff is heavy, complex takes time. So again, I'm, I'm this, that constant pursuit of faster, more meaningful, more depth, more value, right? In this kind of cross silo collaboration. You, I mean that's a theme that comes up over and over again is that you need contributions from lots of people and lots of no formerly siloed departments as is maybe what they're going to be called in the future to get to resolution so that you can move forward. >>And I think the thing that we spoke to in one of the product announcements was we are so inundated with information and Rebecca, Mark, I needed faster, I need a faster yet again and saying, Holy Rebecca, I can't actually process it all. So one of the things we're trying to do is how do you also improve the context within P within which people see things? Right? So if you asked me question and I don't have to tap out to another application, I can actually see your question in the context of that work. And that's when I think we were one of the real big breakthroughs where we're releasing this, this engaged, >>I mean, when you think about the, the, the current status of, of work and you really, and you really see it, I mean, from, from where you sit, I mean, is it almost shockingly abysmal about how bad things can get at companies in terms of how many silos there are, how the, the number of communication breakdowns, uh, the way the communication breaks down because as you said, you could just be working on a different version for someone. >>Shockingly, business, because we've been doing this for years, it's like it's the norm base, the cost of doing business. So what our job is to, how do we get people to get that spark to elevate a Busick, Oh my goodness, there is a better way. And it takes a lot to change people's behavior. You can't just say, well, there's a better way they have to experience it. Right? So we're in that, in that pursuit of how do you get more people to clear that hurdle the first time? Because the norm is, it's hard. The norm is, is distributed. The norm is, I don't know what version. So that's who we're trying to unlock for folks. >>And you said in the keynote once they get that spark and then achievement becomes the new norm that that has its own momentum too. >>Yes, it's the, you know, Jeff does something amazing and I'm like I want in, it's like well Jeff doesn't have a monopoly on that and that is, that's the viral effect and it's not so much a vendor saying, Hey Jeff did something now you should be motivated. You should feel that way. Rebecca. And that's what we see at this conference. This is 4,000 people who weren't told to go to the conference. These are 4,000 people who want in. And that is a really special part of the conference for us. Shift gears a little bit on AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Cause we hear about >>it all the time and I think everyone now has kind of figured out that it's not, it's not going to be a company delivering AI and ML. It's really applied a I in ML within an application. When you guys look at the opportunities, especially with the data flow that you have and you know your SAS application, where do you see some of the short term wins and opportunities using AI to even better, you know, eliminate some of this redundant, painful work? >>I think part of it starts with educating people on the potential benefits of it. And then I'm an experiential learner. I think many people are. So instead of talking about the theory, demonstrate how it could help. So we've already started doing sings things like recommending to people certain things based on actions they take. It's also very important as a vendor we have made a commitment to being very clear that for more advanced types of AI, people need to opt in. So again, part of this, what's happening to my data, who's working at we that that's part of our platform, right? And when I look at the future, it's the first step I think is really how do you drive convenience improvement recommendation. How do you let someone take better advantage of the systems they're already using? And what people don't have to appreciate today is by exhibiting this behavior, by intaking information, structuring and reporting out this system. >>We'll observe a pattern and ultimately should they choose to opt in the system. We'll get to a point where we'll be able to make recommendations, recommendations and derive insights. But again, a lot of this is fairly theoretical. We're in the early innings of this, Jeff. People are just starting to figure out I can automate something. So you know, I think there's a much like people said 10 years ago, the future is now. The future is kind of showing up today and then the next phase is still a couple of years out. But it's a very exciting, it's a very exciting prospect. >>So those recommendations then can become best practices because I'd like to get it back to this, this achieve as one Alliance and sort of how you're going to take that research and educate the market and then use it to implement these new technologies and best practices of this is how we can get more done and achieve more together >>by showing examples of how AI and ML can contribute to someone's performance as opposed to you did these 10 things. The machine is taking over those 10 things like, well, what's my role in it? That's not a very exciting conversation to have. So I think by demonstrating how somebody's game can, in a sense, slow down. So if the machine can help me further inspect more deeply assess, have that next moment of insight that's contributing, not taking away. And again, we need to show examples as an industry that happening until we show it. It's sort of off or not. So I'm really excited about about helping our customers through that journey. >>Yeah, there's so much opportunity in the ed. The other one that comes up in a other times is unplanned downtime. Right. So a lot of talk always about unplanned downtime of machines, right? It's completely disruptive. You don't want to schedule maintenance, but no one really talks about unplanned downtime of people, not necessarily in the way of being sick, but being distracted by often mundane, often roads, often an anticipated task, I won't even call it work that suddenly get dumped into your lap that you have to take care of. And those really, I think huge opportunities to add some automation and get those things kind of off the plate. >>Yeah. You think about the breakthrough ideas you've had in your lives, does it happen when you're like feverously working waste? No. It's usually when there's a moment of just peace where you're able to process. That's when the breakthrough happens. So one of the things we talked about today was how also as leaders, we need to empower our teams to not just drive for more yield and throughput, take that extra benefit and actually look at the board, process the board and think about what we're going to do next. And I think, again, you need to exhibit, you need to give people the permission to work that way because we're all feeling this, this pressure to innovate. You gotta give people time to do it and do more with less too. I mean, yeah. Do you think it's realistic? Do you think leaders are going to be able to, to do that? And I think the leaders of successful companies will do that and role model that too because they can't also be worried about their own true pled as you said. Right? Right. Yeah. I mean, as Gabby, as Gabby, a reset at the end of her talk, you have to exhibit the behavior. You want others to practice. Right. So I think that was a wise, a wise statement. >>Well, I really loved the, uh, the outdoor clothing company who, you know, specifically said, we want our people out doing the things that our customers are doing, experiencing what they're experiencing and really baking that into the culture. Not just saying it, but get outside and go run around, uh, and, and do what we want our customers to do and what our customers do. Do very different approach. >>It is. It is. I think, again, back to back to us understanding what our customers are doing. This is equivalent to our super bowl every year, right? We get 4,000 these people coming in here and there is no substitute for that in the flesh interaction and that's again one of the reasons why it's everyone's such a positive engaged mood right now. So they're not only interacting with the Smartsheet folks, but they're interacting with each other and learned how each company uses Smartsheet. Yeah, I mean when you think that one half of all collaboration that takes place on our platform is cross company. It's not a surprise that people interact with one another. Here it is. It is happening. We have companies who interact with hundreds of brands outside of their own, so we serve as that cross connect for companies and that's the modern company. I don't know of a company that is completely insular, so if you can help promote that safely, that's a, that's a, that's a real advantage for a company. >>Yeah. Wrapping up. What do you, what do you think you're going to be the themes for next year's conference? What is, what are sort of what's on your plate? What are you thinking about? What are the big challenges that you're knowing on right now? Yeah, I think the, I think the continued shift from efficiency to effectiveness. People. I think most people are still measured on the output goal. How many units did I do, how many sales and and while that may serve you well in the quarter and the next quarter, it does not prepare you for years two and three so you have to be very committed to the investments today. That may not pay off in that six to 12 month window. You have to, and I think stories will come out as people are learning new ways to work of examples of here's what we did in 2019 which ended up being a home run in 2021 so it's back to effectiveness, effectiveness versus efficiency. That is going to be, I think one of the themes we speak to next year. Thanks Mark. A pleasure having you on the show. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. Have more of the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet. Engage.

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to Seattle, Washington. We are here at Smartsheet engaged 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. You're watching the cube. We are here with a cube alum, a cube veteran, Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at constellation research at at Washington DC. Thank you so much for returning to the cube. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic but a fascinating one. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the workplace is driven by the new, the rise of digital technologies. >>Sure. I mean while it digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? And so we've had the past waves of productivity tools and then mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality are going to literally change how we perceive the workplace. And then we have just everyday trends like remote working. And now people can work from anywhere, right? It's fantastic. And that's, that's really revolutionized a lot of things. There are things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote work force. Companies like ADP have a quarter of their workforce working from home, right? Accenture, same thing. They're getting rid of office space and they, they work out of their house unless there's a client site. And because you can create a, create the experience that you want. And one of the really big trends is this is this trend towards being able to shape the employee experience the way that you want to, using the tools that you prefer. >>And some people call this shadow it, other people call it innovation, right? And so that's one of the, one of the big changes. And then we have things like the gig economy, which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms. And that's, that's really quite exciting too. So all these, this confluence of forces all enabled them driven by technology. But it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload workers that are not lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this. And that's another big challenge. >>Well, you also get this tools proliferation, which they're just not, they're just not word and, and Excel anymore. But you've got a tab open with Salesforce, you've got a tab open with Slack, you've got Gmail open, you've got docs open and you've got Smartsheet open. You might have a JIRA open. I mean, so how is that gonna sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of apps that we have to keep up >>and we need all this technology to do better work. I mean the, these apps provide value except that it's increased in the onboarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us to train people. In some companies it's hard to retain people because they feel like they have to go to work and there's this onslaught of technologies they have to have tabs open and get their jobs done. And they do. And so we're seeing things like, you know, we're at the Smartsheet conference where, you know, how can we centralize work a little bit better, streamline it by integrating the tools and creating more focus in on what we're doing. And that's a very big trend. So my latest digital workplace trends report, we say this, we're seeing these hubs form, you know like Slack is another work hub that's become very popular inside of organizations. >>They have over 1100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So we're dealing with this complexity, you know, starting to be able to do this now, but it's early days still a big challenge. So what's a, what are you seeing now? So what's the, what is the answer then? I mean we have you just described all of these trends that are taking place that are making, making the work modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers who have, they're dealing with cognitive overload leaders who want more with less. What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? We talked already about Smartsheet and Slack. We see the new digital experience platforms are emerging and low code and no code is also becoming popular. >>I'd be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamline experiences. So the CIO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, solve his problem right away there. They're knowledge workers are just being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employee experience, the 100 top moments and then he built experiences that enabled, you know, project management and onboarding and all of these key activities to be friction-free built out of their existing applications, but streamlined to just what they needed to do. And he used this as his top priority as a digital leader is to say, we've got to take as much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining and simplification. And we now have tools that allow that shaping to happen very quickly. It's almost reminds me of kind of the competition for Deb's right now. >>It's the competition for employees. And then we've talked a lot about the consumerization of it in mobile devices for the customer experience, but there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same kind of expected behavior, right? Or expected inner engagement interaction with the apps on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers. Cause I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available. But yeah, we only get 2% unemployment in the Bay area. Now it's creating effectively negative unemployment, right? Anything under 3%. So this is the challenges. Employee experience is usually low on the priority list for CEOs. They usually have analytics and cloud and cybersecurity and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet customer experience is, is one of those priorities. But how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to deliver it with? Right. We're seeing you can do with talented people, is expecting to do a great job. And then give them a bunch of hard to use tools, right. Which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that prioritization go up a little bit because employee experience is part of delivering great customer experience and it's how you, how you create that experience to begin with. So small >>and leaders are seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that their workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. >>Yeah. And now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before and I'm sure you've seen the numbers that are, most employees are disengaged at work. The majority, right between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous untapped investment that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employee experiences. And what's disengaging is, as I mentioned, you know, giving a talented person allows you tools or allows you experience, right and expect them to do great is right. It doesn't happen. >>How much do you think AAL or excuse me, AI and machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job. >>Yeah, it's, it's interesting cause there's, you know, there's two sides of the coin there. Some people like a, a job that they can just kind of phone in and it's kind of rote and they can come in, they don't have to think too hard and then they can go home to their family and some people are hired on that basis. Right. Um, because that's the challenge. AI and machine learning will absolutely automate most rote work. If you look at like Adobe sensei, I was at the Adobe conference and, and they were talking about how all of these creative types, you'll have all these mundane tasks automated for them. And I could see everybody looking at each other going, I get paid to do. >>Right, right. >>So you know, it, you'll see things like robotic process automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CIO is how they had, they cut like 25% out of their call center because they handed it over to the box. Right. You know, as bill processing, that's one of the, and sorting and matching bills, the invoices, it's a manual job even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happen about the most rote level and it just, but it's just going to climb up from there. >>What do you see down the road though? I mean in terms of those, in terms of those employees who are raising their saying hands saying weed, I kind of want that job. I are you, are you seeing what's going to happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they, are they going to be invested in by their companies? >>Well you hope so. You know, it's interesting. We see that all the big vendors now have these big education programs. Salesforce has Trailhead. SAP just announced open SAP where they giveaway massively open online courses. And you know, Microsoft has done this with Microsoft developers network way back in the day, trying to educate people. I mean you can get re-skilled for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenges. Even though every technological revolution in the past, and it looks like this one too has totally changed the employment picture. Uh, uh, by and large it creates more jobs than we lose. And that looks like it's going to happen here. But the people who lose the jobs aren't the ones that tend to gain the jobs, the new jobs, right? Yeah. The, it's hard to take somebody who's, who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new AI algorithms because that's where the next strategic jobs are going to be directing the AI to do all these things. Right. And so I think the short term is going to be dislocation and it's happening so fast that unless society, government, and enterprises really intervene that to upskill these folks, we are going to have a challenge. >>Well, we're in this really weird time too, in between, I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right? Which is perfect for autonomous vehicles, you know, to carry a lot of that freight and everyone pretty much agrees that's going to happen. At the same time, there's, there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today. Uh, like there never has been. So as these weird, and again, it's probably not the best thing for a young kid to get into, right? Because it's not, doesn't have a lot great long. >>Right? Right. >>Well, and you know, you look at Uber and their stated direction is, is they want to get rid of all these drivers, right? They want it, they want self-driving taxis. And you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen, right? Uh, and so the unskilled labor is going to be hit by far the worst. You have to become skilled labor in, in the digital economy. Uh, and so a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to, to get the skills into people's hands. You know, like Facebook and other large organizations don't even require a college degree. What they want people, the people that can deliver, they can take these things and create the, you know, the, the great products of the future. And so, you know, those everyone has to become a knowledge worker. >>And, and as Laird Hamilton said on the main stage today, it's the, it's the, the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of, wow, I don't know much about that. I bet. I guess I'd better learn about it. And then learning a lot about it along the way. We all have to be able to adapt and adopt those new, >>no, absolutely. Now the, uh, uh, and so w we see up-skilling and cross skilling becoming more transdisciplinary. So business people are becoming it folks now and it folks really business people, you know, we've had this business, it divide for a long time and cracks me up. I still go to big companies in the it departments using its own building. Right. But those days are going away. And now seeing that, you know, now as it people over on the business side that live there now. Right. You know, so we're seeing this kind of, this blending where digital is infusing everything and so you have to become digitally competent. Uh, and this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the, you know, the, the, the digital workplace, the average user has had the number of applications they have to learn double or triple in the last just the last five years. Right. So it's a big challenge. >>So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your, >>Oh, a game design. Know the gaming industry is bigger than the movie by a large, large margin. Right. And, and that, that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality really come from. And then you can go into business. Right. You know, >>even sociology majors can design games. >>Yeah. It's just, you know, it's just get, like you said, it's, it's the poor tweeners right. That get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new, yeah. I'll have to take care of. And unfortunately, uh, not a lot of great record of retraining today, but maybe that's going to have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. Right? Yeah. Well, and there's these big market places now you can build the career of your dreams. You'd go to Upwork or Gigster. I mean, these are big job markets where you can go and find work and do it from anywhere using a tablet you bought for $50 off Amazon. Right, right. You know, it just that most of you aren't even aware of that. They can do that. Right, right, right. >>So it's this fast changing world. Put a few bucks away for insurance and you've put a few bucks away in your 401k and you, yeah. You know, not just living off the cash plus a little bit to cover your costs, which unfortunately a lot of their, like the Uber drivers and the Lyft drivers are anyway, you know, they're not really banking that thing for building a, a career. Well, I've crawled to those platforms and it's interesting, entrepreneurial activities, very common in places like Asia, right? Where if, you know, they come here, they build businesses right away. Right. And they're used to that. So w and we lost some of that, but I think we were gave a economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know? Right. >>Well Deon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure having you. Absolutely. Thanks. So Jeff. Thanks Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned to more of the cubes live coverage of NJ engaged 2019.

>> Narrator: Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Kristin Komassa. She is the VP Process Improvement at Colliers International Wisconsin. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here. >> So you're here direct from Milwaukee. Tell our viewers a little bit about Colliers International Wisconsin. >> Yeah, so Colliers International Wisconsin, we are recognized as the largest full-service commercial real estate company in the state of Wisconsin. And when I say full-service it means we have everything from brokerage to property management to facilities, architecture, development. We cover the gamut on both the commercial and we've actually started a residential program, as well. So, we've got you covered. >> Excellent, so tell us now about your Smartsheet story. There was a movie that played during the keynote address where we heard a lot about your Smartsheet experience. But you tell our viewers now. >> Yeah, so I started using Smartsheet in 2012 when I came to Colliers and really it was a one specific project that we needed to really wrap our arms around and other methods weren't doing it at all. So I discovered Smartsheet. And ironically if you took Smartsheet from 2012 and put it next to Smartsheet 2019, you wouldn't think they're the same product at all. But it solved our issues at that time. We were able to really elevate what we were doing with that client. We were recognized, and the company ownership saw that if you can do this with one client, what could you do with the whole company? And over the past years we have really rolled it out both internally through the operational side, from how we just manage our day-to-day business to also how do we get in with those clients and how do we manage their real estate with this software program? So that's kind of been my journey and it's been fun and it's been amazing and I'm looking forward to the next phase. >> So what was the killer app in 2012 that you couldn't do with any other tool that was so breakthrough? >> We were starting with Excel and it was just an extremely large portfolio. We tried to do Google Sheets, that didn't work. And Smartsheet was the app of choice, that we could collaboratively work on this entire portfolio but manage it with a security level, because it was a banking institution, that they were concerned. And Smartsheet, even at that time, they knew that security was a big issue with their clients. >> So was it the ability to cross-company collaborate with the banking client as well as your own team? That was-- >> It was. It was a large team, we had 15 people, so you can imagine version control was huge. >> Nightmare. >> Yeah, a nightmare. Nobody wants to see an Excel document sent to 15 people asking for revisions. And, again, we had to be able to report to this banking customer in their own format and we had again really aggregate that data in a consistent and repeatable way, but yet still maintain that control. And Smartsheet allowed us to do that in a very flexible and customizable way. So we didn't buy something off the shelf that we'll maybe use 50% of it, we used 100% of what we purchased. >> So 2012, that's a while ago. >> A little bit. >> Can you talk about the cultural change from your company now that you use Smartsheet on a regular basis and how that has helped you collaborate and helped you be more creative with each other, helped you understand the big picture? >> Yeah, so really in 2012 we were a slightly smaller company. It was coming right out of the recession and when there was a lot of REO properties and just there was some issues in real estate in general. And we were able to really ride that wave and come back a lot stronger than we were because we were able to cross-collaborate between all of our different company divisions, and really show our clients, one of our taglines is Better Together, and that's what we were. And it's easy to be better together when you have a platform that helps you build that up. And our company has since kind of shed some of those maybe less desirable properties or product type and really moved into the class-A downtown markets because we're able to now work with some of those more sophisticated owners of real estate and those sophisticated clients that are, they're really looking for not just a real estate expert, but an advisor for them. How do you help me take my real estate and make it work for my business? And Smartsheet was a big part of that. >> It really has evolved your role. As you said, it's much more of a, you're much more of an advisor now. >> Yes, we are definitely much more of an advisor, of a consultant, of a trusted partner, is what we are. And it's not always just about real estate anymore, it's about building those relationships. But showing them as well as to, how can we put all those pieces together and then still have full transparency with you? And with our other vendors and our clients and bringing everybody together. >> So I love that you, looking at the big picture and big changes in the big picture, but you've also talked about it's a combination of lots of little things that add up to the big thing. I think one of your videos you talked about a push notice for an accept/decline was a game changer. And then today we heard in the keynote, a copy/paste from one to the other got a standing ovation. So what was your favorite feature for today? And I'm just curious, is that approach something that you've adopted also in the way that you use the tool to engage with your clients? >> Every ENGAGE that I've been to I leave and I'm just so excited to get back and start implementing everything because, again, Smartsheet really listens to their clients. But really from what the things that were announced today, it seems like a simple thing but I'm really excited about Move Row. Because when you're done with a project, it doesn't take a lot of time to actually grab it and move it down, but if somebody forgot to do it and it's rolling up to your aggregate data and all that, it's just such a little thing but it makes such a big difference. Show me only my active in-flight projects. I don't want to see my completed ones or my closed, or my on-hold, if I change the status. Give me what I care about, front and center. So Move Row wass my big thing. >> Love it. >> But that is what we've been talking about, frankly, all day, is how these little things can add up to be the big aggravations of work. And so when you are slowly chipping away at all of the annoyances, that leads to a much more pleasant work day. >> Kristin: It definitely does. >> And a much more satisfying work life. >> Yep, I'll take any second I can gain back in a day. >> Right, so we talked about how Colliers International Wisconsin has really evolved from sort of, not a small-time real estate, but now you are this trusted partner of so many wealthier clients. Talk about the internal culture, though, in terms of how you all work together. >> Yeah, so some of our key features are like we like Warrior-Spirit, and this Better Together, and being innovators. And that's really what Smartsheet has encouraged us to be, is more of these innovators and working together and really being a champion internally. You'd be amazed, a lot of real estate companies, they have a lot of brokers and then employees and maybe not everybody, there are different personality types and all that, but our company has been able to figure out a way to pull everybody together and aggregate that data for a real big picture from both sides. Instead of looking at employees versus consultants, but just everybody. What is Colliers? And it's been amazing because Smartsheet has been that platform that we've utilized to do that and to bring everybody up. The collaboration that it has encouraged between different departments. Everybody knowing what is going on with a project or knowing that if you're talking to the same client that I'm talking to and how do we now work together, versus you make a phone call and you just called my client. I don't want that happening and it makes you sound kind of silly. How do we work together for a common purpose, basically, is what's happened. >> So is it the primary work tool that's open on people's desks? >> Yes, it is. It's open on my desk 100% of the time and we have actually created individualized dashboards for every single one of our brokers and it is their ground zero where they go to for all of their information. For if they have a new listing, if they have to submit commission information, if they want to submit a referral to another one of our lines. That is where they go. Our property managers, we're working right now to create their individual dashboards where, again, they're going to be living in there, and how they're communicating with their landlords and their owners and, how do you aggregate that tenant data in there so that everybody on your team is all on the same page? But again, it's living in Smartsheet is what the entire company is doing these days. >> So you talked about how this was 2012 when you first adopted it. The real estate business particularly, and commercial real estate not in a great position, in a much better, more solid position today. What are you thinking about for the future in terms of how your industry evolves and how you're going to need tools to help you evolve? >> Yeah, our clients, it's a tech world, everything. Your fridge can order milk for you these days. If you have a real estate and they're not an advisor, they're just a real estate broker and they're not accessing the technology that is out there to help you get market intel at the touch of your fingertips. They almost want you to anticipate what their question is going to be before they ask it. And they want that data available at night, on the weekends, in the morning, at their own schedule. If you're not able to provide that but you have to send them an email and they have to wait on it, I think that you're going to fall behind. You have to be able to keep up with the world of technology and becoming less of a one, I'm just going to help you on this single transaction to I'm helping you on this one, but what's the next one? And how does it affect your business? And how do I become your partner and your advisor and just that trusted partner? And that's where it's going, I think. >> And have you been able to, are you able to do those things because it has freed up your time? Because that's another thing we hear about this technology, is that because it is automating so many of the manual, repetitive tasks, you do have more time to be creative, to think more holistically and more about the future. >> Yeah and that's really what we're pushing is, if it's an administrative task, if it's something that you can automate it, do it. Don't take another day sending a repetitive email or you checking your calendar, did somebody finish something? Have the system do it for you. Did somebody, if you assigned a task, did they do it? You shouldn't have to babysit them for it. And yes, it should free you up to, how do I look strategically? How do I look forward into something? Instead of constantly trying to look backwards as to what did we do? Has it been completed? It should be done and we should be on to the next step at this point. >> So you said that you always come away from ENGAGEs so excited, so happy to come back to your office and talk about what you've learned. What do you think it's going to be from this one? Besides Move Row? Which I know is going to change your life, Kristin. >> Move Row will change my life, but there's a lot of things. You know what, so many things. Again, Smartsheet, I can't reiterate enough, they listen to their customers. And going back and figuring out how do I optimize something that I already thought was the apex thing that I was going to create, how do I now make it better? How do I make it so that it frees up somebody else's time? So that maybe them moving a row down, they no longer have to do that. How do I now make the next one even better? So I'm just, I'm excited, again, about that continuous process improvement. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, I'm excited to be here. >> And now you're a CUBE veteran. >> Now I'm a CUBE veteran, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (upbeat electronic music)

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the key nude covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Hello, everyone. We are wrapping up one day of coverage at Smartsheet. Engage here in Seattle. I'm Rebecca Knight. Been coasting all day with Jeff Rick. It's been a pleasure sitting next to you together, and it has just been so much fun. It's a great show. >>And you've never been to Seattle before >>my time in the city? Exactly. So you've >>covered this space, Rebecca, in your in your non key black for a very long time. So first off, you know, kind of general impressions of new way to work. We hear about it every show we got to talk about new way to work. So, you know, kind of your global perspective a little bit and then, you know, kind of some takeaways from some of the conversations today. >>Well, we know that the situation is pretty bleak right now that there are the statistics are horrible just in terms of the number of employees that are really checked out, totally disengaged, would would love to quit, but they need the health insurance. And so we're already sort of starting from from a pretty low place, where in terms of people's engagement at work, and I think a lot of the things that that drive people nuts about their work. Uh, of course, is a bad boss and not a great parking spot and everything, but it's it's it's it's the little things that get in your way of doing your job. And it's it's the things that just drive you nuts about some sort of process that takes forever. And, oh, I have to keep doing this. And I just already sent you that email and how come you're looking at this other version? And it's all those impediments that really drive people crazy and that makes people stressed out and and unhappy in their jobs. So I do think that if you are a company like Smartsheet and you have you realized this and you can slowly chip away at those impediments and the aggregate aggravate aggravations that people feel, I think that's not a bad business model. I think I think they're on to something here. Don't worry, though >>sometimes is just is just additive, right? It's just another thing we talked. It's one of the interviews. And when I'm at work, I have three big monitors, each one split into two screens. I've got mail open calendar, open sales force open, slack open asana open YouTube. Twitter. Um, it's probably a couple. And then if I have to, like, look something up and and you know there's this kind of constant confusion is what it what is the screen that's open when you work? And it used to just be e mail, which is not a good solution at all. So I think if if you know, they can become the place that people do, their work right, and we talked about all the integrations like it's that integrate with slack. So maybe you know, the people that work primarily and slacker primarily there, and maybe the people in some other department are primarily on spark cheat, and somebody else is primarily on another tool. But it just seems still like keep adding, tourists were not necessarily taking a lot of them away. >>Well, that will be the job for Anna Griffin, who is the first ever cmo this company. You just started in April, and she's got her work cut out for her because you're right. There are a lot of screens. That's that does not describe my work day. But I know it describes a lot of people's work day, Um, and that that that will be. What she needs to figure out is how to be your number one You're going to the one that you rely on to get your job done. >>The part that I took away from her interview is really She talked a lot about engagement, and you just talked about engagement, an empowerment, you know, not only not only getting the obstacles out of the way, but making me feel like what I do matters, matters to me, matters to my boss, matters to my clients and matters. And then I think that does finally drive to innovation, which is the Holy Grail that everyone talks about. But it's really not that easy to execute. >>Everyone wants more innovative, of course, >>and then the last thing which she talked about, why part of the reason why she came here? His leadership. But I think the way we really can't have this conversation around engagement without talking about leadership, because it's such a critical piece to the puzzle for everyone to rally around, you know, a mission. So this is the execution details. But you also need some type of a mission that you can feel good about, as well as feeling that you can contribute to. >>Absolutely. And I think that what you were just talking about with the ownership piece and so these air these employees, as we said, they're removing the impediments to their job. But then they're also able to then focus on higher level tasks, assignments, thinking, strategy. They're able to use their brains for what they were hired for, not thinking about certain tasks and other files that are old versions. And so if they if they could do those things and then, as you said, feel like they matter, feel like that work, they matters to their boss. However, you are right in that if you got a bad boss, all bets are off. If it works, still gonna stink and you're there. There's nothing you can do about it. >>The other piece that came up, which I was interesting, is really about prioritization. What and what do you optimizing for? And my favorite part of Clayton Christian since Innovator's dilemma, is the conversation about that you must prioritize. You cannot engineer for everything equally, and you have to force up. That pressurization, I think, is interesting here about Smart Cheat is for all the talk about digital transformation. Most people talk about the products, and service is that they sell. They talk about the engagement with their customers. They don't talk about transforming the life of their employees and the way their employees get stepped on and the way the employees actually engage with the company through the applications. And I thought that was a really interesting and insightful take, especially in the day where everything is a service. And again your people walk out the door every night and you hope they come back the next day. So I think, you know, spinning the digital transformation story into more of an employee enable men and engagement story is pretty powerful. >>You I could not agree more because because that that is the critical piece. If you have a bunch of people coming to work every day who hate their jobs, they're not gonna be giving your customers the experience that you want their customers tohave. So it really does start with Happy workers, right? Andi, I think that I think smart. She really gets that. So that's that's what I am struck by today. >>Yeah, it's just those other ones that we're going to bring along. And Dion may have made a good point and said, You know, some people don't want to be engaged work. Some people don't want >>you >>next level things like that they like their roads in the routine gives him comfort. They come to work, they do the road in the routine and they go home. So it's gonna be interesting. Time for those peoples can reach it in time for people to not necessarily have expertise in a broad range of categories formerly siloed categories like product marketing, product management, finance sales, biz, Dev production. But you least have tohave in a kind of an inch. De Milo gave those teams. So you put together a SWAT team, if you will, to accomplish the task. And that's what I'm curious to see. Some of the 4 51 research that how how he was pointing to kind of a restructuring of the silos of teams and organizations within it within a company that We don't hear much about how that's going to restructure on kind of a dev ops, fast assembly, fast, complete kind of assemble and disassemble around projects, which is what Dev Ops says. We'll see you know how that how that impacts organizational structure. >>And I think that could be very cool and very different, particularly with different. I mean, we know that diverse groups make better decisions than lone geniuses. And so if we have a bunch of people who have different perspectives, different levels of expertise and even if it's not expertise, it's just sort of a general knowledge about a lot of different things, right. We know that if we can get those people working together on a task, it's got a lot of potential. So I think I think you're right, right. >>Last thing is that I think really interesting. Here is the is the acknowledgment of team beyond even the company walls. So you've got your core team, you know, cross departmental collaboration, and then was a mere it over and over here here today, collaboration outside the walls to external teams. And it was Mark talking about putting on these big events mean there's so many external stakeholders in place holders and vendors involved in this humongous dance that becomes our enjoyment of the Final Four event. I think that's really insightful. Kind of take that. You have to have the ability to engage, collaborate with a large group or an extended group for any particular project. And And that really changes the way you think about what the application is high share information >>and that they all have to feel ownership in the process to yes, very >>important. All right, Rebecca. Well, >>this was so much fun. I Jeff, I had a great time working with you, and we had a great team. We had Andrew in Jay and Brendan and Taylor Welcome Taylor to the to the show. It was great. I can't wait to come back and do it again. >>It will be big next time. All right, >>Thanks. That is wrapping up our coverage of engaged 2019. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff. Rick. Thanks a lot for watching

>>live from Seattle, Washington. It's the booth covering smartsheet engaged 2019. Brought to you by smartsheet. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of smart. She engaged here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, Jeff. Rick. We're joined by Anna Griffin. She is the CMO of smartsheet. Thanks so much for coming on the Q. Thank you, guys for having me appreciate it. So you were your pretty new to this company joined in April. I'd love to hear, but you've also had an illustrious career in marketing. You've worked several big names, including Apple and Nortel and and Saturn. And you've also worked for Land's end and a whole bunch of different varied career. What attracted you to smart? She You know, it >>was interesting when I first got the call about smartsheet. I had never heard of it, and the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing. I realized it was one of those a category that's just not established, but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing. And we're not even the potential. I mean, it will be the next big thing and you know, I met with that was intriguing. But, you know, I met with the executive team and it was a perfect combination of a killer product, but a killer company. I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is and their authenticity and their passion and their drive and their belief. It's so contagious. There's no way you would not want to be a part of it. So on, then, the privilege to be able to tell this company's story I feel like it is the best kept story not only in Seattle, potentially the world on I plan to tell the story and and what a gift. But what a great opportunity is. A marketer toe have this type of opportunity. >>Well, we're gonna get into how you're going to tell the story, okay, a little bit later, but so now you've been here a few months. It is your first ever engaged What? What does he what are your impressions? >>Well, I wish I had been thio previous engaged to have something to compare it to. But the fact that this conference has doubled in size 4000 customers here and it's only its third show. I will tell you in the industry who have worked, you know, managing events teams for many, many, many years. Not a lot of conferences grow at this size, and Soto have 4000 customers here who are zealots. They are their passion for the product and what it's doing and what it's doing for there. Not only their companies, but their own personal careers. There isn't an empowerment story through their mouse that will just inspire you. So it's It's incredible. The energy here is really, really especially. >>Feel it, too. Way See >>it a lot of the smaller conferences early days. That's why they're fun to be. Here were last year, when those 2000 it was adjacent to the to the office across the across the water. Exactly, but it is a really passion community, and you know, Thio here, literal, literal cheers and claps at features. It's great. It's like copy paste from one road to the other because it's clearly something that means something these people and that they have asked for and the company is delivered and really demonstrates, is listening to engage these crazy people. It's a great asset >>wave. That listening thing is huge, and I feel like that's one of the things. And I think it's why there is a CMO now. Why get the privilege to be the first CMO is because the customers said way need more awareness of this company. We need our our executives. We need lines of business leaders. We need i t to know who you are and the magic of what you do. We need awareness is gonna make it that much easier for us to get much wider adoption across these companies. If people know who you are and they know you know what you're capable of. So listening. That is one of the number one things we've heard. It's like awareness. They wanted awareness, so because >>it'll help make them >>more successful. So I think that was the >>catalyst for OK, let's get achieve, Marty. Officer, Let's go build that about you. What are you gonna do? What were some of your top priority is to tell the story and to build brand awareness. Yeah, well, um well, you're the first thing >>was to really kind of Titan are positioning again. It's a great great products make great brands, and this is a great product company. But man were starting to do so much more than just killer products were really getting into this enablement this, right, transforming companies. And so I wanted to make sure we're positioned properly. And we're really positioning mawr in a more transformative altitude and the capabilities of what we could do. You know, we have found we've spent way too much time talking about technology versus people versus what technology and people are going to do together. And that is the magic of what Smartsheet does. It really takes a platform, a common platform that basically integrates with the tech investments. And you've >>already made with the systems of record that you already have pools that data out and then allows >>the people I work with that data all in a common really time application. And when >>you can marry >>those two things together, that tech and people, that's when one plus one equals three. And so we call that that three is what we really call achievement again, like >>everybody in our space >>is work work, work, task management, project management, the capability of smart shit. Yeah, we do all that too. But when you're playing that transformative altitude, we're in Ebeling achievement and it enterprise wide level and achievement, like what your business can achieve. But this is the more special part, and this is where I get excited. Did you feel to tell this story is the achievement happens at a personal level to like again? I'm telling you when I talk to customers and I see what they're doing right, you don't understand. You have changed my career. I'm doing more strategic work. I am. I am seeing differently in my company. I champion this, like all of a sudden I am leading big teams. I went from this to this, and there they're empowerment is so big and so really that last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. And that's what this product does. And so job one was position. That's properly so we can tell that type of story and really put our solutions in that kind of light because that's what it does on then job to is to launch the campaign launches to the world. So we just launched two weeks ago and it's a slow roll. I mean, we have hundreds of assets it in place. So if I love seeing us on television, you know I love seeing is deeply in digital. I love some of the new interesting things that that we can do in media. But when our customers are saying that you know they're seeing it, a CMO like you gonna get a high from it. Yeah, So it's fun job to launch the campaign, >>and the campaign is, well, we call the campaign can do you know we're positioning >>the brand as the platform for enterprise achievement. Number one Smart sheet is a platform, I think a lot of people, you know as it's grown. I mean, it truly is a platform, and it really is enterprise strong and wide. It's skills which is important, but its scales So everybody and a company can align organizational alignment to truly achieve something bigger aligned organizations do not fill. And so that's the That's the power. But I digress. >>No question that way >>you know, one of the great legs of your of your go to market strategy and your lead Jen is your licensing formula, which enables me as the Spartan sheet licensee to engage lots of people many outside my own, not by my own team, but my own company. And let them have access to this tool. What a smart, smart waiver. Whoever came up with that licensing strategy? What a great way to introduce the opportunity to use this transformational tool to ongoing and broad audience. Yes, >>your table is so exciting. >>When I was in the interview process and I was riding on a plane and clearly I had met with the company and I heard somebody in front of me was a consultant, one of the consulting firms who had met a complete stranger on the plane. And somehow Smartsheet came up that she was going you got Oh, my gosh, Smartsheet. >>This is like she was going. This is the best kept secret. We're using it with all of our clients. We heard about it through one of our clients That wasn't one of them. We'll use it like Oh, my gosh, this is the game changer. I'm like putting my here in between the wayward I put my hand in as it did You just say smart shape. Literally six people on the airplane, random people like, Oh, my gosh, we use it to. It was the >>most surreal experience, and that was when I knew, like, Okay, I've got to be a part of this Coast special. Did a lot of people are now just getting that sensation of what this thing is capable of. >>And, well, it's funny to your personal achievement story. Reminds me of any time you know you got a new software company and whether you know, center Deloitte or even why, when those guys come in, they're making a big bet right there. Some new partner's gonna bet. Bet their career on this new technology. We've heard from a number of people how betting their career internally with smartsheet has changed their position in the company. Yes, we find that today a couple of times so clearly you know it. It is an enablement platform for someone to, you know, grab on to the to the rocket ship and ride this Marchi wave thio new and bigger, better things, >>but but also her point about just even just participating in the technology. And then they're able to, as you said, work on more strategic work, be able to do more things in their jobs that have been catapulted them to new job. So it's not even necessarily betting on smartsheet and bringing in smart cheat. But it is just just using smart sheet and then therefore they have more brain time. Yes, yes, oh, engagement we're talking about, >>right, right? You know, it is because we've been talking a lot about you know, some of the really scary statistics about how disengaged people are at work and how many people are ready to quit their job. And, you know, they've got all these blocks. Is menial roadblocks in their day to day existence that are that are negatively impacting their ability to want to do their job or but actually just want to be there anymore. And so it's It's like it seems, maybe to the outside, looking in some of these things by seem low value, but they're actually tremendous value if you're removing these roadblocks so I could get my job done >>totally and love your job, you love >>your job. But know that the work that you do matters and I think so many people have lost that feeling like there's something about working and I don't know if it's the corporate world, but it has become such a grind and that rare opportunity. We feel like I love what I do, and I know that it matters like it's a gift and this is a platform that enables bad in people. And so I think that's when the fascinating things I've been spending a lot of time on the road with customers and I was at a very big multi national, big global agricultural company. And, um, Singer, Actually, I'm watching WAY Bet with probably 200 different Just what I would call power users across seven different you know, roll types like from I t toe hsc thio, you name it. And, um, every single one of them is like art. We're doing more like we are empowered, like the engagement, the employee engagement in that company, through the roof because every single person felt like were hurt. I have ownership, you know. I'm doing work. I'm taking it to a new level. And so you know, sure, there is a Thanh of operational efficiencies that are gonna come out of working with smart shape, But I think the one to watch is what's gonna happen when your workforce is truly engaged and taking ownership of the work. >>Those were the good. Those are the companies that are >>going to have a higher retention they're gonna have >>They're going to see >>something in that in that talent area. So this is more than just We're getting more work done and return on investment of our our our systems like you're going to see you know, what happens when your when your employees are empowered. >>Well, the word you didn't use his innovation that I firmly believe everyone wants more innovation, their company. >>But how do you do >>it? One of those? I think it's really simple. Lever on that is you just get more people more access to more data and then the ability to do something about it and open it up to all the smart people that see problem to different prisons in different opportunities. And that's where you start to get in. A leverage is amazing talent that you already have inside your four walls. >>But what is interesting about >>innovation is I think sometimes the world so over rotates that innovation is gonna be that next killer line of code, or it's going to be and they forget that the power of practical innovation like it's that Siri's of small collected things at out up, allowing your entire, you know, employee population to feel like they have the power to innovate us. That every person in the company has the power because the power practical innovation can lead to something Justus biggest the big already >>Dev Ops has shown that that's a better way anyway, right in software development, with the grand idea with the market development plan and the product development plan in the three year build cycle that's does not win against constant religious narrative improvement. Improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. Yes, >>indeed. So you and you said this earlier and I saw it on your Lincoln to the last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. Yes. How do you describe the culture at smart shape now that we've done talked about the evangelical customers Yeah, about with in smartsheet itself, it's, um it's pretty >>special. Know what you're gonna say? Of course. And see if I was >>gonna say special. But it is. It is rare >>when people everyone comes to work with this belief like this true belief that they are. They have the power to influence something and touch something that's going to do something great for other people. And I think that's what is the most special is they? They're not just doing it for themselves. They know they're doing it for others, like they know they love these guys. Every single person in the company loves that customer like the love ability, They love the customer and they feel like they've got to do their best work. So their customer, I can do something great >>with it. You know, they really understand that. >>And that's Ah, it's an incredible place to wanna work when you, when you feel that way but toe love your customers. I think that's why our customers love us back and to be loved. You must first love >>and because they love you know, it's it's rare. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it's a great role and you're in the right place. And I can't talk to you next year and hear more about can do and and all of the wonderful things you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I'm Rebecca Knight. That wraps up the cubes. Interviews. Stay tuned for our rap of engaged 2019 you're watching the Cube