>> Live from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Our first time here, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. Jeff, it's great to be paired back up with you again. >> Yeah, it's been a little while, great to see you, Lisa. >> It has, you too. So this is the second annual Smartsheet Engage. There's about a couple thousand people here. Double last year and they shared. We just got in from the keynote and they shared some interesting things. First of all, they IPOed just about four or five months ago. I think April 2018. They have presence in 190 countries. They have 75,000 customers. They've got users in half the Fortune 500. 90% of the Fortune 100. And a lot of momentum. What are some of the things that you're excited to learn about Smartsheet today? >> You know, I think it's kind of an interesting story. There's so many components of a lot of different work applications and we go to so many shows. We hear about a new way to work from IBM. One of my favorite lines of the year was actually from Google Cloud where you want to empower people to actually be, as you wrote it down, make judgements instead of drudgery. And these guys are all about that, but it's a little bit confusing 'cause they integrate with a lot of the other type of applications that people interact with at work. The big mentions of the Microsoft Suite, of 365, of Slack and some of those other tools. So what Smartsheet's tryin' to do is really roll those all up under kind of a unified view, parts of project management, parts of task management, a lot of pieces to really add that top level management. So I think it's a little bit of an interesting message. It's a lot of bits and pieces. We're used to that with theCUBE. We have three brands, so I kind of get it. So I'm lookin' forward to learning more about really how they kind of parse that out. >> I am as well 'cause you mention a number of other solutions who they both compete with, Microsoft Teams, JIRA under Atlassian. They also partner with them. And I'm curios to see an example and we've got three customers of theirs on the show today, Jeff. I'm interested to see that in action. If I am at an enterprise, and I am running a marketing project and I want to use Smartsheets, but I also need Slack for messaging, email for communication. I've got maybe another team I'm collaborating with that's using a different workflow automation platform. How does it actually work together? One of the interesting things, when CEO Mark Mader who's our first guest today, was with you in the studio in Palo Alto just a couple months ago, he was talking about the genesis of Smartsheet. And I also saw him say this in a press release when their IPO occurred back in April and said a lot of people, critics, in the very beginning 12 years ago said, you guys are nuts to go base this new technology, this new SaaS platform off of a spreadsheet model. But something interesting that he said is that, that's a construct that 400-500 million people understand. So this is another interesting element to me is that this is technology that's not, you don't have to know how to code or even what an API is. This is for the business users, the lines of business, IT, marketing, engineering, the facilities management. So it's really, it's got a broad spectrum of use cases that I'm also interested in hearing about today. >> It's funny on the worksheet as kind of a construct because we hear that all the time. Especially at all of our big data shows, right? Worksheets in Excel is still used by a lot of people for a significant amount of work. So people are familiar with it and they know how it works. I think they'll have to change that a little bit as they grow a little bit beyond that. Still a lot of conversation about rows and it sounded very spreadsheet centric in the keynote. And I think that'll evolve, but I think what's the most important thing, what I'm excited about, I say this time and time again. We go to so many shows, right? Everyone is struggling to find innovation. To me the answer is, one of the answers is kind of simple. You get more people, more access to more data with more tools to manipulate that data. And then most importantly, the power to do something about it. This was all about empowerment, empowerment, empowerment. Letting people, give 'em the information and then let them actually do something with it. That is so significant and it's kind of interesting. They had a Stephen Covey quote up on their as well that's kind of a similar thing. Taking it to the next step which is that's how you keep people happy, that's how you keep people engaged. Again, less drudgery, more judgment. Let them feel like they can actually make a difference versus just pushin' buttons and movin' paper along. >> Yeah, another theme that we heard a lot on the keynote this morning, Jeff, is about collaboration. And it really seems to me to be this message of symbiotic collaboration. They, Gene Farrell, who's going to be on the show with Jeff and I just in a few minutes or so, talked about, hey, customers we've heard you. You want more, and he actually got the crowd to chant, we want more, it was great. But when he was starting to talk about some of the new enhancements to the features. And yes, you're right, they're still talking about some, I don't want to say antiquated row structures and things like that, there were a number of times where the audience today broke into applause. So, not only are they delivering this SaaS platform to facilitate collaboration between teams at small organizations to big enterprises, they are also collaborating with their customers to continually innovate and improve their product. And I thought, something that I've never seen and we see a lot of keynotes, is that their CEO, Mark Mader, actually went into the audience during his session this morning and asked customers to stand up and talk about how Smartsheet is empowering them. And there were at least three different customers that stood up-- >> Right. >> and quite articulately spoke about how mostly qualitatively, but how their businesses or their team or their productivity is being improved. So this bidirectional collaboration, I thought was very palpable this morning. >> Right, which again I think is one of the huge benefits of the SaaS business model that is way underreported, not by us, we talk about it all the time. Is that if you have a recurring revenue model with your customer it forces you to be engaged. It forces you to deliver value. It forces you to innovate on an ongoing basis. It's not a ship and dump and then release. We'll come back in a year for our 15% maintenance. It's a very different way to go. Other really interesting things, they talked about recent events, Hurricane Florence in North Carolina. Happened to be a customer there able to aggregate and pull together a lot of information into these dashboards and that's something we hear about all the time. We'll hear about it more in the PayPal example. It was referenced in the keynote which is when you have to pull that data together for your weekly executive briefing, this promise of all these dashboards has always been there. Smartsheets is a little bit different because they want to be the primary way, but they want to integrate with all these other applications and other SaaS applications as well, so that you can create that user specific dashboard for the objective and you don't have to reassemble all that data every week for your weekly to roll up to the C-Suite. >> Yeah, and one of the things, speaking of customers, they had over 50 customers speaking at the event this week which is a lot. I was very impressed by that. >> Yeah, out of 2,000 registrants that's a big percentage. >> That is a big number. I think also some of the stats that Mark Mader showed were 1,100 companies are represented here from 20 countries. In fact, I also saw online that nearly a third of their revenue comes from outside the US and they actually don't have much presence outside the US at all. Outside of Converse.AI that they acquired based in Edinburgh, back in I think January of this year. But in terms of customers, the voice of the customer and that customer collaboration, we're also going to be talking to a gentleman who runs their customer success and partner success program. As you mentioned, the SaaS model being different, this isn't just check in every year and dial up the increase in subscription costs. So I'm curious what their new playbook is for customer success that they are developing and implementing or executing, that going to be their word, right? >> Right, right. >> Execution. Based on this new model and how customers want to be engaging with vendors. Ultimately they want things as simple as possible, so I'm curious to hear about how that customer success playbook here might be a differentiator against Atlassian, JIRA, Microsoft Team, and some of the other competitors. And also, how does it facilitate this breadth of collaboration? How does it enable them to collaborate with sales force and Amazon and Microsoft and Slack, for example? A lot of interesting points here and I'm hoping today what we're able to do is help put that together and sort of integrate this message. >> Should be a good day, looking forward to it. >> I think so. >> Our first time here. >> It is our first time. So stick around, Jeff and I are going to be live all day. We are again in Bellevue, Washington at the second annual Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. Stick around, we're going to be right back with the CEO in just a minute. (high tech music)