from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi Bri welcome back this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special presentation made possible by IBM we're talking about data op data ops in Acton Steve Lucas here he's the senior vice president and director of data management at Associated Bank be great to see how are things going and in Wisconsin all safe we're doing well we're staying safe staying healthy thanks for having me Dave yeah you're very welcome so Associated Bank and regional bank Midwest to cover a lot of the territories not just Wisconsin but another number of other states around there retail commercial lending real estate offices stuff I think the largest bank in in Wisconsin but tell us a little bit about your business in your specific role sure yeah no it's a good intro we're definitely largest bank at Corvis concen and then we have branches in the in the Upper Midwest area so Minnesota Illinois Wisconsin our primary locations my role at associated I'm director data management so been with the bank a couple of years now and really just focused on defining our data strategy as an overall everything from data ingestion through consumption of data and analytics all the way through and then I'm also the data governance components and keeping the controls and the rails in place around all of our data in its usage so financial services obviously one of the more cutting-edge industries in terms of their use of technology not only are you good negotiators but you you often are early adopters you guys were on the Big Data bandwagon early a lot of financial services firms we're kind of early on in Hadoop but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about sort of the business drivers and and where's the poor the pressure point that are informing your digital strategy your your data and data op strategy sure yeah I think that one of the key areas for us is that we're trying to shift from more of a reactive mode into more of a predictive prescriptive mode from a data and analytics perspective and using our data to infuse and drive more business decisions but also to infuse it in actual applications and customer experience etc so we have a wealth of data at our fingertips we're really focused on starting to build out that data link style strategy make sure that we're kind of ahead of the curve as far as trying to predict what our end users are going to need and some of the advanced use cases we're going to have before we even know that they actually exist right so it's really trying to prepare us for the future and what's next and and then abling and empowering the business to be able to pivot when we need to without having everything perfect that they prescribed and and ready for what if we could talk about a little bit about the data journey I know it's kind of a buzzword but in my career as a independent observer and analyst I've kind of watched the promise of whether it was decision support systems or enterprise data warehouse you know give that 360 degree view of the business the the real-time nature the the customer intimacy all that in and up until sort of the recent digital you know meme I feel as though the industry hasn't lived up to that promise so I wonder if you could take us through the journey and tell us sort of where you came from and where you are today and I really want to sort of understand some of the successes they've had sure no that's a that's a great point nice I feel like as an industry I think we're at a point now where the the people process technology have sort of all caught up to each other right I feel that that real-time streaming analytics the data service mentality just leveraging web services and API is more throughout our organization in our industry as a whole I feel like that's really starting to take shape right now and and all the pieces of that puzzle have come together so kind of where we started from a journey perspective it was it was very much if your your legacy reporting data warehouse mindset of tell me tell me the data elements that you think you're going to need we'll figure out how do we map those in and form them we'll figure out how to get those prepared for you and that whole lifecycle that waterfall mentality of how do we get this through the funnel and get it to users quality was usually there the the enablement was still there but it was missing that that rapid turnaround it was also missing the the what's next right than what you haven't thought of and almost to a point of just discouraging people from asking for too many things because it got too expensive it got too hard to maintain there was some difficulty in that space so some of the things that we're trying to do now is build that that enablement mentality of encouraging people to ask for everything so when we bring out new systems - the bank is no longer an option as far as how much data they're going to send to us right we're getting all of the data we're going to we're going to bring that all together for people and then really starting to figure out how can this data now be used and and we almost have to push that out and infuse it within our organization as opposed to waiting for it to be asked for so I think that all of the the concepts so that bringing that people process and then now the tools and capabilities together has really started to make a move for us and in the industry I mean it's really not an uncommon story right you had a traditional data warehouse system you had you know some experts that you had to go through to get the data the business kind of felt like it didn't own the data you know it felt like it was imposing every time it made a request or maybe it was frustrated because it took so long and then by the time they got the data perhaps you know the market had shifted so it create a lot of frustration and then to your point but but it became very useful as a reporting tool and that was kind of this the sweet spot so so how did you overcome that and you know get to where you are today and you know kind of where are you today I was gonna say I think we're still overcoming that we'll see it'll see how this all goes right I think there's there's a couple of things that you know we've started to enable first off is just having that a concept of scale and enablement mentality and everything that we do so when we bring systems on we bring on everything we're starting to have those those components and pieces in place and we're starting to build more framework base reusable processes and procedures so that every ask is not brand new it's not this reinvent the wheel and resolve for for all that work so I think that's helped if expedite our time to market and really get some of the buy-in and support from around the organization and it's really just finding the right use cases and finding the different business partners to work with and partner with so that you help them through their journey as well is there I'm there on a similar roadmap and journey for for their own life cycles as well in their product element or whatever business line there so from a process standpoint that you kind of have to jettison the you mentioned waterfall before and move to a more being an agile approach did it require different different skill sets talk about the process and the people side of yeah it's been a it's been a shift we've tried to shift more towards I wouldn't call us more formal agile I would say we're a little bit more lean from a an iterative backlog type of approach right so what are you putting that work together in queues and having the queue of B reprioritized working with the business owners to help through those things has been a key success criteria for us and how we start to manage that work as opposed to opening formal project requests and and having all that work have to funnel through some of the old channels that like you mentioned earlier kind of distracted a little bit from from the way things had been done in the past and added some layers that people felt potentially wouldn't be necessary if they thought it was a small ask in their eyes you know I think it also led to a lot of some of the data silos and and components that we have in place today in the industry and I don't think our company is alone and having data silos and components of data in different locations but those are there for a reason though those were there because they're they're filling a need that has been missing or a gap in the solution so what we're trying to do is really take that to heart and evaluate what can we do to enable those mindsets and those mentalities and find out what was the gap and why did they have to go get a siloed solution or work around operations and technology and the channels that had been in place what would you say well your biggest challenges in getting from point A to point B point B being where you are today there were challenges on each of the components of the pillar right so people process technology people are hard to change right men behavioral type changes has been difficult that there's components of that that definitely has been in place same with the process side right so so changing it into that backlog style mentality and working with the users and having more that be sort of that maintenance type support work is is a different call culture for our organization and traditional project management and then the tool sets right the the tools and capabilities we had to look in and evaluate what tools do we need to Mabel this behavior in this mentality how do we enable more self-service the exploration how do we get people the data that they need when they need it and empower them to use so maybe you could share with us some of the outcomes and I know it's yeah we're never done in this business but but thinking about you know the investments that you've made in intact people in reprocessing you know the time it takes to get leadership involved what has been so far anyway the business outcome and you share any any metrics or it is sort of subjective a guidance I yeah I think from a subjective perspective the some of the biggest things for us has just been our ability to to truly start to have that very 60 degree view of the customer which we're probably never going to get they're officially right there's there everyone's striving for that but the ability to have you know all of that data available kind of at our fingertips and have that all consolidated now into one one location one platform and start to be that hub that starts to redistribute that data to our applications and infusing that out has been a key component for us I think some of the other big kind of components are differentiators for us and value that we can show from an organizational perspective we're in an M&A mode right so we're always looking from a merger and acquisition perspective our the model that we've built out from a data strategy perspective has proven itself useful over and over now in that M&A mentality of how do you rapidly ingest new data sets it had understood get it distributed to the right consumers it's fit our model exactly and and it hasn't been an exception it's been just part of our overall framework for how we get that data and it wasn't anything new that we had to do different because it was M&A just timelines were probably a little bit more expedited the other thing that's been interesting in some of the world that were in now right from a a Kovach perspective and having a pivot and start to change some of the way we do business and some of the PPP loans and and our business models sort of had to change overnight and our ability to work with our different lines of business and get them the data they need to help drive those decisions was another scenario where had we not had the foundational components there in the platform there to do some of this if we would have spun a little bit longer so your data ops approach I'm gonna use that term helped you in this in this kovat situation I mean you had the PPE you had you know of slew of businesses looking to get access to that money you had uncertainty with regard to kind of what the rules of the game were what you was the bank you had a Judah cape but you it was really kind of opaque in terms of what you had to do the volume of loans had to go through the roof in the time frame it was like within days or weeks that you had to provide these so I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how you're sort of approach the data helped you be prepared for that yeah no it was a race I mean the bottom line was it felt like a race right from from industry perspective as far as how how could we get this out there soon enough fast enough provide the most value to our customers our applications teams did a phenomenal job on enabling the applications to help streamline some of the application process for the loans themselves but from a data and reporting perspective behind the scenes we were there and we had some tools and capabilities and readiness to say we have the data now in our in our lake we can start to do some business driven decisions around all all of the different components of what's being processed on a daily basis from an application perspective versus what's been funded and how do those start to funnel all the way through doing some data quality checks and operational reporting checks to make sure that that data move properly and got booked in in the proper ways because of the rapid nature of how that was was all being done other covent type use cases as well we had some some different scenarios around different feed reporting and and other capabilities that the business wasn't necessarily prepared for we wouldn't have planned to have some of these types of things and reporting in place that we were able to give it because we had access to all the data because of these frameworks that we had put into place that we could pretty rapidly start to turn around some of those data some of those data points and analytics for us to make some some better decisions so given the propensity in the pace of M&A there has to be a challenge fundamentally in just in terms of data quality consistency governance give us the before and after you know before kind of before being the before the data ops mindset and after being kind of where you are today I think that's still a journey we're always trying to get better on that as well but the data ops mindset for us really has has shifted us to start to think about automation right pipelines that enablement a constant improvement and and how do we deploy faster deploy more consistently and and have the right capabilities in place when we need it so you know where some of that has come into place from an M&A perspective is it's really been around the building scale into everything that we do dezq real-time nature this scalability the rapid deployment models that we have in place is really where that starts to join forces and really become become powerful having having the ability to rapidly ingesting new data sources whether we know about it or not and then exposing that and having the tools and platforms be able to expose that to our users and enable our business lines whether it's covent whether it's M&A the use cases keep coming up right they we keep running into the same same concept which is how rapidly get people the data they need when they need it but still provide the rails and controls and make sure that it's governed and controllable on the way as well [Music] about the tech though wonder if we could spend some time on that I mean can you paint a picture of us so I thought what what what we're looking at here you've got you know some traditional IDI w's involved I'm sure you've got lots of data sources you you may be one of the zookeepers from the the Hadoop days with a lot of you know experimentation there may be some machine intelligence and they are painting a pic before us but sure no so we're kind of evolving some of the tool sets and capabilities as well we have some some generic kind of custom in-house build ingestion frameworks that we've started to build out for how to rapidly ingest and kind of script out the nature of of how we bring those data sources into play what we're what we've now started as well as is a journey down IBM compact product which is really gonna it's providing us that ability to govern and control all of our data sources and then start to enable some of that real-time ad hoc analytics and data preparation data shaping so some of the components that we're doing in there is just around that data discovery pointing that data sources rapidly running data profiles exposing that data to our users obviously very handy in the emanating space and and anytime you get new data sources in but then the concept of publishing that and leveraging some of the AI capabilities of assigning business terms in the data glossary and those components is another key component for us on the on the consumption side of the house for for data we have a couple of tools in place where Cognos shop we do a tableau from a data visualization perspective as well that what that were we're leveraging but that's where cloud pack is now starting to come into play as well from a data refinement perspective and giving the ability for users to actually go start to shape and prep their data sets all within that governed concept and then we've actually now started down the enablement path from an AI perspective with Python and R and we're using compact to be our orchestration tool to keep all that governed and controlled as well enable some some new AI models and some new technologies in that space we're actually starting to convert all of our custom-built frameworks into python now as well so we start to have some of that embedded within cloud pack and we can start to use some of the rails of those frameworks with it within them okay so you've got the ingest and ingestion side you've done a lot of automation it sounds like called the data profiling that's maybe what classification and automating that piece and then you've got the data quality piece the governance you got visualization with with tableau and and this kind of all fits together in a in an open quote unquote open framework is that right yeah I exactly I mean the the framework itself from our perspective where we're trying to keep the tools as as consistent as we can we really want to enable our users to have the tools that they need in the toolbox and and keep all that open what we're trying to focus on is making sure that they get the same data the same experience through whatever tool and mechanism that they're consuming from so that's where that platform mentality comes into place having compact in the middle to help govern all that and and reprovision some of those data sources out for us has it has been a key component for us well see if it sounds like you're you know making a lot of progress or you know so the days of the data temple or the high priest of data or the sort of keepers of that data really to more of a data culture where the businesses kind of feel ownership for their own data you believe self-service I think you've got confidence much more confident than the in the compliance and governance piece but bring us home just in terms of that notion of data culture and where you are and where you're headed no definitely I think that's that's been a key for us too as as part of our strategy is really helping we put in a strategy that helps define and dictate some of those structures and ownership and make that more clear some of the of the failures of the past if you will from an overall my monster data warehouse was around nobody ever owned it there was there wasn't you always ran that that risk of either the loudest consumer actually owned it or no one actually owned it what we've started to do with this is that Lake mentality and and having all that data ingested into our our frameworks the data owners are clear-cut it's who sends that data in what is the book record system for that source data we don't want a ability we don't touch it we don't transform it as we load it it sits there and available you own it we're doing the same mentality on the consumer side so we have we have a series of structures from a consumption perspective that all of our users are consuming our data if it's represented exactly how they want to consume it so again that ownership we're trying to take out a lot of that gray area and I'm enabling them to say yeah I own this I understand what I'm what I'm going after and and I can put the the ownership and the rule and rules and the stewardship around that as opposed to having that gray model in the middle that that that we never we never get but I guess to kind of close it out really the the concept for us is enabling people and end-users right giving them the data that they need when they need it and it's it's really about providing the framework and then the rails around around doing that and it's not about building out a formal bill warehouse model or a formal lessor like you mentioned before some of the you know the ivory tower type concepts right it's really about purpose-built data sets getting the giving our users empowered with the data they need when they need it all the way through and fusing that into our applications so that the applications and provide the best user experiences and and use the data to our advantage all about enabling the business I got a shove all I have you how's that IBM doing you know as a as a partner what do you like what could they be doing better to make your life easier sure I think I think they've been a great partner for us as far as that that enablement mentality the cloud pack platform has been a key for us we wouldn't be where we are without that tool said I our journey originally when we started looking at tools and modernization of our staff was around data quality data governance type components and tools we now because of the platform have released our first Python I models into the environment we have our studio capabilities natively because of the way that that's all container is now within cloud back so we've been able to enable new use cases and really advance us where we would have a time or a lot a lot more technologies and capabilities and then integrate those ourselves so the ability to have that all done has or and be able to leverage that platform has been a key to helping us get some of these roles out of this as quickly as we have as far as a partnership perspective they've been great as far as listening to what what the next steps are for us where we're headed what can we what do we need more of what can they do to help us get there so it's it's really been an encouraging encouraging environment I think they as far as what can they do better I think it's just keep keep delivering write it delivery is ping so keep keep releasing the new functionality and features and keeping the quality of the product intact well see it was great having you on the cube we always love to get the practitioner angle sounds like you've made a lot of progress and as I said when we're never finished in this industry so best of luck to you stay safe then and thanks so much for for sharing appreciate it thank you all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube data ops in action we got the crowd chat a little bit later get right there but right back right of this short break [Music] [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's The Cube covering Adobe Summit 2019 brought to you by Adobe. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jason Woosley, Vice President of Commerce Product and Platform for Adobe, part of the big keynote display this morning and news on the announcement of the Commerce Cloud, formerly Magento. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Hey, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. >> Love the commerce angle because now that's a big part of a journey, people buy stuff. >> Absolutely. >> That's the most important, one of the most important parts. >> So when you think about an experience end to end, right it culminates hopefully in a transaction, and that's one of the pieces that makes the Magento acquisition fit so well into the Adobe family. We actually kind of finished that last mile of the transition getting to actual ownership. >> You know, I love this event because it feels a little like Woodstock, as Steve Lucas said on stage because you've got the best of big data all the intoxicating conversations and discussions. You get the best of the cloud, all the geek stuff under the hood. >> Oh, yeah. >> Then you've got the applications which are super relevant. So, it's really kind of, I love the content, love that you guys are in the middle of, I think, a great wave of innovation coming. But if you look at the big picture, you're seeing the same kind of themes, latency, relevance. I mean, these are tech terms used on your product in commerce a lot different than other things. So, you start to see these geek terms kind of weaving into this new cloud. >> I think you're really starting to see a convergence of some of the terminology and what really matters and that's the customer experience, right. It's really about answering what the customer wants and getting that is, that's the magic. >> It's accepting the fact that it's a disjointed journey. I love the journey conversation but it's not the straight pipe like it used to be. You're in and out, you're looking on a website, you're jumping over from a tweet, you know, there's so many kind of in's and out's, in's and out's, in's and outs before you get to that buy. >> And consumers are so sophisticated now, right. I mean they absolutely take advantage of all of those channels and that's why it's so important for merchants who are trying to be relevant. You've got to be present at every point where your customers are and it's a tough thing to do because there's just a proliferation of channels, I mean, you know, we've got digital kiosks, we've got buy online pick up in store, all these omnichannels operations coming together now. So it becomes even more important for merchants to make that investment and make sure that not only are they at the place where their customers are but they're there with a relevant and personalized message. >> Jason, I've got to ask you a question. I bring this up in a lot of these kind of user experience conversations. When you have new things coming on the market that are hard to operationalize out of the gate. It takes some time. We're starting to see that with you guys that built the platform. People are starting to operationalize new capabilities. But on the consumer side, the user side, expectations become the new experience. It's kind of a cliche in the tech world. What are some of those experiences that you're seeing that's becoming the new expectations. To your point about, the old way, I can smell a marketing funnel a mile away. I'm trying to buy something and all this other distractions that are not relevant to me are there. So you start to see some frustration but now users expect something new. What is that expectation that's converting it to experience? >> It's across the board and expectation are sky high, right. And it seems like every time we see something innovative you think about Amazon Prime, right, two day shipping. That was crazy back in the day and now, two day shipping is considered standard shipping, right. If you wanna be fast, you're doing same day. And that kind of, it's so hard to keep up with that pace of innovation and it happens all over the place. It's not just in logistics. People are expecting to be able to take advantage of omnichannel operations, right. Millennials especially. 60% of them really prefer to be able to have a tangible interaction with the product before they buy it. But they still want to buy online. So now they do buy online pick up in store or click and collect, they call it in Europe. And it's just become a huge fad. We've seen a 250% increase of the largest retailers of buy online pick up in store in the last year. Absolutely crazy. >> It's pretty wild when Best Buy gets on stage and says, we're not a brick and mortar retailer. (laughing) >> It actually changes the game, right. What else is interesting though is these brick and mortars that have an online presence, they actually have a distinct advantage because of that tangibility, right. You've got the opportunity to do all of your shopping online but you've also got a place to go do showcasing and actually interact with some of those especially more high tech tools. >> Right. >> You guys have been out front on the Magento side. We covered your event last year for the acquisition. And a couple things popped out at me that I want to get your reaction to now. One is obviously the role of the community. But as you started getting into the cloud kind of play the economics are changing, too, right. So you have community, economics and then large scale. These are new table stakes. So what's your reaction to that? How is Adobe and how are your customers adjusting to this new normal? Your thoughts on this shift? >> Yeah, I think that they adjust faster than we expect them to. It's really interesting because as you see these demands for things like cloud operations. Really, that's taking a whole set of responsibilities away from the merchant and allowing a single vendor to provide that as a service and we're seeing that again and again, right. This service based economy that's just becoming much, much more prevalent. What it means for our community and I'm glad you brought that up because our commerce community is the largest in the world, it's highly engaged. We have a tremendous amount of participation from those guys. And they're actually helping lead the way. They help merchants feel good about adopting new technologies. They're also incredibly innovative and they take our product and do things that we would never have thought of. >> They provide product feedback, too, the developers, that creates a nice fly wheel. >> It is a great fly wheel. >> It's a great use case. Congratulations, you guys done some nice work there. >> Oh, thanks, thanks. >> And Adobe's certainly gonna get the benefits of that. The other question I wanna ask you is something I noticed on digital over the years is that, it's gotten more prevalent now that everyone's connected. You know, the old days of buying tech. Let's buy this great project, we'll build it out and multiple year payback and everyone nerds out. It's like a project and they have fun doing it. And then, like, what was the value. When the value today is about money. When people lose money, the friction, all those other kinds of coolness, the shiny new toy, it goes away. >> Yeah, it falls away. >> You're in the middle of that. You see more of that now. People whose businesses are on the line. Security breach or revenue. >> Jason: Yeah. >> I mean, the optimization around the new way just goes right to the problem right there. >> The very best way to tackle that is an iterative experimental way. You've go to be able to make small bets. Learn from those bets and then pivot. This concept that we can take an idea, go into our back rooms and code it for three years and come back out with something that meets the market, it's a fallacy. It's never gonna work, right? So you've gotta start delivering shippable increments much faster, smaller pieces and then make sure that you've got that feedback loop closed so that you can actually respond to your customers. >> Jeff: Right, the other piece which you just talked on briefly but I wanna unpack it in reference to what you just said, two big words. Open source and ecosystem. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And as you said, you can't just go in the back room. Even if you knew the product, you can't necessarily go in the back room and build it yourself. >> Jason: Yeah. >> Fundamentally, believe that not all the experts are in your four walls and that there's, by rule, a lot more outside and leveraging that capability is really a game-changer. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we have three hundred thousand developers that call themselves Magento engineers and don't take a paycheck from Adobe. It's phenomenal what they're able to do and they help us move very, very quickly. We saw last year when the Amazon patent expired for one-click checkout on the day that it expired one of our community members created a pool request that made every Magento store able to take advantage of it. >> John: They were probably waiting right there on that clock. >> Oh no, they were waiting. (John laughing) Because the licensing fees were extortion. >> That's innovation. >> It is. >> That's our example of community driven innovation. >> And that's a great place to go get that, right. Within your four walls, you've got lots of expertise but you always end up with some blinders on. We've got profit margins to go chase. We've got all kinds of good business things to go do. The community, however, completely unfettered. They've got the ability to go try all kinds of cool stuff. >> Two questions on that thread. One is community. A lot of people try the buzzword. Hey, let's get a community. You can't buy a community. You've got to earn it. Talk about that dynamic and then talk about how Adobe's reacted to Magento's community because Adobe's pretty open. >> Yeah. >> They're creatives. I don't think they'd be anti-community. They have developers. They got a bunch of community themselves. So, community, buying a community versus earning it, and then the impact of Magento's community to Adobe. >> You cannot buy it. 100% you cannot buy a community. And you have to deserve it. And really, you have to think about yourselves as custodians of a community rather than, I mean, we're members. We used to have this saying, we are Magento. Everybody inside Magento, in the ecosystem, our partners, our developers. Everybody is part of that solution so trying to own it, trying to exert control over it, it's a recipe for not having it at all, right. So you have to be very cautious and it really is a custodianship. It's an honor and it's a privilege and you have to kind of take it seriously. >> If you get it right, the benefits are multi-fold. >> That's exactly it. >> Now, Adobe, obviously they have, we heard and we see that they're open to that and working with it. >> Adobe has been terrific and it was, I think, one of the biggest fears from our community as acquisition unfolded was hey, Adobe, big corporate company not a lot of open source projects. They've got some but their core isn't about open source and what was gonna happen to our community as we came in. It's been absolutely terrific because Adobe has been absolutely investing and making sure that we continue to be terrific custodians of this community and in fact, they're trying now to expand that community to the rest of their products. They would love to have our community members that are able to go out and innovate so rapidly, do so across the entire Adobe portfolio. >> Well, it's interesting, too. If you have a platform play in the cloud scale and some of these cross functional connection tissue points that's recipe for robust ecosystem development. >> Exactly. >> Because they means there's white space, there's opportunities to build on top of. That's a platform. >> Right, and you will see innovation and ingenuity from that you'll never expect. It's just phenomenal. >> So I'm curious to get your take on a specific feature I wanna dive into which is dynamic pricing. Right, hotels have been doing dynamic pricing forever. You give the authorization to the kid working at the front counter if it's 11 o'clock, you got a open room take whatever walks in the door. >> Jason: Yeah. >> To the airline, it's got very sophisticated but most companies haven't really be able to excuse dynamic pricing. Just curious, when you bring in capabilities that you get now with the Adobe suite and the data now that you have around the customer and the data that you now have around the context, I mean, are we gonna see much better execution of things like dynamic pricing. >> We're gonna see democratization of a lot of those things that were typically reserved to the very, very big industries, right. I think you're looking at airlines, they did a great job. But they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into systems to go do that. Now, with things like Sensei and artificial intelligence our machine learning capabilities, we can actually bring those capabilities to small merchants and everyday folks to go out and do those experiments with your pricing and understand where you have elasticity and where you don't. Once you have that information, you're making much better decisions across the board for your business. >> And that's actually the benefits of the Magento platform and scale that you have. So the question is, as you guys continue to get this cloud scale going, what are some of the platforms priorities for you guys? What product areas you looking at? What white spaces are gonna leap for the ecosystem? Can you share a little insight into what you guys are thinking? >> Yeah, I mean, one, we try to open everything to the ecosystem. There's really not a lot of advantage for us to have anything that's super closed off and secret sauce. We try to make sure that everything is available and so what you'll see is investments in things like SDK's. An SDK is software development kit basically lets you use any language, any tool that you're comfortable with to go ahead and integrate, extend and contribute to our core capabilities. You'll see us continue to invest in making sure that everybody that wants to participate has a very, very easy path to do so. >> And in terms of the developer program, you mention SDK, what's your impression of that? Can you give an update? We're not really familiar with that much, we're learning Adobe. What do you guys have for developer programs within Adobe? >> Well, it is terrific. We have a project called Adobe I/O that actually does a terrific job at sort of standardizing the API and interfaces between all of the different components within the digital experience suite. So, you'll continue to see us investing in that. Certainly, commerce is gonna start participating in that Adobe I/O model and that's going to make it even more broadly available to these great folks. >> Even one of the things we had on The Cube today was a historic moment. We been doing this for 10 years, hundreds of shows a year. We had our first guest on, one of your customers from Metlite. His title was Marketing CIO and I'm like, okay. He's part of the global technology operations team of Metlite. But I think the bigger story there is that we think we'll be a bigger trend than just one-off. We think, we're seeing the connection between the IT world, data, developers, applications coming together where marketing is like a CIO. >> And it's exactly right. We look at the CMO and the CIO as two sides of the same coin. And more often than not they have the same objectives. They're coming at it from a slightly different perspective and so you really do end up having to marry the message so that it resonates not only with the IT folks and usually that's about cloud processes, ease of use, ease of deployment, low cost operation and then on the marketing side it's really about feature availability and visual merchandising and being able to bring their great products to life. >> And an interesting quote, he said, what's it like, to be a marketing CIO, share to others who might to be that. He goes, well, I'm kind of a matchmaker and a translator. (laughing) >> I think that's pretty good a way to put it. Yeah, that makes good sense. >> He puts projects together, translating jargon to business benefits. Emphasis was on the business. You got to know the business. We had Dollar Shape Club on earlier, another one of your Adobe's customers. They were like, no, we need to know the business. It's about the data, data processing, the data systems, business. It has to be blended. It's the art and science of business and technology. >> Yeah, the only get that right when you put the customer right in the middle. You have to build all of those business processes and all of those systems around what that customer's looking for. >> So I'm just curious, Jason, what's changed over the last couple of years, 'cos we've been talking about the 360 view of the customer since, I don't when, but a while. >> A while, yeah. >> And we've been talking about omnichannel marketing and touching the customer for a while but it seems like we've hit a tipping point. Maybe I'm misreading the tealeaves but you know, what are the kind of critical factors that are making that much more a reality than just talk it was a couple years back? >> Well, on omnichannel, we're certainly seeing a maturity, an understanding of what it takes to do omnichannel. It's not just a commerce operation. omnichannel actually stretches back into your supply chain. To be able to really think about the way you deliver to customers as a single channel. Your supply chain has to be highly flexible. Your logistic capabilities have to be extremely flexible and they have to be able to tuned for the things that are important to your customers. Either speed of delivery or cost of delivery. All of those kinds of things. In the omnichannel space, I think we're finally starting to see the maturity of, okay, how do we make these things real. And that's critically important. And the other one. >> 360, 360 view of the customer. >> 360 view of the customer. Almost the same thing there, right. We're finally seeing the technology start to catch up and the big challenge there was we always had one view or the other. You either had a behavioral view of your customer, how they interact with your content. Or you had this great transactional view, the dollar and cents behind a relationship. Now, we're starting to see companies especially like Adobe, that have made these incredible investments to bring those two houses of data together, and that really starts to tell the full story. Again, going back to that customer journey, you need to be able to observe that entire journey in order to make those kinds of decisions. >> Jason, I wish we had more time. I wanna get one more question. I know we might wanna break here. Maybe we can follow up as a separate conversation in Palo Alto. You know, having a digital footprint you hear that buzzword, I'll get a digital footprint out there. It makes a lot of sense but a world that has been dominated by silos, it's hard to have footprint when you have siloed entities. So, in your mind, your reaction between something that's foundational and then data silos. Maybe silos could be okay at the app level but what's the foundational footprint? I mean, foundation's everything. >> Jason: It is. >> Without a foundation, you clearly can't build on. >> Yeah, and we talked a little bit about the Adobe experience platform this morning. Eric Shantenu and Anje will come on and talk about, we've got this amazing capability now to really take that data, standardize it and make it available for all kinds of systems and processes. And I think that's where you're going to see the real foundation for all of these siloed efforts. It's gonna be in this kind of common data understanding, what they call a XDM. >> And customers got silos, too. They've got agencies. All kinds of things out there. >> Absolutely. >> Data everywhere. Jason, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. >> Hey, guys, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. >> Jason Woosley on The Cube here at Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Day one of two days of wall-to-wall live coverage. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you >> by Adobe. >> Well, Brian, welcome to the Cube Lives Conversations here. Recovering Adobe summat twenty nineteen in Las Vegas. I'm tougher with Jeff Frick co hosting for the next two days wall to wall coverage around Adobe Summit, a company that is transformed from some making software to being a full blown cloud and data provider. Changing the user experience That's our Kino revue. Jeff, this morning was the keynote. The CEO Sean Tom knew no. Ryan took over in two thousand seven. Bruce Chizen Cube alumni, right. What a transformation. They actually did it. They kind of kept down low. But over those years absolutely changed the face of Adobe. We're seeing it now with a slew of acquisitions. Now seventeen thousand people attending this conference. This is kind of interesting story, your thoughts >> a lot of interesting stuff going on here, John and I think fundamentally they they took the risk right. They change your business from a by a news buying new license every year for eight hundred bucks. Nine hundred bucks, whatever used to be for Creative Cloud to go to an online model. And I think what was interesting about what Johnson, who said, is when you are when you're collecting money monthly, you have to deliver value monthly. And it completely changed the way that they paste their company the way they deliver products the way their product development works. And they moved to as we talked about all the time, instead of a sample of data that's old and making decisions. Now you can make decisions based on real time data in the way people are actually using the product. And so they've driven that transformation. And then now, by putting your whole sweet and with these gargantuan acquisitions of Mar Keto, now they're helping their customers really make that transition to a really time dynamic, digitally driven, data driven enterprise to drive this customer experience. >> It's interesting. Adobes, transformations, realist, legit It happened. It's happening. It's interesting, Jeff, you and I both live in Palo Alto, and I was looking through my Lincoln and my Facebook. There's literally dozens of friends and your colleagues over the years that I've interfaced with that all work at Adobe but feed all the acquisitions. They've built quite a huge company, and they brought a different set of experiences, and this is the to be the big story. That hasn't been told yet. Adobe again. This our first time covering Adobe Summit and excited to be here and continue to cover this. But here's what's going on That's really important. They transformed and are continuing Transformer. They did it in a way that was clever, smart and very predictive in their mind. They took a slow, slow approach to getting it right, and we heard the CEO talk about this. They had an old software model that was too slow. They want to attract the next generation of users, and they wanted to reimagine their product and the ecosystem changed their business model and change their engagement with customers. Very targeted in its approach, very specific to their business model. And their goals were innovate faster, moved to the cloud moved to a subscription based business model. But that's not it. Here the story is, the data equation was some kind of nuances in the keynote, like we didn't get the data right. Initially, we got cloud right, but data is super important, and then they got it right, and that's the big story. Here is the data driven and this is the playbook. I mean, you can almost substitute Adobe for your company. If someone's looking to do Tracy, pick your spots, execute, don't just talk about >> it, right? Right? Yeah. They call it the DDO in the data driven operating model, and he pulled up the dash board with some fake data talked about The management team runs off of this data, and when you know it's everything from marketing spend and direct campaigns and where people are sampling, there was a large conversation, too, about the buyer journey. But to me, the most important part is the buying act is not the end of the story, right. You want to continue to engage with that customer wherever and however, and whenever they want you. There was an interesting stat that came out during the keynote, where you know the more platforms your customer engages with you, the much higher the likelihood that they're goingto that they're going to renew, that they're going to retain so to me. I think you know, we talk a lot about community and engagement and this experience concept where the product is a piece of the puzzle, but it's not. It's not the most important piece that might be the piece Well, what she experiences built around, but it's It's just a simple piece. I think the guy from Best Buy was phenomenal. The story, the transformation, that company. But they want to be your trusted. A provider of all these services of two hundred dollars a year. They'LL come take care of everything in your home so you know they don't just want to ship a box. Say, say goodbye. They want to stay. >> Well, let's talk. Let's talk about that use case. I think the best bike Kino Best Buy was on the Kino with CEO. But I think that what I what? I was teasing out of that interview and you just brought it up. I want to expand on that They actually had massive competition from Amazon. So you think, Oh my God, they're going to be out of business? No, they match the price. They took price off the table so they don't lose their customers who want to buy it on Amazon. You can still come in the story of experience, right? They shifted the game to their advantage where they said, we're not going to be a product sales company. We're going to sell whatever the client want customers want and match Amazons pricing and then provide that level of personalization. That then brought up the keys CEOs personalization piece, which I'd like to get your thoughts on because you made a stat around their emails, right, he said, Quote personalization at scale, Right? That's what they're >> that's that they're doing right? And he talked about, you know, they used to do an e mail blast and it was an email blast. Now they have forty million versions of that e mail that go out forty million version. So it is this kind of personalization at scale. And you know, the three sixty view of the customer has been thrown around. We could go in the archives. We've been talking about that forever. But it seems that now you know the technology is finally getting to where, where needs to be. The cloud based architectures allow people to engage in this Army Channel way that they could never do it before. And you're seeing As you said, the most important thing is a data architecture that can pull from disparate sources they talked about in the Kenya. The show does they actually built their customer profile as the person was engaging with the website as they gave more information so that they can customize all this stuff for that person. Of course, then they always mentioned, But don't be creepy about it. I >> don't have too >> far so really delivering this mask mask, personalization at scale. >> I think one of the lessons that's coming out a lot of our interviews in the Cube is Get the cloud equation right first, then the data one. And I think Adobe validates that here in my mind when it continue investigating, report that dynamic the hard news. Jeff The show was Adobe Cloud experiences generally available, and I thought that was pretty interesting. They have a multiple clouds because a member they bought Magenta and Marquette on a variety of other acquisitions. So they have a full on advertising cloud analytics, cloud marketing cloud and a commerce cloud. And underneath those key cloud elements, they have Adobe, sensi and Adobe Experience platform, and we have a couple of night coming on to talk about that, and that's making up. They're kind of the new new platform. Cloud platforms experience Cloud. They're calling it, but the CEO at Incheon quote. I want to get your reaction to that. This, he said, quote people by experiences, not products. That's why they're calling it the experience cloud. I hear you in the office all the time talking about this, Jeff. So it's about to experience the product anymore, >> right? It is the passion that you can build around a community in that experience. My favorite examples from the old days is Harley Davidson. How many people would give you know they're left pinkie toe, have their customers tattoo their brand on their body? Right in The Harley Davidson brand is a very special, a special connotation, and the people that associate with that really feel like a part of a community. The other piece of it is the ecosystem. They talk about ecosystem of developers and open source. If you can get other people building their business on the back of your platform again, it's just deepens the hook of engagements that opens up your innovation cycle. And I think it's such a winning formula, John, that we see over and over again. Nobody can do by themselves. Nobody's got all the smartest people in the room, so get unengaged community. Get unengaged, developer ecosystem, more talk of developers and really open it up and let the creativity of your whole community drive the engagement and the experience. >> We will be following the personalization of scale Cube alumni former keep alumni who is not at the show. I wanted to get opinion. Satya Krishna Swami. He's head of persuasion. Adobe had pinned them on linked him. We'LL get him on the Cuban studio so keep on, we're going to follow that story. I think that's huge. This notion of personalization of scale is key, and that brings us to the next big news. The next big news was from our friend former CEO of Marquette. Oh, Steve Lucas. Keep alumni. They launched a account based experience initiative with Adobe, Microsoft and Lincoln, and I find that very interesting. And I'd start with Ron Miller TechCrunch on Twitter about this. Lincoln's involved, but they're keeping in Lincoln again. The problem of data is you have these silos, but you have to figure out how to make it work. So I'm really curious to see how that works, so that brings up that. But I think Steve Lucas it was it was very aggressive on stage, but he brought up a point that I want to get your thoughts on, He said. Were B to B company, but we're doing B to seeing metrics the numbers that they were doing at Marquette. Oh, we're in the B to see rain. So is this notion of B to B B to see kind of blurring? I mean, everyone is a B to C company these days. If everything's direct to consumer, which essentially what cloud is, it's a B to see. >> Yeah, well, it's interesting records. We've talked about the consumer ization of again. Check the tapes for years and years and years, and the expectations of our engagement with applications is driven by how we interact with Amazon. How we interact with Facebook, how we interact with these big platforms. And so you're seeing it more and more. The thing that we talked about in studio the other day with Guy is that now, too, you have all these connected devices, so no longer is distribution. This this buffer between the manufacturing, the ultimate consumer, their products. Now they're all connected. Now they phone home. Now the Tesla's says, Hey, people are breaking in the back window. Let's reconfigure the software tohave a security system that we didn't have yesterday that wasn't on our road map. But people want, and now we have it today. So I think Steve's perception is right on. The other thing is that you know, there's so much information out there. So how do you add value when that person finally visits you in their journey? And let's face it, most of the time, a predominant portion of their engagement is going to be Elektronik, right? They're going to fill out a form. They're going to explore things. How are you collecting that data? How are you magic? How are you moving them along? Not only to the purchase but again, is that it was like to say, is never the orders, the reorder in this ongoing engagement. >> And that's their journey. They want to have this whole life cycle of customer experience. But the thing that that got that caught me off guard by McKeen against first time I went satin Aquino for an adobe on event was with me. All these parts coming together with the platform. This is a cloud show. Let's plain and simple. This is Cloud Technologies, the data show we've gone to all the cloud shows Amazon, Google, Microsoft, you name it CNC Athletics Foundation. This is a show about the application of being creative in a variety of use cases. But the underpinnings of the conversations are all cloud >> right, And they had, you know, to show their their commitments of data and the data message right? They had another cube alumni on Jewell of police have rounded to dupe some it all the time, and she talked about the data architecture and again, some really interesting facts goes right to cloud, she said. You know, most people, if you don't have cloud's been too much time baby sitting your architecture, baby sitting your infrastructure Get out of the way Let the cloud babe sit your infrastructure and talk. And she talked about a modern big data pipe, and she's been involved with Duke. She's been involved with Spark has been involved in all this progression, and she said, You know, every engagement creates more data. So how are you collecting that data? How are you analyzing that data and how are you doing it in real time with new real time so you could actually act on it. So it's It's very much kind of pulling together many of the scenes that we've uncovered >> in the last two parts of a Kino wass. You had a CEO discussion between Cynthia Stoddard and >> Atticus Atticus, other kind. Both of them >> run into it again. Both big Amazon customs, by the way, who have been very successful with the cloud. Then you had and you're talking engineering, that's all. They're my takeaway from the CEO. One chef I want to get your thoughts on because it can be long in the tooth, sometimes the CEO conversation. But they highlighted that cloud journey is is there for Adobe Inn into it? But the data is has to be integrated, totally felt like data. Variables come out the commonality of date, and she mentioned three or four other things. And then they made a point and said, quote data architectures are valuable for the experience and the workload. This is critical with hearing us over and over again. The date is not about which cloud you're using. It's about what the workload, right, right? The workloads are determining cloud selection, so if you need one cloud. That's good. You need to write. It's all depending on the workload, not some predetermined risk management. Multi cloud procurement decision. This is a big shift. This is going to change the game in the landscape because that changes how people buy and that is going to be radical. And I think they're they're adobes right on the right wave. Here they're focusing on the user experience, customer experience, building the platform for the needs of the experience. I think it's very clever. I think it's a brilliant architecture. >> Yeah, she said that the data archive data strategy lagged. Right? The reporting lag. They're trying to do this ddo m >> um, >> they didn't have commonality of data. They didn't have really a date. Architecture's so again. You can't build the house unless you put in the rebar. You build the foundation, you get some cement. But once you get that, that enabled you to build something big and something beautiful, and you've got to pay attention. But really, we talk about data driven. We talk about real time data, they're executing it and really forcing themselves by moving into the subscription business model. >> Alright, Final question I want to get one more thought from you before I weigh in on my my answer to my question, which is What do you mean your opinion? What was the most important story that came out of the keynote one or two >> or well or again? You know, John, I was in the TV business for years and years before getting into tech, and I know the best buy story on what came before them and what came before them and what came before them. So what really impressed me was the digital transformation story that the CEO shared first, to basically try to get even with their number one competitors with which was Amazon in terms of pricing and delivery. And then really rethink who they are Is a company around using technology to improve people's lives. They happen to play in laundry. They play in kitchen, they play in home entertainment. They play in computers and education, so they have a broad footprint and to really refocus. And as he said, To be successful, you need to align your corporate strategy and mission with people's strategy and mission. Sounds like they've been very successful in that and they continue to change the company. >> I agree. And I would just kind of level it up and say the top story, in my opinion, wass the fact that Adobe is winning their innovating. If you look at who's on stage like best buy into it, the people around them are actually executing with Cloud with Dae that at a whole another level that they've gone the next level. I think the big story here is Adobe has transferred, has transformed and continues to do transformation. And they just had a whole nother level. And I think the story is Oracle will be eating their dust because I think they're going to tow. You know, I think sales force should be watching Adobe. This is a big move. I think Oracle is gonna be twisting in the wind from adobes success. >> Well, like he said, you know, they tie the whole thing together from the creativity, which is what creative cloud is to the delivery to them, the monetization in the measuring. So now they you know, they put those pieces together, so it's a pretty complete suite. So now you can tie back. How has my conversion based on What type of creative How is my conversion based on what type of campaigns? And again the forty million email number just blows me away. It's not the same game anymore. You have to do this and you can't do by yourself. You gotta have automation. You got have good analytics and you got a date infrastructure that will support your ability to do that. >> So just a little report card in adobe old suffer model that's over. They have the new model, and it's growing revenues supporting it. They are attracting new generation of users. You look at the demographics here, Jeff. This is not, you know, a bunch of forty something pluses here. This is a young generation new creative model and the products on the customer testimonials standing on this stage represent, in my opinion, a modern architecture, a modern practice, modern cloud kind of capabilities. So, you know, Adobe Certainly looking good from this keynote. I'm impressed, you know. Okay, >> good. Line up all the >> days of live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Doby summit. I'm John for Jeff. Rick, Thanks for watching. We'll be back with a short break

(upbeat digital music) >> Announcer: Live, from the Javits Center in New York City, it's theCube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome to day two of theCube's live coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City at the Javits Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-hosts, Dave Vellante, and Jim Kobielus, who is the lead analyst at Wikibon for AI. So we're here in day two, fellas. We just heard the keynote. Any thoughts on what your expectations are for today, Jim, and what you're hoping to uncover, or at least get more insight on what we learned already in day one? >> I'd like to have Infor unpack a bit more of the Coleman announcement. I wrote a blog last night that I urge our listeners to check out on wikibon.com. There's a number of unanswered issues in terms of their strategy going forward to incorporate Coleman AI and their technology. You know, I suspect that Infor, like most companies, is working out that strategy as they go along, piece by piece, they've got a good framework then. We have Duncan Angove on right after this segment. Dave and I and you, we'll grill Duncan on that and much more, but that in particular. You know, I mean, AI is great. AI is everybody's secret sauce, now. There's a lot of substance behind what they're doing at Infor that sets them apart from their competitors in the ERP space. I want to go deeper there. >> So, yeah, so I'm looking at the blog right now. But what are the particular questions that you have regarding Coleman, in terms of how it's going to work? >> Yeah, well, first of all, I want to know, do they intend to incorporate Coleman AI in their premises-based software offerings? You know, for, I'm sure the vast majority of their customers want to know when, if ever, they're going to get access to Coleman, number one. Number two is, when are they going to complete the process of incorporating Coleman in their CloudSuite portfolio, which is vast and detailed? And then, really number three, are they going to do all the R&D themselves? I mean, they've got AWS as a major partner. AWS has significant intellectual property in AI. Will they call on others to work with them on co-developing these capabilities? You know, those are, like, the high-level things that I want to get out of today. >> Rebecca: Okay, okay. >> Well, so a couple things. So, I mean, the keynote today was okay. It wasn't, like, mind-blowing. We had customer appreciation, which was great. Alexis, who is from Foot Locker, cube alum was up there, and B of A got customer of the year. I met those guys last night at one of the customer appreciation dinners, so that was kind of cool. They all got plaques, or you know, that's nice, little trophies. I heard a lot about design thinking, and they shared some screen shots, essentially, of this new UI, started talking about AI is the new UI. It was very reminiscent of the conversation that we had in May at the ServiceNow Knowledge conference, where they're bringing consumer-like experience to the enterprise. It's always been something that ServiceNow has focused on, and certainly, Charles Phillips and Hook and Loop have been focused on that. The difference is, quite frankly, that ServiceNow showed an actual demo, got a lot of claps as a result. Infor said this is ready to be tested and downloaded, but they didn't show any demo. So that was sort of like, hmm. >> Jim: They haven't shown any demos. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> Is it really baked out? Steve Lucas was up there. He killed it, very high energy guy. You know, again, another cube alum. He's been in our studio, and he's an awesome dude. >> Jim: He's awesome. >> And I thought he did a really good job. >> From Marketo. >> Talking about, you know, the whole engagement economy, you know, we think it's going a little bit beyond engagement to more action, and systems of an action, I think, is a term you guys use. >> Systems of agency or enablement, yeah. Bringing more of the IoT into it and robotics and so forth, yeah. >> And then DSW was up there. I said yesterday, "I love DSW." I tweeted out that, you know, the CIO had a picture, Ashlee had a picture of DSW, and I said, "Okay, when the girls and I go to DSW, "I break left, they go middle-right, "we meet at the checkout to negotiate "what actually goes home," so that was good. It was kind of fun. And then a lot of talk about digital transformation. Marc Scibelli was talking about that, and IoT and AI and data. So that's sort of, you know, kind of a summary there. As you know, Rebecca, I've been kind of trying to make the math work on the $2-plus billion investment from Koch. >> Rebecca: Yes, this is your-- >> And the messaging that Infor is putting forth is this is a source of new capital for us, but I'm-- >> Rebecca: You're skeptical. >> You know, as a private company, they have the right not to divulge everything, and they're not on a 90-day shot clock. Charles Phillips, I think, said yesterday, "We're on a 10-year shot clock." I said, "Okay." I think what happened is, so I found, I scanned 10-Qs, and I've been doing so for the last couple of days. There is virtually no information about how much, exactly, of the cash went in and what they're doing with it. And so, I suspect, but there are references to Golden Gate Capital and some of the management team taking some money off the table. Cool, that's good. I'm just, it's unclear to me that there's any debt being retired. I think there is none. And it's unclear to me how much cash there is for the business, so the only reference I was able to find, believe it or not, was on Wikipedia, and it says, "Citation still needed," okay? And the number here, and the math works, is $2.68 billion for 66.6% of the company, and a valuation of $10 billion, which Charles Phillips told us off-camera yesterday, it was $10.5 billion. So you can actually make the math work if you take that $10 billion and subtract off the $6 billion in debt. Then the numbers work, and they get five out of 11 board seats, so they've got about 45% or 49%, I think, is the actual number, you know, voting control of the company. So here's the question. What's next? And now, a couple billion for Koch is nothing. It's like the money in my pocket, I mean, it's really-- >> Rebecca: Right, right, right, the empty, yeah, exactly. >> And I suspect what happened is, 'cause it always says "$2 billion plus." So in squinting through this, my guess is, this is a pure guess, we'll try to confirm this, is that what happened is, Koch provided the additional funding to buy Birst recently. That upped their share to 66%, and maybe that's how Koch is going to operate going forward. When they see opportunities to help invest, they're going to do that. Now, one might say, "Well, that's going to further dilute "the existing Infor shareholders," but who cares, as long as the valuation goes up? And that's the new model of private equity. The old model of private equity is suck as much cash out of the company as possible and leave the carcass for somebody else to deal with. The new model of private equity is to invest selectively, use, essentially, what is a zero-interest loan, that $6 billion debt is like free money for Infor, pay down that debt over time with the cashflow of the company, and then raise the valuation of the company, and then at some point, have some kind of public market exit, and everybody's happy and makes a ton of dough. So, I think that's the new private equity play, and I think it's quite brilliant, actually, but there's not a lot of information. So a lot of this, have to be careful, is speculation on my part. >> Right, right. >> Well, the thing is, will the Coleman plan, initiative raise the valuation of the company in the long term if it's, you know, an attrition war in ERP, and they've got SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, all of whom have deep pockets, deeper than Infor, investing heavily in this stuff? Will Coleman be a net-net, just table stays? >> Well, so I think again, there's a couple ways in the tech business, as you guys know, to make money, and one is to invest in R&D and translate that R&D into commercial products. Some companies are really good at that, some companies aren't so good at that. The other way to make money is to do acquisitions and tuck-ins, and many, many companies have built value doing that, certainly Oracle, certainly IBM has, EMC back in the day, with its VMware acquisition, hit probably the biggest home run ever, and Infor has done a very good job of M&A, and I think, clearly, has raised the value of the company. And the other way is to resell technologies and generate cash and keep your costs low. I think a software company like Infor has the opportunity to innovate, to do tuck-in acquisitions, and to drive software marginal economics, so I think, on paper, that's all good, if, to answer your question, they can differentiate. And their differentiation is the way in which they're embedding AI into their deep, vertical, last-mile approach, and that is unique in the software business. Now, the other big question you have is beautiful UIs, and it sounds really great and looks really great, well, when you talk to the customers, they say, "Yeah, it's a little tough to implement sometimes," so it's still ERP, and ERP is complicated, alright? So, you know, it's not like Infor is shielded from some of the complexities of Oracle and SAP. It might look prettier, they might be moving a little faster in certain areas, they might, they clearly have some differentiation. At the end of the day, it's still complicated enterprise software. >> Right, exactly, and we heard that over and over again from the people, from Infor themselves, and also from customers, is that it isn't seamless. It's complicated, it involves a lot of change management initiatives, people have to be on board, and that's not always easy. >> Well, and that's why I'm encouraged, that to see some of the larger SIs, you know, you see Grant Thornton, Capgemini, I think Accenture's here, Deloitte-- >> Rebecca: We're having Capgemini later on the program. >> Deloitte's coming on as well. And so, those guys, even though I always joke they love to eat at the trough and do big, complex things, but, this is maybe not as lucrative as some of the other businesses, but it's clearly a company with momentum, and some tailwind that, in the context of digital transformations and AI, the big SIs and some of the smaller SIs, you know, like Avaap, that we had on yesterday, can do pretty well and actually help companies and customers add value. >> And with a fellow like Charles Phillips at the helm, I mean, he is just an impressive person who, as you have pointed out multiple times, is a real visionary when it comes to this stuff. >> Yeah, except when he's shooting hoops. He's not impressive on the hoop court, no. >> No? Oh! (laughing) >> I tweeted out last night, "He's got Obama's physique, "but not his hoop game." >> Oh! (laughing) >> So don't hate me for saying that, Charles. But yes, I think he's, first of all, he's a software industry guru. I think he, you know, single-handedly changed, I shouldn't say that, single-handedly, but he catalyzed the major change in the software business when Oracle went on its acquisition spree, and he architected that whole thing. It was interesting to hear his comments yesterday about what he sees. He said, "You'll see a lot more tech industry "CEOs running non-tech-industry companies "because they're all becoming SAS companies." >> If they have been so invested in understanding the vertical, they really get it. You can see someone who worked on a retail vertical here going in and being the CEO of Target or Walmart or something. >> Yes, I thought that was a pretty interesting comment from somebody who's got some chops in that business, and again, very impressive, I mean, the acquisitions that this company has done and continues to do. You and I both like the Birst acquisition. It's modern-day BI, it's not sort of just viz, and I don't mean to deposition Clik and Tableau, they've done a great job, you know, but it's not, it doesn't solve all your enterprise-grade, BI sort of problems. And, you know, you talk to the Cognos customer base, as great of an acquisition as that was for IBM, that is a big, chewy, heavy lift that IBM is trying to inject Watson and Watson Analytics. I mean, you know, you used to work at IBM, Jim. And they're doing a pretty good job of that, improving the UI, but it's still big, chunky, Cognos BI. Build cubes, wait for results. >> Yeah. So in many ways, the Birst acquisition for Infor and their portfolio is a bit like the thematics that IBM's been putting out on HTAP, you know, injecting analytics into transactional processing to make them more agile, and so forth. What I like about the Birst acquisition, vis-a-vis Coleman and where Infor is going, is that the Birst acquisition gives them a really good team, the people who really know analytics and how to drive it into transactional environments such as this. They've got, I mean, ostensibly, a deep fund of capital to fund the Coleman development going forward. Plus, they've got a really strong plan. I think there's potential strong differentiators for Infor, far more comprehensive in their plan to incorporate AI across their portfolio than SAP or Oracle or Microsoft have put out there in public, so I think they're in a good position for growth and innovation. >> Well, we have a lot of great guests coming up today. As you said, Duncan Angove is going to be on, up next. So, I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante and Jim Kobielus, we will have more from Inforum just after this. (digital music) (pensive electronic music)

hello everyone welcome to the cube conversations here in our studio in Palo Alto California I'm John Faria co-host of the cube co-founder Sylvania media special guest today inside the cube in Palo Alto Steve Lucas the new CEO of Marketo formerly of sa P industry veteran a lot of experience in the enterprise space now the chief executive officer at Marquette Oh welcome to this cube conversation great to see you yeah great to see you again so Marketo has been on our radar spent on everyone's radar it's been one of the hottest marketing companies that have come out of this generation of SAS what I call SATs cloud offerings and certainly as burn burn in the field in terms of reputation in terms of quality high customer scale a lot of other companies have been bought out you see Oracle doing a lot of stuff you got Salesforce the SAS business is booming oh yeah and you have a rocket ship that you're now the CEO now for two months first question what's it like here now compare a CPA yeah Marketo what's it what's happening well it's I mean s if he's a fantastic company and loved it it's the the the kind of metaphor I've used is it you know with sa P it's it's a bigger it's a bigger vehicle you're driving a bus and you can carry a lot of people with you takes a little bit longer to make a u-turn Marketo is a Formula One car I mean this thing is just in and out of traffic and it's it's unbelievably nimble so it's it's been a big kind of shift culturally but absolutely love it for the folks that are watching you might not know but Steve was in the HANA analytics president of that division with ASAP which was a real interesting transformation because Hana and and and s ap was a traditional big enterprise software company yeah but had to move very quickly Hana was basically built before Hadoop was even conceived and it was built before the big cloud explosion but kind of well built for the cloud so you have to kind of move quickly oh yeah from scratch into the cloud oh yeah with sa Pease resources yeah so compare construct contrast butBut your expense from sa p what is Marquette O's prospects I mean what's going on there I mean I'll see you got a formula speedboat but the big aircraft carriers are thrown pretty big wake they are how are you gonna maneuver yeah yeah well it's it's a fascinating environment right now because you know going from us if he I'd say that my experience they're kind of highly tuned me or prepared me for what I'm doing in Marketo si P had to move nimbly at the time really nimbly you're entering a market where you've got oracle microsoft at a database level they're the incumbents they own massive share how does si penetrate that but we were successful at the time at sa p and i loved that experience coming into Marketo really i mean it's a couple things one is you got to out-innovate the competition this is not rest on your laurels and wait for the release a year and a half from now that doesn't happen so this is about moving quickly but the second thing it's about I believe is it's all about putting the customer at the center of your strategy they have to drive everything I've talked to more marketers more CMOS in the last two months than I have in my last 20 years putting them the center is all about that Marketo their heritage was marketing solutions built by marketers for market what are the people saying you made with a lot of those CMOS more in the past since the past two months what are they saying what's on their agenda what do they care about what's important to them brand revenue and impact they want to know how do I Drive my brand how do I drive revenue and how do I show that impact to my CEO the board whomever it may be but the thing that scares marketers right now the most is what is digital transformation changing relative you know the big trend in macro trend globally how is it changing buyer expectation how is it changing the customer brand relationship that's top of mind Peter Paris who heads up by research for wiki bond and he used to do the b2b practice at Forrester around digital and stay Volante now we're talking yesterday that digital now is everything right so if you look at digital it's not just oh marketing need some tools to send emails out or oh I need to get a website up call IT up and provision or landing page this is now a fabric of pure infrastructure yet the infrastructure was built in the web days and you can go back to your business object days and go back again even back in the 90s that infrastructure now is so hard and as instrumentation there's no agility so that I feel that and we here in our in our teams and our customers that I want agility but I also want to control what the infrastructure might look like but then I don't want to touch it again I wanted to work for me do you see that same dynamic and how does that play out because I mean it's kind of the nuance point but the end of the day shadow marketing is going on shadow IT oh it's happening and it's on this unequivocally I mean so the the it literally the what's crushing the marketer right now is every time we get a new touch point a a watch so we go from just a watch that tells me the time to an Apple watch right every time there's a new touch point there's a new point solution for it and it's crushing the marketer so if it's social there's point solutions if it's mobile there's point solutions if it's a watch there's point solutions I blew my mind I literally saw it start up this is we can do you know monitoring and engagement of people on a watch it's just it's overwhelming the marketer and so their landscape of applications is looking like 30 40 different apps and their big win single sign-on that's the big win for the marketer internally it's just crushing them so what they're looking for your point is the Mahr tech or marketing technology graph and map is so big each one of their own underlying stack database software is that kind of what you're getting at absolutely absolutely you pick a marketing cloud it really doesn't matter you could say Oracle's marketing cloud sales force marketing cloud Adobe's marketing cloud it's just convoluted the the graph or chart of what's out there so point solutions just put together cobble together that's exactly right and so we're the benefit are that this is the the problem with that is what well the problem with that is that you first of all you lose any context relative to who you are there's no way that I can across 30 or 40 systems keep a consistent definition of job for you it's just impossible to do and our notion is we're looking at and what we're driving is a single engagement platform where the definition of you who you are no matter what touch point how we listen to you how we learn from you and how we engage with you it's all the same it's all integrated so let's get back to this point because I think an engagement platform and then the applications are interesting so I mentioned the CMOS earlier there's more development going on in marketing with like programmers developing apps because creig's of course okay so they're using the cloud and the marketing cloud is not like a one-off it has to be part of the core infrastructure so one of the things that wiki bonds gonna be releasing a new research coming up but I saw David floor yesterday who's a head of the research project that they're gonna show market share numbers of Amazon Google all the top cloud guys yeah interesting dynamic past is squeezing now platform-as-a-service is being squeezed down and SAS is increasing and then I as infrastructure stores is kind of shortening which means this automation in there so that the middle layer is gone but yet there's more sass how does that relate to the marketing cloud because the marketing cloud would be considered middleware or is it just the SAS app and does that speak to an explosion of SAS applications well I mean you're gonna see an explosion of SAS applications regardless I mean we reached that point of critical mass a while ago that's there's no going back at this point but if you look at kind of I think you're absolutely right there's compression at the IaaS layer in the past layer etc because these these these larger kind of SAS applications they are really ruling today and if you look at how that applies to marketing we actually think about three technology tiers within marketing there's the listen learn and engage tier the listen it's here is how do I listen on these digital channels the myriad that are out there and then the learned here is core to our platform the engagement platform it's all about an automation engine an AI engine and an analytics engine it's learning and then engaged here is how do I go back to those self same channels I was listening to and engage you the way that you want to be touched and so that's really the stack that comprises the Marketo engagement platform what's interesting the dynamic for us is we're actually seeing our own native applications that we're building on our engagement platform and then we have over 600 partners that are building applications are not building applications on our engagements they're writing software on top of the market absolutely so they're extending it so if social listening which I know is a big thing for Silicon anger that's like the I mean you guys are masters at it that if that's your thing then we have a not only do we have social listening capability but there's an app for that there's dozens so we could potentially plug into that oh absolutely so that's your vision so the vision let's go back to the so more apps a platform that enables more satisfaction yeah and and you mentioned people building on it that's an integration challenge and that's something that people they want to do more of they want to integrate other things with platforms which could be a challenge but it brings up the point data where does the data sit because now the data is the crown jewel yes and also a very important aspect to get real-time information so if you have information on me you won't have access to that data fast that's right and so there's an architectural challenge there there is your thoughts and reaction to the role of data well I first of all marketers still want to own their data and I think we need to be you know the reality is is that if you look a lot at a lot of these marketing clouds that are out there they're the vendor perspective is going to be will if I own your data I own you and our perspective is well you know that your data can sit within our platform but we can actually drive that data into you know on-premise warehouse etc etc so we're our goal is not to own your data ergo we own you that's not our goal I think the big thing like in the content you're saying is you want to use their data to give them value absolutely and so for us it's a matter of you know we can we can do to protect their data - exactly and so for me it's all about you know it's securing the data its but it's also the data is so complex now for the marketer so you've got social data highly unstructured you know you're listening for key words they still have to interpret that information you've got highly structured data demographic for example so it's how do you bring all that together you can bring that together in the Marketo engagement platform and then you can turn that into something meaningful it's always funny always to love to interview the new CEOs because we got the fresh perspective but I can't ask the tough questions cuz you lived in there for two months you get it say I won't even that two months I really can't answer that so I'll get the more generic on that what to try to get this at some of the hidden questions that I like to expose for the audience and really the main one is what attracted Univ Marketo I mean you left a pretty senior very senior position NSA p-president and Marketo is like the ship that's out there it's a motorboat but some are saying that the ways might be big enough and so you know be like okay but their public company so everything's out in the open what attracted you to market what God did say you know what I want to ride this speedboat well the trigger point for me was you know especially it s if he get exposed to kind of the big macro trends big macro trend everybody knows it is digital transformation as if he's talking that Microsoft Accenture picked the big company they're talking digital transfers and it is real the reality is you either are a digital native company were born digital uber or you're going digital ie you know you're a hospitality company trying to compete with air B&B and you gotta go digital so it's yeah I wrote an article I want on go digital or die right that's that's the that's the notion and when I looked at that I said so how does that lens apply to marketing well the reality is is that the marketer in the digital economy is only going to win if they can engage with not two or three people but Millions in an authentic and personalized manner at scale so that it's kind of juxtaposed how do you do that how do you engage with millions of people but at scale but deliver personalized an authentic experience and I looked at Marketo and I saw this platform and I just said oh my gosh there they are there's like this this convergence of those two things that are going to happen and I just think that the whole kind of marketing automation space which is known as really I I want to transform that into the engagement space we're talking about things like this engagement economy trend I absolutely believe we are fully in this notion of the engagement economy I think Marketo is right there so I gotta ask you a question is this is interesting you mentioned getting personalized information one of the things that's apparent we talked about on my Silicon Valley Friday show if you go to soundcloud.com /john for every year that people watching can get the copies of those but the thing was the recent election highlighted an issue around trust right v news younger natives digital natives younger kids they actually don't know what fake news is and what real news is a lot of people are moving off cable TV into digital which opens up the snapchats of the world different channels omni-channel like things and so this brings up this notion of communities because what people are turning to in this time of no trusting the mainstream media right news or Trump or what they were saying it's causing a lot of theater but it highlights an issue which is what's real what's not its content content is also has a relationship with users content is marketing content is trust is now a huge deal how do marketers now deal with the fact that content marketing coming from a company it could be fake news but there's a real or not and how do they get the context jewel connections is it the communities and we see that election people kind of going back to their tribe and saying oh anti Trump or Trump or whatever so tribal communities are a big part of data it is what's your thoughts on this trust factor and data and the content yeah yeah well so I think I mean a couple things first of all you know the I I think you or I as a consumer you know where anybody really we don't respond well to stare I'll moderately creepy advertisements that show up that you you know you know okay you're tracking my cookie you know in my browser and that that is just that's a non-starter I think that that in and of itself is is not interesting now we respond well to there's I said that that kind of personalized and I use that word authentic content so if there's content it's not just hey I know that you visited you know three websites about cars so I'm just going to pump you with ads full of cars but if we deliver thoughtful content it could be a comparison of vehicles that you've been looking at and take a look so there's more thoughtful content that you can deliver that that I think can come through a Mar tech platform like what we have our engagement platform no I will tell you that that trust to me it's it's not just the the authentic nature it's also a consistent engagement you can't show up show me an ad one time and I'm just gonna buy from you it doesn't work that way anymore so it's about having a relationship digital at scale but you know it's it's delivering that human touch I wrote a blog on this one where I said how do you deliver the human touch its Kate for blog addresses it it's on Marquitos website actually yeah right on our website so we talked about that as well and as companies are moving away from you or I managing the social engagement to the AI engines the machines engaging with us I think that we run the risk the marketer runs the risk of reinforcing the stare aisle you know kind of engagement and that's not what we want we want warm human touch that breeds trust sowhat's marcado's technology I mean people look at Marketo and people in marketing general yeah they're just hiring agencies to do all this work this isn't real maar tech marketing technology going on I like some of the technology for the folks watching because yeah I think it's pretty interesting most people don't understand that's a lot of machine learning a lot of technology involved in databases from security to trust also enabling real-time yeah share some insight into what's going on there so so this so there's a notion of engagement platform which we believe is is just fundamentally different than your run-of-the-mill marketing cloud so the engagement platform for Marketo is all about that listen learn and engage kind of methodology that we think about and the listening notion as I said literally as we can listen to anything your custom data social channels smoke signals if we had to we can read and consume almost anything and if we can't do it one of our partners can with like a DMP for example they learn the core of our engagement engine and this is pretty neat so we have three engines in our engagement engine we have the automation engine which is all about I hear you say something on Facebook I can engage with you then there's the analytics engine so I can help you understand what are people talking about on Facebook what are you talking on a LinkedIn and then there's the AI engine now this is where I think the the merger of the marketer and the machine is going to start coming together in a big big way so our AI engine allows you to not just say well if people say Silicon angle on Twitter then send them this but you can actually have it adapt and customize learn and reason learn and reason so X writes out and do some it's right it's predictive Oh not only just predictive actually have it I think it's borderline kind of clairvoyant but understand well I'm not just gonna immediately react to something that you put on Twitter I'm gonna go and I'm gonna check the rest of your digital persona there's a digital assistant basically not a sales rep it's more of an assistant it is it is and and so the future of marketing is simple I can build a marketing or an engagement campaign and I can click a button that says make it adaptive and then that's when the machine in the marketer come together and so on top of that engine we have our marketing applications our native apps like marketing automation we have an account based marketing which is a pretty big deal especially in the enterprise account based marketing is all about going from the single buyer to the consensus buying that you know behavior that's see in the enterprise and then we have other technologies like mobile marketing so we can track when you open an app if you close it if you click on it so it's not just one thing we have a range of marketing apps that sit on the platform right so I want to get the final question I get your thoughts on just the future of the business obviously a year you're there two months you got to get to know the team you've got to get to know the players any changes on the horizon that he let's shop so you got a big launch coming up with it well Ryan codename Orion which is there a new engagement platform that you guys pre-announce and get the announcement coming up there got a book you going on but if for Marketo what's the guiding Northstar for you what do you what do you say to customers and kind of the vision and and what changes you look that might be coming down the pike yeah so I think so the vision really there's two elements to that one is that our core focus like at its core is we're going to help the CMO build the lasting relationship derive revenue for the company and the way that we're going to do that is deliver the engagement platform which we are now rolling out I mean we've been working on a ryan for a long time way before I showed up and Orion takes the ability for a marketer to go from millions of interesting touch points per year social mobile did you know digital touch points to quadrillions of touch points we are ready for that digital transformation what we call the engagement economy era I'm writing a book on there the whole notion of engagement economy we're entering this new era where if you're not able to engage with people and and also things because things will be out there too at scale you won't win you just won't we want to get your thoughts on one final point I know we're kind of running up on time in this segment but if you look at the cloud go back to 2008 2007 timeframe when it really emerged and Amazon is already you know had a couple years under their belts with what they were doing you saw the DevOps movement developed merging development and operators be the real catalyst those early adopters you know those you know Navy SEALs the Green Berets you know eating nails and spit and glass out so so that was Facebook that was the big web scalars Yahoo essentially invented Hadoop which became big data you saw all these companies that were new natives build their own stuff not buy off-the-shelf equipment and they became the the canary in the coal mines for everybody else now everyone wants to be like AWS and even Microsoft's changes to be more like AWS and competing directly with them Google is changing so there was early guys on Facebook what they're doing drones and virtual reality you know what these stuff they're doing with open open compute those are now leaders so they're the predictors of the future in my opinion so I look at it so the question I want to ask you is how does Marketo rank up because companies that don't have huge early adopters of the scale side of it platforms that can't scale probably won't have any Headroom so do you have an example where your business has guys pushing the tech scaling it up that are gonna be that canary in the coal mine you guys have that mix of business can you give some examples yeah first of all we have fantastic customers that are using us today kind of scale Oh at scale absolutely whether it's a GE for example GE is literally attributing billions in revenue to the the Marketo engine and the campaigns and efforts that they're driving through that but ge is a perfect example Microsoft another great when there's lots of great examples of customers of ours that are doing what I would I would call hyper scale in engagement within marketing data and they're with marketing data etc so they're using your tools at large large scale yeah and I'd say it's the scale that that today you get these hyper scale example points but tomorrow everybody's gonna have to do it it's just what's neat for us you see the same thing I was mentioned that those hyper scales are gonna be the you know the pioneers that are gonna let the settlers come in and and behind them do you see that more typically and the neat part for us is is because as a marketing automation technology or an engagement platform we're fully integrated with Facebook Linkedin etc so they actually pull us forward we get that I think we get that we've got the telescope to see the canary in the coalmine a little bit further down the road assuming it's a well-lit coal mine but we get to see that a little bit further down the road so I it's an advantage for us strategically I got to ask you the question because in the database world the systems of record the services of engagement and then systems of AI IBM calls it cognitive yes how do you guys play in that new era is that just all marketing for them well I mean everybody has their cognitive exist yeah and you have something it's so they're every two degrees so everyone has tech and we certainly have what what I characterize as adaptive and intuitive that's my version of AI you know I think saying artificially intelligent it's kind of like I've met a bunch of teenagers that I consider to be artificially intelligent but the reality is is that everybody to a degree has this brochure layer tech that they run around waving it really comes down to what's practical what's usable and for us that's we're focused on is what is adaptive and intuitive technology that's going to merge the marketer in the machine final question final final question is what's the top three priorities for you if we look back on your performance next year this time what are the top three things you want to accomplish as the new CEO of Marketo well number one champion engagement economy that whole we're there and I think people just need to understand what it is to is help the market or win I mean the reality is if you boil it down you ask the question what does the marketer what they want to win they just want to win help their company win and so we want to help the marketer win and then three is really engage our marketing nation we've got a community of an online community talking about communities over a hundred thousand marketers that are working inside of that community it's just absolutely huge and so I want to engage the community if we can do that and be just customer centric and oriented our technology the AI all of those things part of our engagement platform it's gonna help us win to stick congratulations on being the co-chief executive Marketo great to see you Steve Lucas here inside the cube and Paul all those new Studios here in Pella 4,500 square feet you see a lot more content live programming as well as featured interviews with top CEOs of Silicon Valley and top technology companies I'm John Fourier thanks for watching