>> Narrator: From New York City It's theCUBE covering New Relic FutureStack 2019. Brought to you by New Relic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Minimen and we're here at New Relic's FutureStack 2019 at the Grand Hyatt, next to Grand Central Station, here in New York City. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Roger Scott who's the Chief Customer Officer at New Relic. Roger, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me on. Good to be here. >> Alright so, I love this morning actually in addition to hearing all of the announcements, my first hand full of guests on theCUBE were customers. So I got to hear from them and we know your team is always excited about the announcements, but definitely enthusiasm from the customers, things in the keynote that got people. >> Fired up! Yeah. >> Clapping, and fired up. >> Great to see. >> Things like, oh wait! 10 terabytes of data, pressure thing, refresh for like a second, and >>oh my gosh! There's results. Yeah >> Pretty impressive so maybe give us a little bit of insight into customer engagement and how it's let to the bevy of announcements here at the show. >> Oh it's a great question actually and I think in my capacity as Chief Customer Officer and the functions I'm responsible for, we're continually engaging with customers as you can imagine. And one of the things we take a lot of pride in is being a proxy for the voice of the customer back into the organization. So we have a pretty rigid process. Not rigid, a pretty discipline process, I would argue, that allows us to get feedback from the field, listen to our customers, understand what's important to them, and reflect that in our product roadmap. And I'll let you know that's on a weekly cadence we do that. Now we're not doing that in a reactive fashion such that our roadmap diverts every single week in there, but we hear that constant feedback from the field as to what our customers are lacking. So lot of what you hear today, in terms of those six great announcements that we have were a combination of feedback that we've had over the last couple of years, I would argue. Because it's a dramatic shift to go from what we were previously, which was essentially six individual products that work really well together. But through the release of New Relic 1 in May earlier this year and what we announced today has truly developed us in to a observability platform. So monitoring with six different products to a true observably platform that's open, connected and programmable is a dramatic shift. And that's a combination of a bunch of feedback from our customers over the years. >> Yeah. I'm sure it's pretty much feedback from all customers. They're not asking for more tools and more interfaces and more things that they need to learn. >> Roger: Not at all, right. >> In many ways software can be a unifying feature especially that term platform who spend a bunch of time emphasizing what's needed from platform. >> Maybe, what were your costumers struggling with that kind of New Relic 1 in general is looking to solve as well as the observability piece? What went into that launch that was costumer pinpoints and things that they'd been asking for. >> Yeah maybe to stand back a little bit and understand some of the challenges that costumers had and then why they were asking for different solutions or evolution of our solution. If you think about today's world, there's this rapid development an deployment of software, so it's almost got to the point of continuous software deployment. And so your speed of needing to be able to react to problems in your environment, your costumer experience are degrading, ect. Being able to respond to that really quickly is essential, understanding the costumer experience is essential. You talked about operational efficiency of reducing the number of tooling sets or data sets that I'm looking at continually. So anything that we could provide to our costumers that allowed them to get to answers quicker, understand the why, and then be able to remediate that really easily so that the costumers have a greater experience. And at the same time reduces this friction that's unnecessarily introduced when you're going from one product to another, one tool to another and you're spending too much time rationalizing data sets across those tool sets. So consolidation is a big theme, ability to get to your answers really quickly is a big theme and that's really been the genesis of being able to create a platform. But not just a platform for consolidation, for better visibility, and observability but we believe it's not truly a platform until you can develop on it. If you think back in technology history of all the different peradams we've had throughout the history of technology, those who've won the platform wars over the years have been really good at being able to provide tools and ease of adoption of the platform by virtue of being able to build things on top of it. The ability to give people tools that allow them to build technology is really a therasense of the platform as well. >> You know, Roger, there's a certain trust level that costumers have to have if they're going to be building on top of your platform. >> When I've talked to costumers in New Relic they do talk about a partnership >> and the good back and forth but there's definitely a certain amount of stickiness once they've built something on your platform. >> Roger: Right, yeah. >> Any concerns from them as to, you know there's that term lock in out there as to the how do I know that this is going to work for me, and that I'm not going to have my pricing kind of crank up over time and be like oh my gosh, a year or two later, what did I get myself into? >> Right. It's a really important point that I'd like to start off by actually reemphasizing the point you made. I think we pride ourselves on the relationship we have with our costumers. It truly is the heart of everything at my organization does. We have this saying that we are because they are. In the realization that if we don't serve our costumers really well they have choices frequently, we're a saas vendor, the contracts come up for renewal frequently. And if you're unable to deliver on the promises that you made in the sales process, once they implement your solutions and try to use those in production, environments and everyday work if you can't deliver on those promises then you're going to breakdown that level of trust. And trust is at the center of all relationships as you know. Whether it's a personal relationship, you're playing on a sports team, whether you're working with your costumers. And so we want to make sure that we can deliver on those promises once we've sold them the product. So I haven't heard any specific concerns about lock in or anything, I think what they regularly come to us though with is they want us to have a really strong point of view, want us to be opinionated, tell them how this should work effectively together, what does best practice look like, what's the gold standard, what are some of the artifacts, tools, frameworks, reusable templates that we can share with them that accelerates their time to value. So I think the value significantly outweighs the concerns around lock in or reduction of the number of vendors that they're working with. >> If I look at really the enterprise space, you've got costumers working through their application modernization. They've got their modelist their going after micro services. I heard a stat that only about five to ten percent of apps are monitored at the app level today. >> Yeah, pretty scary, isn't it? >> Yeah, how many of your costumers are dealing with the installed state versus new deployments and what are some of the challenges you're hearing from costumers there? >> Yeah and I think it's important to pause that number because I think it's five to ten percent or growing to twenty percent as I think got indicated. If you look at those organizations Born In The Cloud or Born Digital it's significantly higher percentage of that which is possibly an indictment of the low level of instrumentation we see in a lot of legacy software technology stacks. And so I think in today's world we're tryna get that level of instrumentation observability up as much as possible. But maybe to link back to your previous question as well I think there's an important aspect here of when we move to a platform. When you're a product company your differentiation comes through product, comes through the capability of that product features and functions and we've certainly found ourselves in a significant number of those battles against competition where it's feature and function based. That's not a great comfort for the costumer. I think when you move to a platform it's very much around the networks differentiation. When I say network differentiation I think it's about getting the users of your service access to third party applications to third party data sources be they open source data emitters, opentelementry, open sensors, Zipkin any of those data sets that we are now in support for today. Giving them access to those data sets and being able to enrich the experience that we provide them that network effects and that's really where we see the opportunity to deliver significantly more value to our costumers with the ability to then build your own applications on top of the platform. That's second to none in the industry in my opinion. >> Roger, what's New Relic's role in helping costumers as really they're modernizing their work force? When I talk to so many companies it's like they need to retrain and they have to have new skill sets they need to make sure as certain cloud in automation changes where they focus on things and embrace devops and new ways of doing things. There are a lot of challenges there. Where does New Relic play in that modernization for costumers? >> You know what I think it's in a couple ways. The ways that we, my organization, can help the costumer in terms of just sheer understanding of the capability of the platform, what are best practices, how we can drive better accountability as you move to these new technology stacks and new ways of working much more agile environments. And so I think we can do a combination of that just sheer skills development, working really tightly with the likes of AWS you would've heard Dave McCann this morning talking about how when costumers migrate the application work goes to the AWS cloud environment. Hopefully they're not just doing that by way of compute lift and shift but they were actually looking at modernizing and refactoring those applications and when they do that, you heard Dave talk through a number of assets and frameworks and models and reusable best practices that we're trying to work with them on that we can give to our costumers that accelerate their journey 'cause it's not easy. We were talking to Chris Dillon this morning from Cox Automotive and when you think of an organization like that that's forty, fifty years old and has had to transform itself in terms of digital experience for it's costumer base, it's a significant cultural adjustment quite often to get teams to work in fundamentally different ways. So it's not an insignificant challenge but that's partly why we've invested so heavily in costumer success. Taking the costumers on the journey, thinking about their maturity over time, and constantly look for them to get better value from the platform. >> Roger, there are a number of things that have jumped out at me. Things like oh hey, we can save you potentially millions of dollars on your AWS cloud bill. You've already got costumers building on top of the platform, you had the future Haka event just a couple of weeks ago. Any other kind of interesting or exemplary costumer outcomes that you might be able to share? Either doesn't have to be about the new stuff but just that you've recently with your costumers. >> You know, one of the things that's most gratifying for me when talking to costumers is when we've been able to see when you work with older, more traditional companies that are undergoing some form of digital transformation and they're trying to shift a lot of the applications into a more modern stack and environment, become more agile, etc. they frequently sort of peel off part of the business and will have a digital division that will build some innovative, typically mobile based, apps. We've seen a number of different retailers that we've worked with. Number of different travel organizations where we've started out intrumenting the mobile application because they've built a new application to give their consumers or costumers access through to their services, and at some point that application is going to merge into the backend and have to connect back into older technology. And it's been the beauty of being able to connect those two different environments together. Not starting off at what we would've got as slightly easier place to start which was the more modern application environment where we are really well suited to. But then seeing the full value of being able to instrument the front end all the way through to the backend, link that back to the costumer's experience and to the impact on the business in terms of funnel analysis from number of people using the mobile application to actually ordering something to once they've ordered it, feeling satisfied in actually receiving the goods that they ordered. Being able to instrument all of that and understand the impact of performance and availability on the overall business arcam, that's when it's been truly transformational in working with costumers and that's certainly where we'd love to help more of our costumers in that fashion. >> Alright, Roger, want to give you the final word. Of course you bring together a number of costumers here at FutureStack in the U.S as well there's a few of those run in other geographical areas but throughout the year, any other key things you want to highlight as to how costumers can get engaged even more. >> Yeah, I mean, we've got a sort of what I would argue is a tiered approach to costumer success. At the very high end of our engagement model we have a significant number of resources. Solution architects, costumer success managers that we can deploy directly with our costumers. We typically do that in conjunction with them, build out success plans, etc. What we looking at investing Heavily at the moment is also having a good understanding of what the ideal costumer journey is like. Realizing that a costumer can come to an event like this and learn about our product but the best way for them to experience that is in the course of using the product. So heavy focus on product lead growth and how we actually deliver better value through the product itself, remove friction and adoption and getting to better value. We want to automate some of that costumer journey so that we know that if you've just signed up and, for instance, you've configured you're agent and you've done your learning policy but you haven't yet configured a custom apdex on that application or you haven't understood what your key transactions are, we've got all that data in the backend. So we're working really hard to understand how we get that information back out to costumers and go hey we know you haven't necessarily done this yet, here's some access to great assets. A short video clip, a self paced learn guide that somebody can get on demand from an LMS system. So trying to use a combination of direct resource investment, events like this where it's great to make announcements like we did about the six grade innovations and then increasingly using digital through the products but also through just the general costumer journey to say hey this is really important content and information, you should look at this now 'cause it's going to add value in what you're doing today. >> Alright, well Roger Scott, Chief Customer Officer at New Relic, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much, it's been great talking to you. >> All right. I'm Stu Minimen back with lots more here at New Relic FutureStack 2019 in New York City. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (outro music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with Stu Miniman, my co-host. We are joined by Sandra Rivera, Vice President and general manager Network Platform Groups at Intel. Thanks so much, Sandra. >> Thank you for having me. >> I want to talk about a point you made during your keynote address and you talked about the transformative power of data and just about how data will change the face of so many industries, from healthcare to airlines to the financial services industry. And yet there are so many challenges that companies and developers themselves face in dealing with this avalanche of data. Sifting through it, understanding it, sorting it, chunking it the right way and really understanding what it's saying. Can you talk about the challenges and then also what companies are doing to overcome the challenge? >> It is really at the crux of both challenge and opportunity is what do you do with all the massive amounts of data that is being generated, and I spoke about how an average user really generates or consumes about one and a half gigabytes of data per day, but if you fast forward of what's happening in the rest of the industry, we connect to cars at four terabytes of data per day or connect to planes at five terabytes or a smart factory at one petabyte of data a day. What do you do with all of that because today, much of that goes wasted and unutilized, right? We create these large data lakes and yet, the value creation portion that you need to turn it into something useful and profitable is really challenging. The things that we're doing to address those challenges, collectively with the ecosystem are really building standardized sets of software interfaces and APIs through our contributions and open source and open standards because we do believe that these are problems that are best addressed when you're doing it in community and in parallel and much of the investments that we're making in the underlying ingredient technologies, be it hardware or software, have to be exposed at a much higher level that, for the application developer, they know that there are some tools underneath giving them performance or capabilities that they desire for their customers, but not having to know a lot of those intricacies, so lot of that abstraction work that we do collectively with the ecosystem, and with Red Hat being a great partner of ours in that vein, in that effort, is really to abstract all those complexities and make it easier to onboard the developers and let them innovate and really focus on the value creation portion of the problem statement. >> So do developers now need a new layer of education to get the data? I mean, it could be data science. >> Exactly, well, and a lot you see a lot of the larger corporations hiring in data scientists, but everyone is not going to be a data scientist and everyone's not going to be able to afford one on their payroll, so our job is really to have, again this abstraction capability, but one that takes advantage of the underlying innovations that we invest in, both from a hardware and a software perspective. And then to really try to provide some of that education capability and some of the things that I spoke about are, as part of our community, a community that we call the Builder's Community. In fact, I was trying to get folk to go look at builders.intel.com because you see we have hundreds and hundreds of publications there of solution briefs and technical documents and reference architectures and tip and tricks and techniques for how you can optimize your software to take advantage of all of these innovations underneath instead of doing that trial and error that you would do if you're just starting from ground up and doing it and repeating that same process over and over again. It's really embracing much more of that Dev Ops model, which is new to the networking industry, but very familiar to the IT type developer. >> Sandra, I'm wondering if you can help us connect the dots. I think back to when we started talking about the term big data. One of the terms I loved, it was the bit flip from that all that data is going to be a challenge to, "hey, this is an opportunity for us to do good things." But when you start talking about the evolution now to machine learning, artificial intelligence. Big data, there's so many companies that are like, "we tried these initiatives and over 50% of them "were failing. "We just weren't delivering on the value. "We were investing, but we weren't there." Why will it be different, how is the ecosystem matured, this kind of maturation on the market? >> A lot of it is really about how do you make the access to all of that data look like another compute problem? And we have a lot of compute application developers that are very familiar with the types of software tools and optimization capabilities that we have, not just in the Intel portfolio, but in the ecosystem through our efforts in Open Source and Open Standards. I think that we learn that trying to dig down and get every ounce of optimization from the hardware by hard coding to a lot of those interfaces is not the fastest way to bring a broad community of developers onboard. And the investments that we have been making is in trying to both build up from a software side perspective, but also build out our capabilities in our existing software tool chains that we have that we have hundreds of thousands of developers that are familiar with developing to those interfaces. When you do that, or when we've been doing that, we don't think that the application developer will particularly care or should particularly care if that workload is running partly on a general purpose processing CPU, partly in a FPGA, which is another asset and capability that we have and is highly programmable or running in an ASIC environment which is another capability that we brought into the company specifically around machine learning and artificial intelligence, through an acquisition of a company by the name of Nirvana. Again, all of those are your building blocks, but our job is to create the software environment that just let's you put it together like Lego Blocks as opposed to really having to know the intricacies and complexities of the underlying ingredient technologies. >> And how does the Open Source initiatives help us get to that customization that I might need for specific verticals and help accelerate the growth for everyone? >> A lot of the investments that we've been making is both in the virtualization layer, but also in container types of technologies. I talked about the Open Shift initiative that we have with Red Hat and with other partners where we're looking at Docker and Kubernetes and container types of deployment models in addition to VM types of deployment models. If you look at everything that is happening in the industry and the investments going there, it really is very much around upleveling the tools so that you can take advantage of the underlying capabilities, but you do have opportunities for customization that don't require, necessarily, programming micro engines down at the bare metal layer or lower layers of the hardware stack, so it very much is the playbook around. If you want to enable a broad ecosystem, you have to lower the barriers to entry, you have to give them a tool chain that they can more easily adapt to or program to and you have to show them opportunities by working directly with the end customers to again, we talked about financial industry or healthcare industry that allows you to optimize for the problems that they're facing or the opportunities that they see as well. Some of the work we do is not just on the technology side, but very much in terms of matchmaking to the end customers and doing the proof of concept and doing the learnings and that iterative process of uncovering the things that you thought were going to be big problems sometimes aren't and the things that you didn't anticipate would be challenges sometimes are and it's hard work, but it actually is really being successful in terms of there's a lot of interest in this area, there's many more tools, there's more investment going in and there's a lot of opportunity for innovation and growth. >> And particularly with the emerging force of artificial intelligence and 5G that really will have a transformative effect on the way we customers, just individual customers interact with these industries. You had some great examples. >> I talked a little bit about a banking application that's sort of natural language processing that happens and the ability to have an AI assistant what can help you when you just speak in regular sentences and syntax but also get smarter over time to learn your individual habits and preferences and really, will provide advice. Not just answer questions but actually provide some investment advice, let's say. We talked about AI in sports, which is another great area for application of artificial intelligence and learning movements and motions and form of an athlete's swing, or an athlete's form or position as they're exercising their sport, but one of the other areas that we're seeing a lot of application is in something as old as agriculture, which is a 23,000 year old industry, but smart and connected cows and smart and connected wine, which is a wonderful application. >> Rebecca: Sure, sign me up! >> But for the farmers to understand the soil quality and to know the forecast and the moisture and the sunshine and the rainfall. I mean, all of these things really allow them to be more effective and have a higher output. More successful crops, more profits, and even their farming equipment. All the sensors that are in farming equipment to be able to predict a failure of the equipment or a service requirement for that piece of equipment, so all of these things that you realize that anything that can be smart and connected is going to be smart and connected. We fundamentally believe that at Intel that whether you're talking about sports and skateboards and bikes or you're talking about industries, financial, medical certainly is a huge one, education or agriculture, there's so many opportunities for you to really have that value creation element of the data collection process. >> I want to ask you also, about the technology industry and the community within the technology industry. It's getting a bad rap these days. There's very little diversity, there's very few women, particularly in leadership positions, very few minorities. I know that this is a cause that you champion personally and professionally. First of all, is it as bad as the headlines when you're in it and second, what are you doing to change it both as an individual leader and what Intel is doing? >> This is something that Intel is deeply committed to from our CEO through our leadership team and really driving throughout the organization. It isn't just because it's the right thing to do, diversity is the right thing to do but it just makes business sense. If you look at just women in general and women and men, women make over half of the purchasing decisions in a family, and actually, in the household, they make more than half the purchasing decisions for the big ticket items, and so it's kind of dumb to not include more women in leadership positions that could have a different perspective on product development and features and trade offs and capabilities in just organically, what you do in terms of your own product innovation. But beyond that, we also know that any organization that has diversity and it's men, it's women, it's ethnicity, it's experience, large company, small company, it's different cultures and backgrounds, you will drive a better business result. Data proves it over and over and over again that you are quicker to innovate, you're quicker to find and identify problems, you're quicker as a team to just move to something that is more innovative faster and it's proven that all of those companies that have more diversity on their boards and in their senior leadership team do drive better business outcomes, so from that perspective, it's again, the right thing to do, but it also makes good business sense. But it is a complex problem and at Intel, we certainly know it's a pipeline problem that starts at a very young age, in terms of just getting, in particular, more girls interested in science, technology, engineering, and math. Then when they graduate, it's attracting them to come and really be engineers and to maintain that technical passion that they have and sometimes in the face of a lot of adversity, because we know that sometimes their inputs get marginalized or discounted, but then we find that even after we've made it all through that that it's a retention problem from the perspective that women want to see a career progression just like men do, and typically, that is just a bigger challenge for women because the people that make those decisions or provide those opportunities, there's not enough women that are advocating and frankly, not just women, but there are not enough men advocating for those women, so we have a lot that we're investing in this very multifaceted problem. It is a journey, but to your point, I'm not discouraged. I really do think it's better than it's ever been. >> And the bro culture, you talked about the women who may get discouraged because they're not called on in a meeting, they're not chosen for that cool new project. That is deflating. >> It is deflating, and those are the thing that you have to address, but one of the ways that we have found to do that is that you have to assume that there is a bias. We all have biases. This is one thing that we learn is that if you have a brain, you have a bias. It's not good or bad, it just is. There's so many ways to overcome those biases. There's all kinds of ways. We know this from studies that were done. Women that were trying out for the Philharmonic Orchestra in New York. >> Rebecca: The blind audition. >> If you did the audition behind the curtain, they were chosen 50% more of time than if they weren't behind the curtain because you just tend to, your bias is, "well, I didn't hear them play that well," but it's unconscious. You don't realize that you're actually doing that. THere's so many ways that you can overcome the unconscious bias, but you have to acknowledge that it exists and once it exists, then there's a lot of tools and techniques that we employ at Intel in terms of having more diverse hiring panels, having more diverse candidates that you're bringing in, and establishing your criteria for hiring before you meet the candidates, and then assessing each candidate against that criteria so that you don't get to change your mind afterwards. There's lots of ways, but truly, I am very encouraged. I've been at this a long time and I think it is a much better environment now than it was. It's nowhere where we need it to be, but yeah, the culture is tough, but it's not as bad as it was and it is getting better every day. >> Great, well, thank you so much Sandra Rivera. We appreciate your time. >> Sandra: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Minimen. We'll be back with the wrap just after this. 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