>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCube. The Mark Benny office finished this portion of the keynote, so we can get back to business here. Special event outside of sales force, the 171,000 people over watching Mark and the keynote. We're here at a special Conga event, it's called Conga Connect West. It's about 3,000 people they said they had last year, 3 days of taking over the thirsty bear, they've got free food, free drink, free entertainment, lot of demos, come on over. The invitation is open. Just make sure you come early because the line is really long, but we're excited to get into it with a practitioner, we love to talk to customers. So, really excited to have our next guest, Susan O'Leary, she's a continuous improvement leader 6and program manager for Abiomed. Great to see you. >> Hey Jeff, thank you so much for that introduction. I'm so excited to be here. >> Excellent, and with her is Will Spindla, the VP of marketing from Conga. Will, great to see you. Warming up before your panel tomorrow. >> Exactly. (laughs) >> So, first off, impressions of this show, it never fails to amaze me when we come to Dreamforce, what happens to downtown San Francisco. >> It's insane, isn't it? >> It is crazy. It never disappoints, there is so much going on at every moment, and especially right here at Connect West. >> Right. So, what is Abiomed, for folks that aren't familiar with the company? >> So, Abiomed, we're a class-3 medical device company. We make the world's smallest heart pump and our corporate mission is to recover hearts and save lives. And more recently, we have some commercials for our flagship product, the Impella product, on T.V. So I feel like we've really arrived at some point in the company's maturity that we have television commercials. >> Right, so what does class-3 mean? >> So, it's a certain level of classification within the FDA, and class-3 means essentially, in the simplest way, that it goes inside the body. >> Okay. >> So, the rigor at which it's controlled, and how products are introduced into market, have a very rigorous path for patient quality and compliance and safety, it's a pretty exciting space to be, but it's not easy to bring a product to market. >> And you've got hardware, I imagine you've got all kinds of crazy software, you probably have all types of continuous monitoring, not a simple device. >> No. >> And a very important one. >> A very important one. That's right. >> So we're here at Conga, Connect West, what do you guys do with Conga, where does Conga play in your world? >> So Conga has enabled Abiomed to do amazing things. We're here at Dreamforce, obviously as Salesforce customers, and we began our journey with Salesforce back in 2009, and we discovered that we had some business processes that still resided outside of Salesforce, that people were struggling with these PowerPoint presentations and putting together their sales forecast, and all the data that would really drive that lives in the Salesforce orb. A tour on the app exchange back probably 2010 I would say, Will, and Jeff, I found the composer product, and it was a pretty easy sell to our VP of sales, a quick proof of concept, taking certain data that people were manually manipulating and with the click of a button, here is your forecast blown up in all kinds of colors and charts and graphs, it was a game changer. >> All right, so that's early intro, right, 'cause the biggest knock on Salesforce, always, is getting sales people to use it, right, and changing behavior is much harder than writing software or developing software. So, did you find that that app was the killer app to get the sales team to actually use the tool? >> Well, so they were using- >> 'Cause everybody's got the same story, right, everyone's got PowerPoint, and a lot of times people use Salesforce for reporting, not actually working, and now it's double data entry, I can't stand it, but it sounds like this composer was really a game-changer for you. >> Well, it brought the best of both worlds together because our field organization was using Salesforce, they're doing their work in that application, and yet the model that leadership wanted for delivering their weekly forecast in their update was very, very specific, and you couldn't do that in any Salesforce report. You can do it in Excel. >> So the forecast model was outside of Salesforce driven by the executive leadership, even though the day-to-day work was happening inside of Salesforce? >> You're right, you're right. >> And this was like, "Oh, it happens over and over again?" >> (laughs) It was the visualization that was impossible in standard Salesforce reports, but you could build it in Excel, and then merge the data with the composer product, so that was our first use case, and we have invented so many more, but that got us in the door, so to speak. >> So, Will, have you ever heard that story before? >> Well, what I was going to say, I think it's interesting because I worked at Salesforce for about six years before I came to Conga, and one of the things that we often saw was that sales people sometimes put their data in Salesforce, unless they're coaxed very greatly, but what they actually don't do a lot of the time is leverage the data that's inside there once it's there. And so the nice part about having a tool like Conga is that you can make it so the sales people don't have to do anything with the data, right? You can automate- >> Exactly. >> Creation of reports and charts and PowerPoint presentations, so that the sales reps, they don't have to do anything. >> They just click a button. >> Click a button. >> They click a button, they have the relationships with their customers, they know how to win the deals, they know how to take all those conversations to the next level, and why do we want them crunching numbers and doing that? We don't want them doing that. There's no value in that. So, you find great tools that take the data and put it in a button, and game changed. >> Yeah, and then you can ensure that whatever process or policy your company, like Abiomed has, every single sales rep is within that guideline, so they're not making their own decisions, they're doing what the organization wants them to. >> That's right, they're following a tested and validated model that delivers what leadership wants. And I'm probably not joking if I say half a day on Friday, if you were a cardiology account manager, you would be trying to cobble this together in a PowerPoint and then turn it in to the office. Half a day. >> So the office is asking for a PowerPoint presentation on the updated status of your pipeline, basically? >> This very specific visualization model. And, with Composer, with how people are with data, they think that this is all they really need, but once they saw what we could put in that output document from Composer, it has grown to be an enormous analytic tool set for the field team that drives their forecast. >> I'm just curious in terms of the scale and the size of team, don't tell me anything out of school but, are you talking tens of reps, hundreds of reps? >> Hundreds of reps. >> Hundreds of reps. >> Globally, we have over 100 sales territories, and so we have easily 450 feet on the street. And certain people have different roles, right, so the cardiology account manager role is that forecasting leader in the company, that person is really clicking that button to generate that document, and there's well over 100 in our organization. >> So, Will, you hear these stories all the time, I'm sure, is Composer the killer app to get people to start to embrace this tool? Do you see that time and time again? >> Yeah, I think one of the nice parts about Composer is that you can, in some respects, direct your entire sales or organization on the way the company wants to showcase themselves, whether it's in reporting, whether it's highly branded and pixel-perfect documents, what we've seen a lot of people do is you may have a monthly or a quarterly business review. >> Oh, we do that! We have Composer for that. We have this beautifully crafted merge template that delivers a business review to our customers. Yeah, that was the second thing we did with Composer. >> That's right. >> Where we first did the forecast then we did the business review. >> Business review. >> Wow! >> And you can do that in Excel, or in PowerPoint, or in Word, or even in HTML, it just gives you the ability to take data, that sits inside Salesforce, and push it out in any format you want. And the nice part, too, is you can pull data from other systems. >> Right. >> So it can be in your ERP or your accounting system and brings it all into one spot. >> I just can't help but think of the poor guy on the receiving end of the 450 PowerPoint decks on Friday afternoon, I mean how did that get rolled up? >> Yeah, we had another process for that. >> I don't want to hear that one, that one sounds scary. >> There's the regional, there's a country base- >> Too much. >> And it's all Composer. It's all Composer. >> Last question for you, Susan. So, have you been able to leverage the success of Composer to basically expand into more applications in the Salesforce suite with Conga or other, to actually get your adoption up, and now start to add more and more applications? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Jeff, and certainly Composer was that early-adoption product that was such an easy sell, it had win-win written over it in capital letters, everybody really got it right away. "We're buying this, we're doing this." And then over the years, Conga in its development life cycle put out a couple other game-changing products that we also have, we have their Action Grid product, and their contract solution. >> Was that as easy of a sell? >> Yes. >> Okay. (laughs) >> Well, it wasn't IT organizations selling solution on business, business is saying, "We want a quoting platform, and we need something better than standard Salesforce." So, we started looking at what is now CPQ, but it was called Steelwork at the time, and then we needed to solve for the contract life cycle management part of that, and a contract product didn't even exist at the time. And we were looking at other solutions, and we were trying to make something work, and we learned about the contract product through a Connect event that a colleague of mine attended, and came back from that event, and just said "Sue, you've got to stop everything you're doing, you've got to go talk to Pete Castro at Conga, and you have to see this contract tool. Because I know we're almost at the end of this project, but literally you're going to rip out everything that we did before and you're going to want to do this." So guess what we did? We did it! >> Will, you can't let this one off your hip, I'm telling you. She's awesome. >> It was a tough timeline and that was part of the promise that we needed to hear back when we went to the table, was we can't miss our launch. >> Yeah, yeah. >> To do this pivot and switch and can we do it? >> But that's easy compared to getting sales people to change behavior, timelines are one thing, but if you got people to actually use the tool the way the tool is supposed to be used, then the ancillary benefits are tremendous. Thank you for sharing that story with us, Sue. >> You're very welcome, Jeff. We do have the Action Grid product, but I'm not the expert in that space, but I've seen some amazing things. >> You've got the sales people using Salesforce on a weekly basis, plant the flag and call it enough. Come on now! All right, so thanks again. He's Will, she's Sue, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube for Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.