>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> SaaS companies have been some of the strongest performers in this COVID era. They finally took a bit of a breather this month, but they remain generally well-positioned for the next several years with their predictable models and cloud platforms. Meanwhile, the demise of on-prem legacy players from COVID shock, seems to have been overstated, in part because of the return of the laptop and in the case of Oracle with some see as a cloud play, Hmm. Then there's Bitcoin which is seeing public companies use their balance sheet liquidity to invest in the cryptocurrency. (chuckles) Wow. What does that all mean? I'll leave that for another day. Hello everyone and welcome to this week on Cube insights powered by ETR. On this breaking analysis, we'll pick out some of the more recent themes from this month and share our thoughts in some major enterprise software players, the future of on-prem, a review of our take on cloud and what cloud will look like in the 2020s. Wow. It's true, trees really don't grow to the moon. As predicted, the stock market has been a little bit crazy this month. February saw some leading SaaS names like Workday, Salesforce, and ServiceNow take a bit of a breather in the second half of the month. Workday and Salesforce announced earnings on the 25th. Workday had its first billion dollar subscription revenue quarter at 16% revenue growth a revenue and earnings beat. And of course the stock closed down Friday, more than 2%. Salesforce had a nearly $6 billion revenue quarter 20% growth, a revenue and earnings beat. And the day after it announced earnings the stock was down more than 6%. The market is worried about rising interest rates, and maybe concerned that an inflation fears are going to kill the stimulus bill. And so any whiff of caution by company managements is met with dampened enthusiasm. Meanwhile, it's looking like some of the big on-prem legacy firms, notably Dell, HPQ and HPE are making it through COVID, and might even come out in the other side stronger maybe. Dell handily beat expectations on the 25th on the strength of 17% growth in its client business. That's PCs. It's the gift that keeps on giving. HPQ had a strong beat as well, and we're anticipating a solid quarter from HPE next week on March 2nd. And then there's Oracle. Barron's had a big article on February 19th, entitled, "Oracle is turning into a cloud giant and why it's stock is a buy". It moved the market. And many investors rotated out of growth stocks, tech growth tech stocks into Oracle, others who had owned Oracle for a while scooped up some profits. Is Oracle a cloud giant? Hmm. We'll discuss that in a moment. And then there's all this Bitcoin mania. You know, our interest there is much more beyond the price fluctuations rather we're interested in the innovations in crypto. Look, we're going to table this for another day, but it's an interesting side note of this February madness. Let's take a look closer look at the February chill for SaaS companies. Here's a chart showing the relative performance of some of the big SaaS names in the latter half of this month. Now despite the strong earnings for Workday and Salesforce you can see the market's negative response on the 26th. Snowflake and ServiceNow they had epic runs last year, and they've been softening although on Friday morning ServiceNow shut down quickly on the open on sympathy with Workday and ServiceNow and then investors, you know, came back in. Very weird action in the market these days, again, not surprising. And look at the reaction investors had to the Barron's article on the 19th. They anointed Oracle as a cloud giant. Kudos to the Oracle PR team for that one. Now, let's take a look at these companies and put them in context. Even though they're not direct competitors it's instructive to model some of the top enterprise software players in positions, and line them up against each other. This chart here shows two dimensions from the ETR data. On the vertical axis is net score or customer spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the survey. The table inset shows the net score measurement in the shared end. That's the metric that plots the dots. In both cases bigger is better. Note, that red dotted-line there is the 40% line. 40% to us is the magic number. Anything above that line is considered elevated. So we have ServiceNow and Salesforce they're up to the right. They're both big companies. They have significant market presence amongst the CIO and both have elevated spending velocity in the 50% range. And I've said for years, these two companies are on a collision course and I stand by that. It started happening and McDermott Bill McDermott, new CEO he's going to accelerate that in our view. We put a cloud around Snowflake tongue in cheek, because they are literally in the clouds on this chart. They stand alone, with a solid market presence that continues to grow in an off the charts net score of 83.3% now. For context you can see Oracle Fusion, NetSuite and Taleo. In addition, we put Slack and Coupa on the graphic, two names that have been on the radar lately and SAP, which continues to show decent spending momentum despite its challenges. All right, let me make a few comments on some of these companies. Snowflake, we've talked about a lot. I said earlier that their IPO, that if you really wanted to own it and couldn't wait for a better price, which I thought you'd get. And by the way you did, but then if you really wanted to own it on day one hold your nose and buy it and then wait a few years. So, you know, good luck. And I think you'll, it'll turn out okay for you. Now, the data really continues to show strong demand for Snowflake. There's no signs of them slowing down. So they announced earnings on March 3rd. We didn't have more data there. So we would expect confirmation of our analysis but you never know. Now Workday, here's our take. In our view the market is catching up to Workday. They had about a three-year lead at least in human capital management and the cloud and that whole model. And they had the best product. It was really simple and it was quite disruptive. But now you got Oracle, ADP, Ceridian they're catching up. Workday's expansion into financial management has been much more challenging and as it gets bigger, things get tougher. It's still though an enduring name. Salesforce, we see a bit differently. Salesforce is so big now, it's really hard for it to move the needle. And so it's been on an acquisition binge, and to grow that's likely going to continue. It could work well for the company. I mean, similar to the ways in which Oracle consolidated software names and picked up a lot of customers. Salesforce is a great name, and we think is going to continue to grow. ServiceNow is interesting. It's entering a new chapter under CEO, Bill McDermott, new CEO. He wants to double the company's revenue. And I think he's got a reasonable chance at that through a combination of great go-to-market and expanding the platform and in McDermott style doing acquisitions. SAP's market value tripled under his watch, and he knows the customers. And he's a magnet for attracting talent. Now ServiceNow is not without its challenges. Its customers often complain that ServiceNow is pricing is really high and it's becoming the Oracle of service management. But as McDermott aims more at SAP and Oracle customers, they create a nice umbrella for ServiceNow to work with. And technically, we think ServiceNow has other challenges around its multi-instance. We call it, if you can't fix it feature it architecture. That may present some issues down the road at scale. We don't have time to go into that in detail but suffice it to say that ServiceNow runs on its own cloud. So it's not running on a hyper scale cloud. Yeah. Good news it doesn't have to pay it through that. The bad news is, has got to manage all that infrastructure. It's basically be a cloud supply supplier but it doesn't do multi-tenant which means fundamentally, it has a more expensive cost structure. Okay. Let's turn our attention to what's happening on-prem with some of the big legacy names. Here's the same X Y chart with some of the big names that have a presence on-prem. First you can see VMware and Cisco, Oracle, Dell, IBM and HP. Look at them on the horizontal scale. They've got a large market share of presence in the ETR dataset. Unlike the larger SaaS companies however, none is above that magic 40% net scoreline. Pure, Dell's laptop business, Red Hat, OpenShift. They're above the line with Nutanix just about there at the line. The other major laptop players, Lenovo and HPQ showing momentum from the whole remote work trend. And for context, we put in NetApp so you can get a sense of where they're at. Pure beat its earnings last week but only grew 2% last quarter. Now remember the ETR survey, this is a forward-looking survey. So this potentially bodes well for the companies that are above that 40% line. Okay. So most so sorry of the companies on this chart only IBM and Oracle, those two own a public cloud. And we'll dig further into that in a moment, but virtually every name shown here, even Oracle has a mandate to redefine cloud. Meaning it has to put forth in our view in North star vision and execute on it. That will unify the experience between on-prem, hybrid cloud, public clouds, cross clouds and the edge. Now I say even Oracle, because in my view, Oracle is in a stronger position than the others, because of it's more coherent software architecture. Now the other companies on this chart, they have to architect a platform that abstracts the underlying complexity of clouds, leverage cloud native tooling in the respective public clouds. Connect on-prem infrastructure and build a layer, that stretches out and accommodates edge workloads. I think Oracle will follow suit and is actually ahead of most in a narrower context, i.e hybrid. But it doesn't have to race toward this vision. It can sit back as it often does, watch everyone else fumble around and make mistakes. And then Oracle will keep investing in R&D, watch the market, you know make its own experimental mistakes, and then enter the market and act like we invented it. Now, Cisco will come at this from a strong networking and security perspective. And it has a nice story on programmable infrastructure with Cisco DevNet. But unfortunately it does not own VMware as does Dell, but Dell is in the middle of a fairly remarkable journey. And it will be interesting to see what happens with the VMware spin-out and the cozy commercial relationship that Dell is structuring with VMware as you know, and as we've reported, Dell has used VMware's cash for a lot of this restructuring. And so we'll see, as it exits the current phase and enters a new phase, how it will be able to pursue that vision. It's going to be, whatever it does it's going to be much different than that vertically integrated Oracle approach, which of course brings me to IBM. Potentially Red Hat with OpenShift is the most powerful card in the deck right now. OpenShift I mean, it's open it's everywhere. It has momentum as we showed. And I like their position. My concern is IBM, IBM is still unwinding and restructuring its business. And it's taking a long time as we've seen, with its outsourcing business. And now the Watson health assets, Irvine is continuing that downsizing trend that we saw under Ginny, shedding non-strategic businesses that don't fit, Irvine has a lot to deal with. And I want to point out that this idea of an abstraction layer across clouds is not trivial. First, all of these companies have to stop being so defensive about the public cloud. To a large extent, VMware and Red Hat have found a happy place. But in my view, they all should be thanking AWS, Azure, and Google for building out this great global distributed system, that they can leverage and build on top of. And second, this is going to be expensive. And Cisco, Dell VMware, IBM, they're all really stretched thin from an R&D perspective. They a lot of mouths to feed across the portfolio. So is HPE stretched thin, and it doesn't have the R&D budget at less than $2 billion annually. So my concern is that we're going to have lots of complexity across these obstructions layers by vendor. Now maybe the good news for companies. This may be good news for companies like Hashi or specialists with a vision to do this within a domain like a clumial, or a vast data, but this is big, and they are small. So it's going to take the better part of a decade to play out. Now, let's take a quick look at the cloud players. OMG when I saw that article in Barron's last weekend my mouth dropped. What a headline and it had this illustration of a stout Larry Ellison rising above the clouds. Here's a picture of the ETR data for the cloud players. It's the same X, Y plotting or net score and market share. If you follow this program, you know we believe there are four and only four hyper scale cloud players, with the resources to compete and differentiate as horizontal infrastructure players, which really is how we view the origination of modern cloud computing. AWS created it with S3 and EC2 with 2006. Those four are AWS and Azure, which have a large lead over the pack. Google cloud and Alibaba. And you can see we've circled the on-prem pack which comprises Oracle and IBM along with Dell VMware. And we snuck Google just stuck them at the edge of that circle because the differentiate they're cozying up to companies with strong enterprise sales teams and Google's, they're smart, they're patient. And so we, by no means, count them out. They're spending like mad and they have a lot of cash. They've done some really interesting open source things with containers. And so, you know, no doubt they're a player, but they are behind. Now in that on-prem pack, IBM and Oracle they actually own their own public clouds. IBM, they acquired soft layer which was a bare metal hosting company at the time to get IBM into the game. They retooled the platform over several years. Now here's the thing, try and unpack IBM's cloud business looking at its financial or in earnings reports. It's just a mess. I hope Irvine cuts the nonsense and actually develops and reports a set of metrics that are meaningful to cloud observers and IBM observers, because the way IBM reports its cloud business today is opaque and it's nonsense. It's frankly embarrassing to the company. It needs to end sooner rather than later is fundamentally meaningless to any observers. Now observers of cloud. If you care about the big chunk of whatever then maybe it has meaning. Now Oracle for its part, they announced the public cloud years ago, its version of one datto cloud was crap. And the company, they hired a bunch of really smart cloud engineers and they spent a lot of money to fix that. Now neither IBM nor Oracle have the CapEx resources of the big four, not even close, yet they'll build out data centers and yes they'll have a play, but they're different and that's okay. Now in the Barron's article on Oracle, the author was quite positive on Oracle, noting that quote, "On a recent earnings call CEO Safra Catz said that Oracle cloud infrastructure revenue was up 139% for the quarter". So, (laughs) we have really no sense or a stake in the ground is to up from what? Anyway, noting further the author said, quote, "Alas! Oracle doesn't break out OCI sales and comps can be messy". Hmm, indeed. Oracle is hiding the ball on OCI, that's because if they did break it out, which by the way they used to report, AIS revenue explicitly, but if they did break it out, they would only be highlighting that they are a minor player in AIS. Further, the article continues, quote, "Catz says that hers is the only tech company that has both a global cloud and a full set of enterprise applications". Unquote, bingo. There it is. That's why Oracle is in a better position than many of or most of the on-prem players listed in this chart. By the way, I would argue that Microsoft has a pretty impressive set of enterprise applications in a fairly global cloud. But what Safra is talking about is applications that support the world's most mission critical work. And when it comes to that, Oracle is number one. Don't fool yourself and get caught up in the Oracle lock-in and high pricing narrative, thinking that they're going to get crushed. They're not. Oracle is the best in the mission critical workload game. There is no one better, period. But guys, come on. The big four last year grew 41% and accounted for $86 billion in AIS revenue, AKA real cloud revenue. And they're going to surpass $115 billion this year combined. Real cloud companies don't grow in the single digits today. So talk to me when we reach equilibrium on that front. Okay. So let's wrap by looking at what does a cloud company look like in the 2020s? Now, I'm not saying that the rest of the pack shouldn't redefine cloud they should. But I hope we can all agree by now that modern day cloud computing was defined in business terms by AWS. They are number one in cloud computing, make no mistake. However, AWS is bringing the cloud into the wheelhouse of the on-prem players, cleverly saying that it's bringing AWS to the edge and it looks at the data centers. Just another edge node is great positioning but that is not trivial. Just look it out posts and how AWS has had to evolve its pricing strategy in terms, can't just turn it off like you can, the public cloud. I have an entire rant on all the, SaaS service transformations. It's really interesting to watch as AWS goes out, and the on-prem players come in and go hybrid. I got a lot of thought on what's happening there both in terms of SaaS, which I think is an outdated pricing model, and the infrastructure as a service players that are really getting into this game, we would love to do a session on that sometime. And it's a real disruption I think coming. Anyway, AWS competitors should absolutely try to redefine cloud. By AWS moving to the edge, it's opened up the door to that possibility. Microsoft is obviously in the best position I think by far here. They've earned the right and I'll never accuse them of cloud washing. Google, they got some work to do in this regard, but they probably have the largest physical cloud infrastructure in the world. As I've said, they just need to pull their heads out of their ads and quadruple down on cloud. But this idea of abstracting away the underlying complexity of the cloud, leveraging cloud native capabilities and building on top of the shoulders of the cloud giants such as David Floyer has expressed in this chart, moving from stateless to state full, integrating across clouds, advancing automation not only through the stack, but across domains and ultimately using metadata to govern where workloads should live or be moved, be disintegrated and recombined with low latency and be highly secured. I look at this, I think about this and I say one there is this technically feasible and smart techies tell me yes, so I keep trying to dig here for signs and I definitely see some movement in this direction. And two, I don't think any one vendor is going to do this themselves. They're not going to, it's not going to be owned by one company. I think what's going to happen is you'll get successes within layers of the stack. I mean, think about Snowflakes data cloud. We're going to see that for storage. See it for backup, data management, security maybe security within different domains. You see endpoint and identity access management. Maybe that cloud comes together as cloud security. You see it in applications, but without clear standards, it's going to be a challenge. And with respect to my friends at Snowflake, we might even see it in database sometime LOL, but look you all have a lot of work to do. And to my CIO friends, you know the drill much better than I, technology is going to keep relentlessly coming at you and you can deal with that. It's the people and the change management in the culture. Those are your bigger challenges, but don't screw up the tech. Okay. Thanks for watching. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcasts, and please subscribe to the series, we appreciate that. Check out ETR's website at ETR.plus sorry, ETR.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me on Twitter at DVellante that's @DVellante or comment, excuse me on my LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, be well, get the jab if you have an opportunity. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Lisa Martin, John Furrier is my co-host, and we are at Boomi World 2019 in Washington, D.C. Very pleased to be joined by the founder of Boomi and the co-founder and CEO of Guru, Rick Nucci. Hey, Rick. >> Hello. >> Lisa: Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, this is very cool setup. >> Lisa: Yeah, isn't it?! >> Rick: Yeah. >> So this is a founder of Boomi. It's pretty cool to have a celebrity on our stage. >> Rick: I'm not a celebrity. (laughs) >> (laughs) Talk to us about all that back in the day back in Philadelphia when you had this idea for what now has become a company that has 9,000+ customers in 80+ countries. >> Yeah, I'm beyond proud of this team and just how well they have done and made this business into what it is today. Yeah, way back in 2007, we were really looking at the integration market, and back then, cloud was really an unknown future. It was creeping up the Hype Cycle of the Gartner. Hype Cycle's my favorite thing they do. A lot of people were dismissing it as a fad, and we were early adopters of cloud internally at Boomi. We were early users of Salesforce and NetSuite and just thought and made a bet and a lot of this stuff is luck as any founder will tell you, any honest founder will tell you. And recognize that, hey, if the world were to move to cloud, how would you actually think about the integration problem? Because it would be very different than how you would think about it in the on-prem days when you have everything in your own data center behind your own four walls. In this world, everything's different. Security's a huge deal, the way data moves and has to mediate between firewalls is a big deal. And none of these products are built like this and so, really wanted as a team, and I remember these early conversations and had the willingness to take a big bet and swing for the fences and what I mean by that is really build a product from the ground up in this new paradigm, new cloud, and take a bet and say, hey, if cloud does take off, this will be awesome for Boomi. If not, well, we'll be in the line of all the other startups that have come and gone. And I think we ended up in a good spot. >> Yeah, that's a great point, Rick, about the founders being honest. And a lot of it is hard work, but having a vision and making multiple bets and big bets. I remember, when EC2 came out, it was a startup dream, too, by the way. You could just purchase a data center. But it wasn't fully complete, it was actually growing very fast. More services were coming on, they were web services, so that was API-based concepts back then. When was the crossover point for you guys going, "okay, we got this, the bets are coming in. "We're going to double down, we're going to double down on this." What were some of those moments where you started to get visibility that was a good bet? And what did you do? >> Yeah, what it really was was the rise of SaaS, very specifically, and the rise of business applications that were being re-architected in the cloud. And everybody knew about Salesforce, but there weren't a lot of other things back then. And there was NetSuite and a handful of others, but then, you started to see additional business units start to build cloud, and you had, in the HR space, with success factors in Taleo and marketing automation space with Eloqua and Marketo. CRM space, we all know that story, e-commerce space procurement, and you start to see these best-of-breed products rise up which is amazing, but as that was happening, it was proliferating the integration problem. And so what became really clear to us, I think, as we were going through this and finding product market fit for Boomi, again, back in 2007, 2008, that was the pattern that emerged, like hey, every time someone buys one of these products, they are going to have to integrate 'cause you're talking about employee data, customer data. You have to integrate this with your other systems and that was going to create an opportunity for us and that was where we were like, okay, I think we're onto something. >> You know, to date, we've been doing theCUBE for 10 years. We made a big bet that people, authentic conversation would be a good bet, turns out it worked. We love it, things going great, but now, we're living in a world now that's getting more complex and I want to get your thoughts that Dave Vellante, myself, Stu who have been talking about how clouds changed and we were goofing on the Web 2.0 metaphor by saying, Cloud 1.0, Cloud 2.0. But I want to get your thoughts on how you might see this because, if you say Cloud 1.0 was Amazon, compute storage, AtScale, cloud NATO, all started there. Pretty straightforward if you're going to be born in the cloud, then you could work with some things there, but to bring multicloud and for enterprises to adopt with this integration challenge, Cloud 2.0 unveils some new things like, for instance, network management now is observability. Configuration management is now automation (chuckles). So you start to see things emerge differently in this Cloud 2.0 operating model. How do you see Cloud 2.0? Do you believe that, one, there's a Cloud 2.0 the way I said it, and if so, what is your version of what Cloud 2.0 would look like? >> Yeah, I think, yes, definitely think things are changing and the way that I think about it is that we're continuing to unbundle, and what I mean by unbundle is we're continuing to proliferate... Buyers are willing to buy and, therefore, we're continuing to proliferate relatively narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper capabilities and functionalities. And one big driver of that is AI, specifically, machine learning, and not the hypey stuff, but the real stuff. It's funny, man, when you compare, right now, AI, and what I was just talking about, it's the same thing all over again. It's Hype Cycle crawling up the thing, okay. But now, I think the recipe for good AI products that really do solve problems is that they're very intentionally narrow and they're very deep because they're gathering good training data and they're built to solve a very specific problem. So I think-- >> Like domain expertise, domain-specific-- >> Exactly, industry expertise, domain expertise, use case. If you're gathering training data about a knowledge worker, the data you'll gather is very different if you're a salesperson or an HR professional or an engineer. And I think the AI companies that are getting it right, are really dialed in and focused on that, so as a result, you see this proliferation of things that might be layered on top of big platforms like CRM's and technologies like Slack, which is creating a place for all this to come together, but you're seeing this unbundling where you're getting more and more kind of almost microservices, not quite, but very fine-tuned, specific things coming together. >> So machine learning, I totally agree with you, it's definitely hype, but the hardcore machine learning has a math side to it and a cognition side, cognitive learning thing. But, also, data is a common thread here. I mentioned domain-specific. >> Rick: All about the data. >> So, if data's super important, you want domain expertise which I agree with, but also there's now a horizontal scalability with observation data. The more data you have, the better at machine learning. It may or may not, depending on what the context is, so you have contextual data, this is a (chuckles) hard thing. What's your view on this because this is where people maybe get caught around the axis of machine learning hype and not nearly narrowing on what their data thinking is. >> Rick: 100%. >> What's your--? >> 100%, I think people will tend to fall in the trap of focusing on the algorithms that they're building and not recognizing that, without the data, the algorithms are useless. Right? >> Lisa: Right. >> And that it's really about how, as a ML problem that you're trying to tackle. Are you gathering data that's good, high-quality, scalable, accurate, protected, and safe? Because now, for different reasons, but again, just like when we were moving to cloud, security and privacy are utmost important because, for any AI to do its job well, it has to gather a lot of data out of the enterprise and store it and train off of that. >> It's interesting a lot of the cloud play. I mean sales was just a unicorn right out of the gate and they were a pioneer, that's what it is. They were cloud before cloud was cloud as we know it today. But you see a lot of things like the marketing automation cloud platform. It's a marketing cloud, I got a sales cloud. Almost seem too monolithic and you see people trying to unbundle that. I think you're right. Or break it apart 'cause the data is stuck in this full-stack model because, if you agree with your sets, horizontal scalability and vertical integration is the architecture. Technically, that's half-stack. (chuckles) >> Yes, yes. >> John: So half-stack developers are evaluable now. >> Totally, and yes, I like that term. The other problem that I think you're getting at is tendency isolation of that data. A lot of things were built with that in mind, meaning that the best AI you're going to build is only going to be what you can derive from one customer's set of data. Whereas, now, people are designing things intentionally such that the more customers that are using the thing, the better and smarter it gets. And so, to your point about monolithic, I think the opportunity that the next wave of startups have is that they can design in that world and that just means that their technology will get better faster 'cause it'll be able to learn from more data and-- >> This hasn't been changing a lot in cloud. I want to get your thoughts because you guys at Boomi here are on a single-tenant instance model because the collective intelligence of the data benefits everybody as more people come in. That's a beautiful fly, we'll feel a lot like Amazon model to me. But the old days, multi-tenancy was the holy grail. Maybe that came from the telcos or whatever, hosting world. What's your view on single-tenant instance on a SaaS business versus, say, multiten... There's trade-offs and pros and cons. What's your opinion, where do you lean on this one? >> Yeah, I mean we, both Boomi and Guru, so two eras worth or whatever. You have to have some level of tenancy isolation for some level of what you do. And, at Boomi, what we did is we separated the sensitive, private data. Boomi has customers processing payroll through its product, so very, very sensitive stuff absolutely has to be protected and isolated per tenant, and Boomi and Guru is signing up for that, and the clauses that we sign to are security agreements. But what you can decouple from that is more of the metadata or the attributes about that data and that customer, so Boomi, you're referring to, launched way back when Boomi Suggest which basically learned. As all the people were building data maps, connecting different things together, Boomi could learn from all that and go, oh, you're trying to do this. Well, these however many other customers, let me suggest how these maps are drawn, and Guru, we're following a very similar pattern, so Guru, we store knowledge which also tends to be IP for a company and so, yes, we absolutely adhere to the fact that only a handful of our employees can ever see that stuff, and that's 'cause they're in devops, and they needed to keep things running, but all the tenants are protected from one another. No one could ever leak to another one. But there are things about organization and structure and tagging and learnings you can get that are not that sensitive stuff that does make the product better from an AI perspective the more people that use it. And so, I don't know that I'm giving you one or another, but I think it does come down to how you intentionally design your data to it. >> John: Decoupling is the critical piece. >> Absolutely. >> This is the cloud architecture. Decouple, use API's to connect highly cohesive elements, and the platform can be cohesive if shared. >> Absolutely, and you can still get all the benefits of scalability and elastic growth and, yeah, 100%. >> Along that uncoupling line, tell us a little bit briefly about what Guru is and then I want to talk about some of the use cases. I know I'm a big Slack user; you probably are too, John. Talk to us about what you're doing there, but just give our folks a sense of what Guru is and all that good stuff. >> Sure, I mean Guru's, in some ways, like Boomi, rethinking a very old problem, in this case, it's knowledge management. That's a concept we've talked about for a long time and I think, these days, it has really become something that does impact a company's ability to scale and grow reliably, so very specifically, what we do is we bring the knowledge that employees need to do their job to them when they need it. So imagine if you're a customer support agent and you're supporting Spotify, you're an employee of Spotify. And I write in and I want to know about the new Hulu partnership. As an agent, you use Guru to look up and give me that answer and you don't have to go to a portal, you don't have to go to some other place to do that. Guru's sitting there right next to your ticket or your chat as you're having it in real time, saying, hey, there's asking about Hulu. This is the important things you want to know and talk about. And then the other half of that is, we make sure that that doesn't go still. The classic problem with knowledge products is the information, when you're talking about something like product knowledge, changes all the time. And the world we live in is moving faster and faster and faster, so we used to ship product once a year, once every two years. Now we ship product every month, sometimes couple times a month. >> Can you get a Guru bot for our journalism and our Cube hosts? We can be real time. >> Hey! >> I would be happy to do that. >> That'd be great! >> (laughs) Guru journalist. >> Actually, you're able to set it right in there where your ears are-- >> Lisa: I'll take it. >> Just prompting you, exactly. So, and then you asked about Slack, that's a really great partner for us. They were an early investor in the company. They're a customer, but together, if you think about where a lot of knowledge exchange happens in Slack, it's, hey, I need to know something. I think I can go slack John 'cause I think he'll know the answer. He knows about this. And you're like the 87th person who's asked me that same thing over again. Well, with Guru being integrated into Slack, you can just say, "Guru, give them the answer." And you don't have to repeat yourself. And that expert fatigue problem is a real thing. >> John: That's a huge issue. >> Absolutely. >> And, as your company grows and more and more people are, oh, poor John's getting buried for being the expert, one of the reasons he got you there. Now he's getting burned out and buried from it. And so we seek to solve that problem and then, post-Guru, a company will scale faster, they'll onboard their employees faster, they'll launch products better, 'cause everyone will know what to talk about-- >> It's like a frequently asked questions operating system. >> Rick: Exactly. >> At a moment's notice. >> Technology, right? And making it living 'cause all those FAQ's change all the time. >> And that's the important part too is keeping it relevant, 24 by 7. >> Rick: Absolutely. >> Which is difficult. >> Contextual data analysis is really hard. What's the secret sauce? >> The secret sauce is that we live where you work. The secret sauce is that we focus very specifically on specific workflows like that customer support agent and so, by knowing what you're doing and what ticket you're working on and what chat you're having with a customer, Guru can be anticipatory over time and start to say, "hey, you probably "want to talk to him about this," and bring that answer to you. It's because we live where you work. And that was frankly accidental in a lot of ways. We were trying to solve the problem of knowledge living where you work, and then what we realized is, wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff that we can learn and give back to the customer about what problems they're solving and when they're using Guru and why, and that only makes the product better. So that's really, I think, the thing that, if you ask our typical customers, really gets them excited. They'll say, hey, because of Guru, I feel more confident when I'm on the phone, that I'm always going to give the right answer. >> That's awesome. >> I love hearing customers talk about or even have business leaders talk about some of the accidental discoveries or capabilities, but just how, over time, more and more and more value gets unlocked if you can actually, really extract value from that data. Last question, Rick, I need to know what's in a name? The name Boomi, the name Guru? >> Yes, well, I'll start with the less exciting answer which I always get asked about, which is Boomi, which is a Hindi word that means "earth" or "from the earth". And, sometimes, if you're ordering at the Indian restaurant, you'll see B-H-O-M-I and that might be the vegetables on the menu. That name came from an early employee of the company. I wish I could say that it had a connection to business (laughs). It really doesn't, it just was like, it looks cool, and people tend to remember the name. And honestly, there have been so many moments in the early, early days where we were like, should we change the name, it doesn't really. And we're like you know what? People tend to, it sticks with them, it's kind of exciting, and we kept it. Guru, on the flip side, one of our early employees came up with that name too, and I think she was listening to me talk about what we were doing and she's like, oh, that thing is like a guru to you. And so the brand promise is that you feel like a guru in your area of expertise within a company and that our product plays a relatively small role in you having that, feeling confident about that expertise. >> I love that, awesome. Rick, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE today, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the cute covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now okay welcome back everyone we are live in Las Vegas this is SiliconANGLE Mookie bonds to cube our footage and event coverage would go out to the event started sitteth on the noise i'm john furrier likos day volante our next guest is Jen Stroud senior director and general manager of the HR applications within service now a former customer now general manager welcome to the cube thank you great I get the service now shirt on the jersey of the number everything right I'm official how does it feel so give us a quick you know Darkseid is always a dark side but I won't say which one it is is they always say with the VCS you join the dark side when entrepreneurs join the VC ranks but in this case service now pumping on all cylinders just like a well-oiled machine with the fast side yeah fasten what's it like give us the perspective it's been tremendous that I've been to two knowledge events before but as a customer very different perspective on this side and it's been it's been fabulous very fast you move fast here you have to keep up but it's been wonderful for me to engage with the partners and the customers here to see all the great things that customers are doing with the platform and with our product and also understanding where they want to see us take the the product going forward as a culture like its service now as a company you're in there ask you there for profit yeah kid jittery revenue from customers and I have a product they bring to the customers to get paid for that what's it like internally was the culture like what's the people like it's it's been incredible to be a part of this culture and a little I wasn't what I expected I knew it was going to be very fast-paced but coming in and being able to rely on everyone to make sure you're successful everybody is interested in everybody being successful and I think that starts from Frank on down he's created that culture and so that's what it's about everyone is staring in the same direction and we're I've always said in Silicon Valley you know people you know high fliers come goes a lot of love you come in and out but building a sustainable business is really haha yeah so you gotta give props to Frank's loop and talk about what you've learned Massey HR managers are out struggling this is in the press now small medium-sized businesses you see all kinds of certainly in Silicon Valley where I live you know eight lawsuits coming from just not keeping your eye on the ball little things like yeah Oh someone's offended in a meeting boom lawsuit I've been discriminating against so there's all kinds of stuff happening just by having shot eh our practices so talk about what that means why that's happening is it just because they're lazy or the games change the technologies change what's going on with in the HR application space I think some other people have said it in my colleague Eric hammer who's a solution consultant now leads the enterprise practice said it HR is kind of a 10 to 15 well five to ten years behind IT they're finally understanding that you can't manage with spreadsheets and email anymore and we're seeing it I don't care the the size of the organization or what their annual revenues are there are many organizations struggling with the same thing how do they provide a better experience for their employees and how do they do it in a consistent way and so that's we're seeing it out there the opportunities large and small with with customers it's very consistent Frank Frank mitch is a real time piece what's your perspective on that I mean being real time means service and complaints and managing that I'm sorry Dave I know oh absolutely i mean that's you want to be able to support your employees in a way that they're used to being supported in interacting outside of work right and yet especially the younger generation they come in and they want to work with a company that understands how to how to do that not you know managing through emails and so they want to come in with a hit company that you know gets it so service now is able to provide that type of experience so the state of Technology in HR is changing quite dramatically we were talking I was talking earlier guys from KPMG you know peoplesoft gets acquired by oracle it sets off this chain reaction taleo success factors work day comes into the market space and so the tech base is changing and then all of a sudden service now starts to play and people are confused people asked you yesterday yeah alist me who are you competing with with work day and of course no although you know but we've been asked eight or nine times already I'm just two days you'll continue to be asked you know and then you said something just recently to John that people they can't you know manage effectively with spreadsheets and the like so there's a lot of confusion because there's a lot of ton of technology that's begin going into a human humble management for decades there's some new cool cloud texts coming out technologies work days just you know one example successfactors many others and then and then service now with service management tied to the HRP so what's happening on the technology substrate how would you describe the changes that are going on it's it's amazing I mean they're the companies are understanding very quickly and you look at companies that have done results from their 2014 surveys of large leading HR organizations they understand that they have to to change and to leverage SAS technology in order to be able to to keep up so you like you were indicating we don't have any plan to compete with the workdays or the essay peas or PeopleSoft out there are our whole philosophy is let's figure out how we complement what they do and give like Frank said yesterday and I love what he said let's give let's give our customers choices let's give them good choices that they can they can have a good choice what they want to do ok so you're an HR pro so that's the many people in our audience have the same question that you've been asked nine times today yep you're not competing with the the transaction component that is work day you don't go to service now to to change my you know data about my self but we could if you want to though okay so we could be that front end so I mean again that's Ultima you start there you say yes sir then that make sense yeah go through service now so every request but we're not going to store that we're not we're not the system of Ragnar the system of record there that's the difference mm-hmm right okay but now love flip it so you're not going to go compete with with work day no but if I'm work day and I'm saying wow this company's service now is doing really well they grow in a 50 plus percent a year they got this great market cap maybe I should start doing some of that stuff now they could yeah but they're not going to do the other things it's hell's force like Frank said the other day well hey I talked to penny off all the time you know we're birds of a feather in a lot of ways we're developing apps they're developing absolutely a company like service now with a market tam of 40-plus billion you're playing in a lot of places especially when I have a platform that can do anything that's right now where do you see that all going well I mean in my view when I look at what I want to provide HR leaders I want to provide them out of the box a product that meets the majority of their needs and delivering services to their employees I and I want it to continue to and will expand on this and future releases look and feel the great user interface because it's all about the employee experience with HR IT doesn't care about the employee experience HR cares about the employee experience so really really working on that user interface and that experience and and the workflows for me the the possibilities are limitless what is it you and the work days of comprehensive system but optimizing workflows is interesting because there's so many different workflows in HR so there's that kind that stands like the strategy just picking it's almost like I Tina sends pick a few critical workflows could be trendy hey we got this new law comes out or longboarding of course is the big one that everybody's talking yeah so what is those use cases what are the key ones you guys are well I mean you have leave of absence as a big use case every HR organization and and it's it's one that can be very sticky it can also bleed into legal and other areas of the business so leave leave of absence managing those leave of absence requests some basic ones that are easy to ition reimbursement employment verification really standard that we that we will be offering out of the box too to our customers a pto request managing time off those are all yes you're lying fruit to use automation automation the other ones are just more yeah it's rewire or something or you know could be exposure that's right yep what percent of companies in your experience do performance reviews I just want to ask you as an HR pro ah too many too many too many do you think it's a I reproductive I think the so this is another probably great reason why I joined this organization is in Frank's and Shelley's philosophy on performance reviews and it's not formal the way we consider it formal or HR many HR organizations do with you know the whole performance review and setting goals he really believes that that that whole responsibility lives with the manager and HR is there to support the manager and I love that philosophy but we have to as a as we're developing our product understand that unfortunately this organization don't share Frank's philosophy ok so you're saying that many organizations have the HR oh they do the performance I feel like a neophyte I didn't know that what that's insane absolutely would you have the HR department it is performing well and i and i don't necessarily i don't i don't agree with it but it absolutely i would majority of organizations HR still manages the whole performance whether the sense that they sent a syntax they had the structure and process yeah which controls the behaviors of Manokotak attendance it's a whole they don't do the review submitted yourself they don't do their reviews but they they set the schedule and you must have your reviews done by this time and you must miss assurance icon the dentist makes your teeth pulled yeah basically and then they're constantly pounding on managers when they don't get it done to get it done get it done get it done i mean that's that's the way it was in my previous company no no offense but it just does it's not it doesn't work well what does frank with what what what Frank's philosophy and Shelley's philosophy is here and that is managers are responsible for the performance of their team and you reward people for their performance and then comes in the last place already no prize for you yeah so I want to ask question about systems of engagement versus a record this comes up a lot and that I look at it a little bit differently as I don't look it from the HR perspective mother from the day big data side what's your view of it from an HR perspective what is the definitions of those systems of engagement systems of record I can also imagine so I look at it and this from this is the my philosophy when I was on the customer side I wanted to create that one stop shop where my employees could come where they knew exactly i took all the guesswork out for them here's where you come to do everything now ultimately they may be the they may be interacting and engaging with a form and service now and that was going to feed being an integration to our hrs is system which was oracle that's fine but they don't need to know that for them I wanted to create that standard look and feel standard system of engagement that was predictable for them easy to use and that's really what you want to provide employees you want to make it easy that's an employee that's the app that's user interface user experience that's right flows and clicks yep click stream where all the information is ultimately stored is a whole different matter and not necessarily important to me other than I want to be able to integrate with those systems so bad you I bed ux taking that to the next level means you don't get the data you need for the systems records so the engagement date is pretty critical engagement is is absolutely critical if you want your your employees to use it if it if it is a bad you I if it isn't a good experience they're going to go I'm not going to use this and they're going to they're going to the employees make themselves heard very loudly so they'll let you know if it's a bad experience so that creating that great system of engagement where it's easy to use and they know how to use it that's important about mobile as it relates specifically an HR context that's the conversation we're having are you happy with where you are with mobile is there a lot more work to do there very happy with where we are but as with everything I think we can continue to enhance what we offer it's absolutely a necessity in HR as you think about where many of the employees make their benefit decisions it's not at the office on their lunch break it's at home with their with their families and so they may be you know looking for information and the knowledge base or making a benefit selection on their mobile device at home not at the office so being able to provide that capability on a mobile or you know iPad device is very critical she has talked a lot about you know the affinity with work day of course I know an eel and Frank you know birds of a feather and friendly but there's a lot of other HR platforms out there oracle SI p many others what about those we also so right now we're focusing just because the market there's a lot of shift to an interest in work days Oh cloud its cloud yeah and but other the other ones are also coming up with they have cloud as well as record yeah yeah so so with the Geneva will have a two-way integration with worth work day to make that easier for customers but then we'll be focusing on additional out-of-the-box integrations with those other hris systems as well so does it have to be cloud-based I mean everybody's cloud now everybody is just like it better because you're why it's this is part of the mantra it's easier it's easier for you it's easier for the customers it doesn't action okay yeah this is a big so what's your goal now you're in there get your running shoes on three feet in a cloud of dust making things happen to get some teammates to support you servicenow yeah what's next what's what are you gonna work on what's your plan well we just don't we're still not known enough in the HR industry as a trusted platform in HR so we've got our work cut out for us there and so you know it is about what we're building in the product that's going to help us but it's also going to help us getting out at HR tech that's coming here mandalay bay and octo we'll be here other events working with analysts as well to help them understand what we're doing and really it's going to be about creating more success and a great customer base so that you know this time next year I hope to you know be able to say you know we really are one of those vendors that HR looks to first and not you know us trying to get in there to have the because I think once they do and once they look at what we have to offer it's it's it's very intriguing for them but we really want to be you know on top of their mind it sounds like your strategy then is to say hey you know what you big pickle the big decisions we're going to come in create some value pretty nimble pretty agile land and expand and if that grows it grows and not really mutually exclusive to some other platform no and in we absolutely are concentrating right now on where we are very successful so we have a lot of great customers already on the IT side so they all have HR departments so we're absolutely focused there in 2015 but beyond we really want to expand and be first okay Jamie keep a track and we'll be following you if you need any help let us know we go stroll at the cube to HR tech con and in October it's the cube we are live here at Las Vegas extracting the scene from the noise shared that with you I'm genre Dave vellante we'll be right back after this short break of the next guest stay tuned off