(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, everyone. This is Lisa Martin, live in Miami. I'm at IFS Unleashed 2022. We've had a great day talking with IFS executives, customers, partners. We're going to be having another great conversation next. I have two guests here on set with me, Sarah Nicastro joins us, the founder Future Field of Service, and VP of Customer Engagement at IFS, and Roel Rentmeeters, the VP of Digital Transformation at Munters. Welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, here we are surrounded by about 1500 or so people. The buzz in here is, people are ready to come back. They're just ready to come back, have these conversations with their peers and their colleagues at IFS which is great to to see and to feel, right? Sarah, let's start with you, your role, founder Future of Field Service. Talk to me about what that is and what the genesis was. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, a lot of what I do is actually what you're doing and interviewing folks, creating content. I was in the media before I joined IFS, almost four years ago in service specifically. So service, you've probably heard a lot today about moment of service. Service is a huge focus area for IFS and Future of field service is thought leadership resource that IFS allowed me to come on board and create, not only for customers, but for the broader service community. So, I write articles related to service trends host a weekly podcast. Over time with the company as I got to engage with more and more customers, and there's so much value in them connecting with one another. You see that here, like you said, people are so excited to be together, but fostering those connections within our customer community, allowing them to get to know each other, share our best practices, as well as making sure that we're bringing the voice of customer always into IFS. So, that's what I do on the customer engagement side. >> I love it. The voice of the customer is invaluable. And of all the conversations that I've had today, it's so clear how strategic and strong the relationships are that IFS has with its customers. Roel, talk to us a little bit about Munters, you're a customer and talk about the relationship that you've established with IFS and the team. >> Yeah, with pleasure. So, Munters is a Swedish company. We are a global leader in sustainable air treatment solutions. So, think about deunification, cooling, but in big industrial applications. I am the VP of digital services or digital transformation. Prior to that, until very recently, I was a VP of services. And we started that standardization roadmap five years ago, six years ago. We work very closely with IFS. We're implementing a new apps version as an ERP for Munters. And so that servitization moving from additional services to outcome-based services has the digital aspect. So, my move is a natural flow with that. >> How long has Munters been in business? >> It's founded in 1955. >> Oh wow. >> It's a Swedish company, quite traditional still in their manufacturing and delivering services. But the shift is there. >> Talk to me about that shift and how IFS has been an accelerant of that. It's challenging for legacy businesses to evolve and transform. Obviously in this day and age, you don't have a choice. But talk to us about the digital transformation of the business so that you can deliver more to your customers and how IFS has been foundational to that. >> Yeah. So, so that servitization roadmap eventually it is something that our customers want. We captured it. Customers want remote management, they want connected devices, but that alone will not bring you servitization. You need to have your strong foundation in the back with a good process, a good system that can support that process. And that's where IFS came in for us. We are a long time IFS user, so, we are on the eighth version in Europe of app eight, but we are doing a new implementation to 10, and this way, a global implementation with clean data that needs to be cleansed, new processes, end to end processes. And so IFS is our partner to support us in this roadmap along with other developments and things IFS is doing, think about remote management, something we've implemented during COVID and that perfectly aligns with that road towards servitization. >> Yeah, I was just going to say Roel and I were on a panel discussion earlier today with two other customers, and all different industries, but when we said what is the focus of the business they all said servitization or outcomes based services. Me too. Me too, me too, right? So, it's a journey that a lot of our customers are on looking at how they differentiate through service, how they move away from being a provider of products or things, and someone that their customers can trust to provide peace of mind, uptime, outcomes, experiences, things like that. >> It's all about outcomes. And we're hearing more and more about servitization. It's not a new concept. The term is somewhat newer to some of these conversations. But we're seeing a lot of businesses especially in light of COVID pivot in that direction and they need a partner that they can trust like IFS to help them get there. Sarah, let's talk more about customer engagement. What are some of the different facets that need to be considered? You guys, IFS has expertise in five verticals which I love the vertical specialization there. But talk to us about some of those facets that make customer engagement successful. >> Yeah, so I think you're absolutely right. So we have our five industries that we focus heavily on, and that is where most of our customer engagement has and does reside, right? So each industry has its own group of customers that get together weigh in on how IFS is innovating, what they need from the company and their respective industries, etc. What I'm focused on, and probably a lot of it is just based on my background. I mentioned on the panel there was a lot of head nods and me-too, me-too. That's because there are also elements of innovation and change that are happening across industries that our customers care a lot about. So what I'm working on at the moment is introducing sort of another layer of customer engagement where we're also fostering those cross industry more innovation-centered conversations so that we can not only better understand what our customers are focused on there, but also allow them to connect and learn from one another. >> I love that. There's so much power and potential. Roel, talk to us about that from your perspective, the opportunity. You mentioned, Sarah, the panel that you guys were on earlier today, but talk to us about the opportunity that IFS is giving you to engage with your peers in other industries, but also for you to learn and get takeaways from them. That's got to be pretty unique from a technology partner perspective. >> That definitely is. And the Future of Field Service, it's one of those four where I think we share so much knowledge, not just while we are sitting together and having our talks with Sarah, also individually we connected with each other. Companies that are also Swedish based like Tetra Park, etc, So, there's kind of bonds that we can see. But it's true, we are learning from each other also because some are maybe a bit more advanced than others in this area. So we can learn, not just around how they do their processes, how they find technicians on the market which is very scarce today and very difficult. How do you retain them? But also, what are you experiencing during your implementation?? What is your partner that are... What are pitfalls that you have discovered since you were there? Would you go to cloud or would you still wait in APP 10? So we share that knowledge to each other and we learn a lot from each other, which is something I like. I also like the fact that IFS is a very customer-centric company, as we mentioned before, the fact that you have changed advisory boards where the voice of the customer is going to be important, where you can feed back or IFS feeds back trends and things they see going forward where we can also say, but, "Would it not be better that the user interface for a technician who just wants to do this and this and this is simpler than what you offer today. So, it's a win-win situation for both of us. >> It's a collaboration. >> Yeah, I like it. >> It should be. And I'm really passionate about what what I do, but to be on sessions with a group of customers and have them say, "I'm going to call you later because I want to know more about how you did this, or can we connect?" And to see those connections happen, it's great to have events like this and they have been on hold, but ideally happen every year or year and a half. But to keep those connections going continuously is really important to me. >> Well, the innovations that IFS can span from just those connections alone is infinite, right? I mean, your mind can wander with all of the different things that can come out of that. Sarah, talk a little bit more about... We often talk about the voice of the customer. It's incredibly powerful. I always think it's the most objective opinion, but one of the things that I think I was learning earlier today is it's not just about the voice of the customer. It's taking the insights from those customers into the company, into the development of the technologies to then be able to fuel customer-driven changes. Talk about that as a one of the focuses that IFS has. >> Yeah, I mean, not only we, but our customers are talking a lot more about outside in innovation, right? An inside out model does not work today. And so, that's really what the focus is. And there's so many parallels between what we're focused on, what our customers are focused on, right? And so, I think voice of the customer, it's always good to have a quantitative measure where you're doing surveys, you're understanding what is your NBS, how do your customers feel, are they satisfied, etc? But it's also very important to have more of a qualitative or more intimate forum to have those deeper discussions to really get into some of the details that, to Roel's point, can then influence. Okay, well, we haven't quite thought about it that way. The more you have those discussions, the more you can notice what those common challenges or opportunities are so that when you are putting effort into our own evolution and modernization, we can make sure that's geared toward the the impact our customers need. >> Right. That's critical. It's all about outcomes. Customers need to move faster and faster and faster these days, right? I think one of the things that was in very short supply during the pandemic was patients and tolerance. And I don't know that it's going to come back. I think we are... >> I've never had it personally. (Lisa and Sarah laugh) >> I had a little bit of it, but I think the consumerization of tech, we expect these experiences in our professional world to be as easy as going on Amazon and buying whatever we want. We also want the brands to know enough about us where it's not creepy, but make it personalized to some degree, have that intimate relationship with me that's good enough to get me the outcome that I'm looking for. We all have that in our personal lives, but it flows into our business lives as well. So you're dealing with customers that probably have gotten more demanding as a result. >> I think you're absolutely right. And at the same time, not all customers want to go into that entire outcome-based direction. So, but what I like about it is, if you can do outcome-based service, you can also accommodate those customers and the service they want without having the outcome, think about as a lay based service or those kind of things because your organization and your systems and your processes are ready to do this. It's actually part of it. So, that voice of the customer is for us important enough to know it's not one thing that we should create. It's not one service offering. It depends on what kind of customers you are. Look at data center customers for which we do a lot of cooling, they are scared to hell that that thing would be brought down because it would endanger their entire data center. They don't want to connect, but they want to have certain data that they can see inside their environment and that they can pass on to us. So, you need to accommodate all those things. So, your voice of customer is extremely important. >> You mentioned, Lisa, that we've been talking about servitization for quite a while, right? And it's because it involves so many layers of change within a business, right? And so, it's really more of a journey, a continuum. And to Roel's point, companies need to be able to address what their customers need at different points. Some may want to remain on a CapEx model and some may want to move to an outcomes model. We also need to be able to address what our customers need on a bit of a continuum, which is what we're working toward with IFS cloud, is being able to meet people where they are and give them what they need that can grow with them as they grow with their customers. >> And that's absolutely essential for a good partnership and that makes for those moments of service to happen at the end of the day to that end user, whether it's an airline or whatnot. IFS cloud, and we have a couple minutes left, but IFS cloud was launched only 18 months ago and I was in the keynote this morning and Christian was actually here on the show with me too, 400,000 plus users in 18 months, that's growing pretty quickly. What's been some of the feedback from the customer side, and we'll get your perspective, Roel, as well? >> I don't have cloud yet, so we are implementing APP 10. Why? Because we signed up with IFS two years ago. At that time it was not yet there. And we think now let's first do this and then we can move to cloud. But it's not that we will not move to cloud. It's something we will do eventually. I like the fact that IFS thinks of having everything in one rather than having the different pieces, which made it also for me personally very difficult to make a choice. Do I go for the standalone version of the field service, or do I take the one that is embedded in the ERP? What is the difference between those two? Is there functionalities that I'm going to miss if I choose one or the other? So, the fact that it will be all together, it makes it easier also to add on later on like customer service or the customer ports or all those kind of things. So, I like that concept. So, I'm very curious to hear from peers here that have done the implementation like the Tetre Pack, how's it going? What is their feeling? I'm very curious. >> Well, I imagine at this kind of event, you're going to learn just that. >> Yep. (Lisa chuckles) >> You were going to say something, Sarah. >> Yeah, I was just going to say, I think it's a really good point that you mentioned with all of the things we're used to in our consumer lives, we want simplicity. Having complex technology stacks is at odds with delivering simplicity to the customer, right? And so, so that's the goal really. I was just in a session before this with Yotin who's on the journey to Evergreen with IFS cloud. And it's really the idea of eliminating some of the manual effort that exists in maintaining a system, making it a lot easier and faster for organizations to adopt innovation that comes out and give them more agility really in focusing on meeting their customer needs instead of focusing on managing their technology. >> Absolutely. Nobody wants to be doing that. Thank you so much, both of you for joining me on the program today, talking about what IFS is doing, the Future of Field Service, how you're partnering, truly partnering with customers. It's impressive. We talked to a lot of vendors and a lot of customers and I definitely am seeing some unique differentiation here. So, thank you so much for sharing your insights with me today. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate it. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from Miami. We've been here all day. We thank you so much for watching. We will see you next time. (soft music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 22 brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to ity of Spain and cube con coup con cloud native con Europe 2022 is near the end of the day. That's okay. We, we, we have plenty of energy because we're bringing it. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my coho, Paul Gillon Paul, this has been an amazing day. Thus far. We've talked to some incredible folks. You got a chance to walk the show floor. Yeah. So I'm really excited to hear what's the vibe of the show floor, 7,500 people in Europe following the protocols, but getting stuff done. >>Well, first I have to say that I haven't traveled for two years. So getting out to a show by, by itself is, is an amazing experience, but a show like this with all of the energy and the crowd, she is enormously crowded at lunchtime today. It's hard to believe how many people have made it, made it all the way here out on the floor. The boots are crowded. The, the demonstrations are what you would expect at a show like this. Lots of code, lots of, lots of block diagrams, lots of architecture. I think the audience is eating it up. You know, when they're, they're on their laptops, they're coding on their laptops. And this is very much symbolic of the crowd that comes to a cubic con. And it's, it's a, just a delight to see them outta here. I so much fun. >>So speaking of lots of gold, we have Bome Toro co-founder of pet trade, but, you know, just saw, didn't realize this Isto becoming part of CNCF was the latest on infield. >>Yeah. Is still is, you know, it was always one of those service mesh projects, which was very widely adopted. And it's great to see that going into the cloud native computing foundation. And I think what happened with Kubernetes, like just became the defacto container orchestrator. I think similar thing is happening with Isto and service mesh. >>What, >>So I'm sorry, Keith, what's the process like of becoming adopted by and incubated by the CNCF? >>Yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple. It's an application process into the foundation where you say, you know what the project is about, how diverse is your contributor base, how many people are using it. And it goes through a review of with TC. It goes through a review of like all the users and contributors. And if you see a good base of deployments in production, if you see a diverse of contributors, then you can basically be part of the CNCF. And as you know, CNCF is very flexible on governance. Basically it's like, bring your own governance. And then the projects can basically seamlessly go in and, you know, get into incubation and gradually graduate >>Another project close and dear to you Envoy. Yes. Now I've always considered Envoy just as what it is. It's a, I've always used it as, as a load balancer type thing. So I've always considered it somewhat of a gateway proxy, but Envoy gateway was announced last week. Yes. >>So Envoy is basically won the data plane war of in cloud native workloads. Right. And, but, and this was over the last five years, Envoy was announced even way before Rio and it is used in various deployment models. You can use it as a front load balancer. You can use it as an Ingres in Kubernetes. You can use it as a side car and a service mesh like steel, and it's lightweight dynamically, programmable, very open with a white community. But what we looked at when we looked at the Envoy base, was it still, wasn't very approachable for application developers. Like when you still see like the nouns that it uses in terms of clusters and so on is not what an application developer was used to. And so Envoy gateway is really an effort to make Envoy even more stronger out of the box for an application developer to use it as an API gateway. >>Right? Because if you think about it, ultimately, you know, people de developers start deploying workloads onto their Kubernetes clusters. They need some functionality like an API gateway to expose their services and you wanna make it really, really easy and simple. Right? I often say like what, what engine X was to like static websites like Envoy gateway will be to like, you know, APIs and it's really few the community coming together. We are a big part, but also VMware and as well as end users, like in this case, fidelity who is investing heavily into Envoy and API gateway use cases, joining forces saying, let's do this in upstream Envoy. >>I'd like to go back to IIO because this is a major step in IIOS development. Where do you see SIO coming into the picture? And Kubernetes is already broadly accepted. Is IIO generally adopted as an after an after step to, to Kubernetes or are they increasingly being adopted together? >>Yeah. So usually it's adopted as a follow on step and the reason is primarily the learning curve, right. It's just get used to all the Kubernetes and, you know, it takes a while for people to understand the concepts, get applications going, and then, you know, studio was made to basically solve, you know, three big problems there. Right. Which is around observability traffic management and security. Right. So as people deploy more services, they figure out, okay, how do I connect them? How do I secure all the connections and how do I do more fine grain routing? I'm doing more frequent deployments with Kubernetes, but I would like to do Canary releases to make safer rollouts. Right. And those are the problems that Isto solves. And I don't really want to know the metrics of like, yes, it'll be, I it's good to know all the node level and CPO level metrics. >>But really what I want to know is how are my services performing? Where is the latency, right? Where is the error rate? And those are the things thatto gives out of the box. So that's like a very natural next step for people using Kubernetes. And, you know, Tetra was really formed as a company to enable enterprises, to adopt STO Envoy and service mission, their environment. Right? So we do everything from run an academy for like courses and certifications on Envoy and STO to a distribution, which is, you know, compliant with various bills and tooling as well as a whole platform on top of STO to make it usable and deployment in a large enterprise. >>So paint the end to end for me, for STO in Envoy. I know they can be used in similar fashions is like side cars, but how they work together to deliver value. >>Yeah. So if you step back from technology a little bit, right, and you like, sort of look at what customers are doing and facing, right. Really it is about, they have applications. They have some applications that new workloads going into Kubernetes and cloud native. They have a lot of legacy workloads, a lot of workloads on VMs and with different teams in different clouds or due to acquisitions. They're very heterogeneous right now. Our mission Tetrad's mission is power. The world's application traffic, but really the business value that we are going after is consistency of application operations. Right? And I'll tell you how powerful that is because the more places you can deploy Envoy into the more places you can deploy studio into, the more consistency you can get for the value pillars of observability, traffic management, and security. Right. And really, if you think about what is the journey for an enterprise to migrate from workloads into Kubernetes or from data centers into cloud, the challenges are around security and connectivity, right? Because if it's Kubernetes fabric, the same Kubernetes app and data center can be deployed exactly as is it in cloud. Right. Right. So why is it hard to migrate to cloud, right. The challenges come in the security and networking layer. >>Right. So let's talk about that with some granularity and you can maybe gimme some concrete examples, right? Because it, as I think about the hybrid infrastructure where I have VMs on premises, cloud, native stuff, running in the public cloud, or even cloud native next to VMs, right. I do security differently when I'm in the VM world. I say, you know what, this IP address, can't talk to this Oracle database server. Right. That's not how cloud native works. Right. I, I can't say if I have a cloud, if I have a cloud native app talking to a Oracle database, there's no IP address. Yeah. But how do I, how, how do I secure the communication between the two? Exactly. >>So I think you hit it straight on the head. So which is with things like Kubernetes, IP is no longer a really a valid noun where you can say, because things will auto scale either from Kubernetes or, you know, the cloud autoscales. So really the noun that is becoming now is service. So, and I could have many instances of it. They could go scale up and down. But what I'm saying is this service, which, you know, some app server, some application can talk to the article service. Hmm. And what we have done with the te trade service bridge, which is why we call our platform service bridge, because it's all about bridging all the services is whatever you're running on, the VM can be onboarded onto the mesh, like as if it were a ity service. Right. And then my policy around this service can talk to this service is same in Kubernetes is same for Kubernetes talking to VM it's same for VM to VM, both in terms of access control in terms of encryption. What we do is because it's the Envoy, proxy goes everywhere and the traffic is going through them. We actually take care of distributing, certs, encrypting, everything, and it becomes, and that is what leads to consistent application operations. And that's where the value is. >>We're seeing a lot of activity around observ observability right now, a lot of different tools, both open source and proprietary STO certainly part of the open telemetry project, I believe. Are you part of that? Yes. But the customers are still piecing together a lot of tools on their own. Right. Do you see a, a more coherent framework forming around observability? >>I think very much so. And there are layers of observability, right? So the thing is like, if we tell you there is latency between these two services at L seven layer, the first question is, is it the service? Is it the Envoy? Or is it the network? It sounds like a very simple question. It's actually not that easy to answer. And that is one of the questions we answer in like platforms like ours. Right. But even that is not the end. It, if it's neither of these three, it could be the node. It could be the hardware underneath. Right. And those, you realize like those are different observability tools that work on each layer. So I think there's a lot of work to be done, to enable end users to go from app, like from top to bottom to make, reduce what is called MTTR or meantime to, you know, resolution of an issue, where is the problem. >>But I think with tools like what is being built now, it is becoming easier, right? It is because one of the things we have to realize is with things like Kubernetes, we made the development of microservices easier. Right. And that's great. But as a result, what is happening is that more things are getting broken down. So there is more network in between. So that's harder. It gets to troubleshoot harder. It gets to secure everything harder. It gets to get visibility from everywhere. Right. So I often say like, actually, if you're going embarking down microservices journey, you actually are, you better have a platform like this. Otherwise, you know, you're, you're taking on operational cost. >>Wow. J's paradox. The more accessible we make something, the more it gets used, the more complex it is. That's been a theme here at KU con cloud native con Europe, 2022 from Licia Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host, Paul Gillman. And you're watching the queue, the leader in high tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE presents the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in cloud startups with AI security and life science tracks, 15 hottest growing startups are presented. And we had a great opening keynote with luminaries in the industry. And now our closing keynote is to get a deeper dive on cracking the code in the enterprise, how startups are changing the game and helping companies change. And they're also changing the game of open source. We have a great guest, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development, Madrona Venture Group. Katie, thank you for coming on the CUBE for this special closing keynote. >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> So one of the topics we talked about with Soma from Madrona on the opening keynote, as well as Ali from Databricks is how startups are seeing success faster. So that's the theme of the Cloud speed, agility, but the game has changed in the enterprise. And I want to really discuss with you how growth changes and growth strategy specifically. They talk, go to market. We hear things like good sales to enterprise sales, organic, freemium, there's all kinds of different approaches, but at the end of the day, the most successful companies, the ones that might not be known that just come out of nowhere. So the economics are changing and the buyers are thinking differently. So let's explore that topic. So take us through your view 'cause you have a lot of experience. But first talk about your role at Madrona, what you do. >> Absolutely all great points. So my role at Madrona, I think I have personally one of the more enviable jobs and that my job is to... I get the privilege of working with all of these fantastic entrepreneurs in our portfolio and doing whatever we can as a firm to harness resources, knowledge, expertise, connections, to accelerate their growth. So my role in setting up business development is taking a look at all of those tools in the tool chest and partnering with the portfolio to make it so. And in our portfolio, we have a wide range of companies, some rely on enterprise sales, some have other go to markets. Some are direct to consumer, a wide range. >> Talk about the growth strategies that you see evolving because what's clear with the pandemic. And as we come out of it is that there are growth plays happening that don't look a little bit differently, more obvious now because of the Cloud scale, we're seeing companies like Databricks, like Snowflake, like other companies that have been built on the cloud or standalone. What are some of the new growth techniques, or I don't want to say growth hacking, that is a pejorative term, but like just a way for companies to quickly describe their value to an enterprise buyer who's moving away from the old RFP days of vendor selection. The game has changed. So take us through how you see secret key and unlocking that new equation of how to present value to an enterprise and how you see enterprises evaluating startups. >> Yes, absolutely. Well, and that's got a question, that's got a few components nestled in what I think are some bigger trends going on. AWS of course brought us the Cloud first. I think now the Cloud is more and more a utility. And so it's incumbent upon thinking about how an enterprise 'cause using the Cloud is going to go up the value stack and partner with its cloud provider and other service providers. I think also with that agility of operations, you have thinning, if you will, the systems of record and a lot of new entrance into this space that are saying things like, how can we harness AIML and other emerging trends to provide more value directly around work streams that were historically locked into those systems of record? And then I think you also have some price plans that are far more flexible around usage based as opposed to just flat subscription or even these big clunky annual or multi-year RFP type stuff. So all of those trends are really designed in ways that favor the emerging startup. And I think if done well, and in partnership with those underlying cloud providers, there can be some amazing benefits that the enterprise realizes an opportunity for those startups to grow. And I think that's what you're seeing. I think there's also this emergence of a buyer that's different than the CIO or the site the CISO. You have things with low code, no code. You've got other buyers in the organization, other line of business executives that are coming to the table, making software purchase decisions. And then you also have empowered developers that are these citizen builders and developer buyers and personas that really matter. So lots of inroads in places for a startup to reach in the enterprise to make a connection and to bring value. That's a great insight. I want to ask that just if you don't mind follow up on that, you mentioned personas. And what we're seeing is the shift happens. There's new roles that are emerging and new things that are being reconfigured or refactored if you will, whether it's human resources or AI, and you mentioned ML playing a role in automation. These are big parts of the new value proposition. How should companies posture to the customer? Because I don't want to say pivot 'cause that means it's not working but mostly extending our iterating around their positioning because as new things have not yet been realized, it might not be operationalized in a company or maybe new things need to be operationalized, it's a new solution for that. Positioning the value is super important and a lot of companies often struggle with that, but also if they get it right, that's the key. What's your feeling on startups in their positioning? So people will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's marketing." But maybe that's important. What's your thoughts on the great positioning question? >> I've been in this industry a long time. And I think there are some things that are just tried and true, and it is not unique to tech, which is, look, you have to tell a story and you have to reach the customer and you have to speak to the customer's need. And what that means is, AWS is a great example. They're famous for the whole concept of working back from the customer and thinking about what that customer's need is. I think any startup that is looking to partner or work alongside of AWS really has to embody that very, very customer centric way of thinking about things, even though, as we just talked about those personas are changing who that customer really is in the enterprise. And then speaking to that value proposition and meeting that customer and creating a dialogue with them that really helps to understand not only what their pain points are, but how you were offering solves those pain points. And sometimes the customer doesn't realize that that is their pain point and that's part of the education and part of the way in which you engage that dialogue. That doesn't change a lot, just generation to generation. I think the modality of how we have that dialogue, the methods in which we choose to convey that change, but that basic discussion is what makes us human. >> What's your... Great, great, great insight. I want to ask you on the value proposition question again, the question I often get, and it's hard to answer is am I competing on value or am I competing on commodity? And depending on where you're in the stack, there could be different things like, for example, land is getting faster, smaller, cheaper, as an example on Amazon. That's driving down to low cost high value, but it shifts up the stack. You start to see in companies this changing the criteria for how to evaluate. So an enterprise might be struggling. And I often hear enterprises say, "I don't know how to pick who I need. I buy tools, I don't buy many platforms." So they're constantly trying to look for that answer key, if you will, what's your thoughts on the changing requirements of an enterprise? And how to do vendor selection. >> Yeah, so obviously I don't think there's a single magic bullet. I always liked just philosophically to think about, I think it's always easier and frankly more exciting as a buyer to want to buy stuff that's going to help me make more revenue and build and grow as opposed to do things that save me money. And just in a binary way, I like to think which side of the fence are you sitting on as a product offering? And the best ways that you can articulate that, what opportunities are you unlocking for your customer? The problems that you're solving, what kind of growth and what impact is that going to lead to, even if you're one or two removed from that? And again, that's not a new concept. And I think that the companies that have that squarely in mind when they think about their go-to market strategy, when they think about the dialogue they're having, when they think about the problems that they're solving, find a much faster path. And I think that also speaks to why we're seeing so many explosion in the line of business, SAS apps that are out there. Again, that thinning of the systems of record, really thinking about what are the scenarios and work streams that we can have happened that are going to help with that revenue growth and unlocking those opportunities. >> What's the common startup challenge that you see when they're trying to do business development? Usually they build the product first, product led value, you hear that a lot. And then they go, "Okay, we're ready to sell, hire a sales guy." That seems to be shifting away because of the go to markets are changing. What are some of the challenges that startups have? What are some that you're seeing? >> Well, and I think the point that you're making about the changes are really almost a result of the trends that we're talking about. The sales organization itself is becoming... These work streams are becoming instrumented. Data is being collected, insights are being derived off of those things. So you see companies like Clary or Highspot or two examples or tutorial that are in our portfolio that are looking at that action and making the art of sales and marketing far more sophisticated overall, which then leads to the different growth hacking and the different insights that are driven. I think the common mistakes that I see across the board, especially with earlier stage startups, look you got to find product market fit. I think that's always... You start with a thesis or a belief and a passion that you're building something that you think the market needs. And it's a lot of dialogue you have to have to make sure that you do find that. I think once you find that another common problem that I see is leading with an explanation of technology. And again, not focusing on the buyer or the... Sorry, the buyer about solving a problem and focusing on that problem as opposed to focusing on how cool your technology is. Those are basic and really, really simple. And then I think setting a set of expectations, especially as it comes to business development and partnering with companies like AWS. The researching that you need to adequately meet the demand that can be turned on. And then I'm sure you heard about from Databricks, from an organization like AWS, you have to be pragmatic. >> Yeah, Databricks gone from zero a software sales a few years ago to over a billion. Now it looks like a Snowflake which came out of nowhere and they had a great product, but built on Amazon, they became the data cloud on top of Amazon. And now they're growing just whole new business models and new business development techniques. Katie, thank you for sharing your insight here. The CUBE's closing keynote. Thanks for coming on. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Okay, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development at Madrona Venture Group. Premier VC in the Seattle area and beyond they're doing a lot of cloud action. And of course they know AWS very well and investing in the ecosystem. So great, great stuff there. Next up is Peter Wagner partner at Wing.VX. Love this URL first of all 'cause of the VC domain extension. But Peter is a long time venture capitalist. I've been following his career. He goes back to the old networking days, back when the internet was being connected during the OSI days, when the TCP IP open systems interconnect was really happening and created so much. Well, Peter, great to see you on the CUBE here and congratulations with success at Wing VC. >> Yeah, thanks, John. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me. >> Reason why I wanted to have you come on. First of all, you had a great track record in investing over many decades. You've seen many waves of innovation, startups. You've seen all the stories. You've seen the movie a few times, as I say. But now more than ever, enterprise wise it's probably the hottest I've ever seen. And you've got a confluence of many things on the stack. You were also an early seed investor in Snowflake, well-regarded as a huge success. So you've got your eye on some of these awesome deals. Got a great partner over there has got a network experience as well. What is the big aha moment here for the industry? Because it's not your classic enterprise startups anymore. They have multiple things going on and some of the winners are not even known. They come out of nowhere and they connect to enterprise and get the lucrative positions and can create a moat and value. Like out of nowhere, it's not the old way of like going to the airport and doing an RFP and going through the stringent requirements, and then you're in, you get to win the lucrative contract and you're in. Not anymore, that seems to have changed. What's your take on this 'cause people are trying to crack the code here and sometimes you don't have to be well-known. >> Yeah, well, thank goodness the game has changed 'cause that old thing was (indistinct) So I for one don't miss it. There was some modernization movement in the enterprise and the modern enterprise is built on data powered by AI infrastructure. That's an agile workplace. All three of those things are really transformational. There's big investments being made by enterprises, a lot of receptivity and openness to technology to enable all those agendas, and that translates to good prospects for startups. So I think as far as my career goes, I've never seen a more positive or fertile ground for startups in terms of penetrating enterprise, it doesn't mean it's easy to do, but you have a receptive audience on the other side and that hasn't necessarily always been the case. >> Yeah, I got to ask you, I know that you're a big sailor and your family and Franks Lubens also has a boat and sailing metaphor is always good to have 'cause you got to have a race that's being run and they have tactics. And this game that we're in now, you see the successes, there's investment thesises, and then there's also actually bets. And I want to get your thoughts on this because a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to evaluate startups and starts also can make the wrong bet. They could sail to the wrong continent and be in the wrong spot. So how do you pick the winners and how should enterprises understand how to pick winners too? >> Yeah, well, one of the real important things right now that enterprise is facing startups are learning how to do and so learning how to leverage product led growth dynamics in selling to the enterprise. And so product led growth has certainly always been important consumer facing companies. And then there's a few enterprise facing companies, early ones that cracked the code, as you said. And some of these examples are so old, if you think about, like the ones that people will want to talk about them and talk about Classy and want to talk about Twilio and these were of course are iconic companies that showed the way for others. But even before that, folks like Solar Winds, they'd go to market model, clearly product red, bottom stuff. Back then we didn't even have those words to talk about it. And then some of the examples are so enormous if think about them like the one right in front of your face, like AWS. (laughing) Pretty good PLG, (indistinct) but it targeted builders, it targeted developers and flipped over the way you think about enterprise infrastructure, as a result some how every company, even if they're harnessing relatively conventional sales and marketing motion, and you think about product led growth as a way to kick that motion off. And so it's not really an either word even more We might think OPLJ, that means there's no sales keep one company not true, but here's a way to set the table so that you can very efficiently use your sales and marketing resources, only have the most attractive targets and ones that are really (indistinct) >> I love the product led growth. I got to ask you because in the networking days, I remember the term inevitability was used being nested in a solution that they're just going to Cisco off router and a firewall is one you can unplug and replace with another vendor. Cisco you'd have to go through no switching costs were huge. So when you get it to the Cloud, how do you see the competitiveness? Because we were riffing on this with Ali, from Databricks where the lock-in might be value. The more value provider is the lock-in. Is their nestedness? Is their intimate ability as a competitive advantage for some of these starts? How do you look at that? Because startups, they're using open source. They want to have a land position in an enterprise, but how do they create that sustainable competitive advantage going forward? Because again, this is what you do. You bet on ones that you can see that could establish a model whatever we want to call it, but a competitive advantage and ongoing nested position. >> Sometimes it has to do with data, John, and so you mentioned Snowflake a couple of times here, a big part of Snowflake's strategy is what they now call the data cloud. And one of the reasons you go there is not to just be able to process data, to actually get access to it, exchange with the partners. And then that of course is a great reason for the customers to come to the Snowflake platform. And so the more data it gets more customers, it gets more data, the whole thing start spinning in the right direction. That's a really big example, but all of these startups that are using ML in a fundamental way, applying it in a novel way, the data modes are really important. So getting to the right data sources and training on it, and then putting it to work so that you can see that in this process better and doing this earlier on that scale. That's a big part of success. Another company that I work with is a good example that I call (indistinct) which works in sales technology space, really crushing it in terms of building better sales organizations both at performance level, in terms of the intelligence level, and just overall revenue attainment using ML, and using novel data sources, like the previously lost data or phone calls or Zoom calls as you already know. So I think the data advantages are really big. And smart startups are thinking through it early. >> It's interest-- >> And they're planning by the way, not to ramble on too much, but they're betting that PLG strategy. So their land option is designed not just to be an interesting way to gain usage, but it's also a way to gain access to data that then enables the expand in a component. >> That is a huge call-out point there, I was going to ask another question, but I think that is the key I see. It's a new go to market in a way. product led with that kind of approach gets you a beachhead and you get a little position, you get some data that is a cloud model, it means variable, whatever you want to call it variable value proposition, value proof, or whatever, getting that data and reiterating it. So it brings up the whole philosophical question of okay, product led growth, I love that with product led growth of data, I get that. Remember the old platform versus a tool? That's the way buyers used to think. How has that changed? 'Cause now almost, this conversation throws out the whole platform thing, but isn't like a platform. >> It looks like it's all. (laughs) you can if it is a platform, though to do that you can reveal that later, but you're looking for adoption, so if it's down stock product, you're looking for adoption by like developers or DevOps people or SOEs, and they're trying to solve a problem, and they want rapid gratification. So they don't want to have an architectural boomimg, placed in front of them. And if it's up stock product and application, then it's a user or the business or whatever that is, is adopting the application. And again, they're trying to solve a very specific problem. You need instant and immediate obvious time and value. And now you have a ticket to the dance and build on that and maybe a platform strategy can gradually take shape. But you know who's not in this conversation is the CIO, it's like, "I'm always the last to know." >> That's the CISO though. And they got him there on the firing lines. CISOs are buying tools like it's nobody's business. They need everything. They'll buy anything or you go meet with sand, they'll buy it. >> And you make it sound so easy. (laughing) We do a lot of security investment if only (indistinct) (laughing) >> I'm a little bit over the top, but CISOs are under a lot of pressure. I would talk to the CISO at Capital One and he was saying that he's on Amazon, now he's going to another cloud, not as a hedge, but he doesn't want to focus development teams. So he's making human resource decisions as well. Again, back to what IT used to be back in the old days where you made a vendor decision, you built around it. So again, clouds play that way. I see that happening. But the question is that I think you nailed this whole idea of cross hairs on the target persona, because you got to know who you are and then go to the market. So if you know you're a problem solving and the lower in the stack, do it and get a beachhead. That's a strategy, you can do that. You can't try to be the platform and then solve a problem at the same time. So you got to be careful. Is that what you were getting at? >> Well, I think you just understand what you're trying to achieve in that line of notion. And how those dynamics work and you just can't drag it out. And they could make it too difficult. Another company I work with is a very strategic cloud data platform. It's a (indistinct) on systems. We're not trying to foist that vision though (laughs) or not adopters today. We're solving some thorny problems with them in the short term, rapid time to value operational needs in scale. And then yeah, once they found success with (indistinct) there's would be an opportunity to be increasing the platform, and an obstacle for those customers. But we're not talking about that. >> Well, Peter, I appreciate you taking the time and coming out of a board meeting, I know that you're super busy and I really appreciate you making time for us. I know you've got an impressive partner in (indistinct) who's a former Sequoia, but Redback Networks part of that company over the years, you guys are doing extremely well, even a unique investment thesis. I'd like you to put the plug in for the firm. I think you guys have a good approach. I like what you guys are doing. You're humble, you don't brag a lot, but you make a lot of great investments. So could you take them in to explain what your investment thesis is and then how that relates to how an enterprise is making their investment thesis? >> Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, the concept that I described earlier that the modern enterprise movement as a workplace built on data powered by AI. That's what we're trying to work with founders to enable. And also we're investing in companies that build the products and services that enable that modern enterprise to exist. And we do it from very early stages, but with a longterm outlook. So we'll be leading series and series, rounds of investment but staying deeply involved, both operationally financially throughout the whole life cycle of the company. And then we've done that a bunch of times, our goal is always the big independent public company and they don't always make it but enough for them to have it all be worthwhile. An interesting special case of this, and by the way, I think it intersects with some of startup showcase here is in the life sciences. And I know you were highlighting a lot of healthcare websites and deals, and that's a vertical where to disrupt tremendous impact of data both new data availability and new ways to put it to use. I know several of my partners are very focused on that. They call it bio-X data. It's a transformation all on its own. >> That's awesome. And I think that the reason why we're focusing on these verticals is if you have a cloud horizontal scale view and vertically specialized with machine learning, every vertical is impacted by data. It's so interesting that I think, first start, I was probably best time to be a cloud startup right now. I really am bullish on it. So I appreciate you taking the time Peter to come in again from your board meeting, popping out. Thanks for-- (indistinct) Go back in and approve those stock options for all the employees. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> All right, thank you John, it's a pleasure. >> Okay, Peter Wagner, Premier VC, very humble Wing.VC is a great firm. Really respect them. They do a lot of great investing investments, Snowflake, and we have Dave Vellante back who knows a lot about Snowflake's been covering like a blanket and Sarbjeet Johal. Cloud Influencer friend of the CUBE. Cloud commentator and cloud experience built clouds, runs clouds now invests. So V. Dave, thanks for coming back on. You heard Peter Wagner at Wing VC. These guys have their roots in networking, which networking back in the day was, V. Dave. You remember the internet Cisco days, remember Cisco, Wellfleet routers. I think Peter invested in Arrow Point, remember Arrow Point, that was about in the 495 belt where you were. >> Lynch's company. >> That was Chris Lynch's company. I think, was he a sales guy there? (indistinct) >> That was his first big hit I think. >> All right, well guys, let's wrap this up. We've got a great program here. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. >> No worries. Glad to be here todays. >> Hey, Sarbjeet. >> First of all, really appreciate the Twitter activity lately on the commentary, the observability piece on Jeremy Burton's launch, Dave was phenomenal, but Peter was talking about this dynamic and I think ties this cracking the code thing together, which is there's a product led strategy that feels like a platform, but it's also a tool. In other words, it's not mutually exclusive, the old methods thrown out the window. Land in an account, know what problem you're solving. If you're below the stack, nail it, get data and go from there. If you're a process improvement up the stack, you have to much more of a platform longer-term sale, more business oriented, different motions, different mechanics. What do you think about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, I was thinking about this when I was listening to some of the startups pitching, if you will, or talking about what they bring to the table in this cloud scale or cloud era, if you will. And there are tools, there are applications and then they're big monolithic platforms, if you will. And then they're part of the ecosystem. So I think the companies need to know where they play. A startup cannot be platform from the get-go I believe. Now many aspire to be, but they have to start with tooling. I believe in, especially in B2B side of things, and then go into the applications, one way is to go into the application area, if you will, like a very precise use cases for certain verticals and stuff like that. And other parties that are going into the platform, which is like horizontal play, if you will, in technology. So I think they have to understand their age, like how old they are, how new they are, how small they are, because when their size matter when you are procuring as a big business, procuring your technology vendors size matters and the economic viability matters and their proximity to other windows matter as well. So I think we'll jump into that in other discussions later, but I think that's key, as you said. >> I would agree with that. I would phrase it in my mind, somewhat differently from Sarbjeet which is you have product led growth, and that's your early phase and you get product market fit, you get product led growth, and then you expand and there are many, many examples of this, and that's when you... As part of your team expansion strategy, you're going to get into the platform discussion. There's so many examples of that. You take a look at Ali Ghodsi today with what's happening at Databricks, Snowflake is another good example. They've started with product led growth. And then now they're like, "Okay, we've got to expand the team." Okta is another example that just acquired zero. That's about building out the platform, versus more of a point product. And there's just many, many examples of that, but you cannot to your point, very hard to start with a platform. Arm did it, but that was like a one in a million chance. >> It's just harder, especially if it's new and it's not operationalized yet. So one of the things Dave that we've observed the Cloud is some of the best known successes where nobody's not known at all, database we've been covering from the beginning 'cause we were close to that movement when they came out of Berkeley. But they still were misunderstood and they just started generating revenue in only last year. So again, only a few years ago, zero software revenue, now they're approaching a billion dollars. So it's not easy to make these vendor selections anymore. And if you're new and you don't have someone to operate it or your there's no department and the departments changing, that's another problem. These are all like enterprisey problems. What's your thoughts on that, Dave? >> Well, I think there's a big discussion right now when you've been talking all day about how should enterprise think about startups and think about most of these startups they're software companies and software is very capital efficient business. At the same time, these companies are raising hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion dollars before they go to IPO. Why is that? A lot of it's going to promotion. I look at it as... And there's a big discussion going on but well, maybe sales can be more efficient and more direct and so forth. I really think it comes down to the golden rule. Two things really mattered in the early days in the startup it's sales and engineering. And writers should probably say engineering and sales and start with engineering. And then you got to figure out your go to market. Everything else is peripheral to those two and you don't get those two things right, you struggle. And I think that's what some of these successful startups are proving. >> Sarbjeet, what's your take on that point? >> Could you repeat the point again? Sorry, I lost-- >> As cloud scale comes in this whole idea of competing, the roles are changing. So look at IOT, look at the Edge, for instance, you got all kinds of new use cases that no one actually knows is a problem to solve. It's just pure opportunity. So there's no one's operational I could have a product, but it don't know we can buy it yet. It's a problem. >> Yeah, I think the solutions have to be point solutions and the startups need to focus on the practitioners, number one, not the big buyers, not the IT, if you will, but the line of business, even within that sphere, like just focus on the practitioners who are going to use that technology. I talked to, I think it wasn't Fiddler, no, it was CoreLogics. I think that story was great today earlier in how they kind of struggle in the beginning, they were trying to do a big bang approach as a startup, but then they almost stumbled. And then they found their mojo, if you will. They went to Don the market, actually, that's a very classic theory of disruption, like what we study from Harvard School of Business that you go down the market, go to the non-consumers, because if you're trying to compete head to head with big guys. Because most of the big guys have lot of feature and functionality, especially at the platform level. And if you're trying to innovate in that space, you have to go to the practitioners and solve their core problems and then learn and expand kind of thing. So I think you have to focus on practitioners a lot more than the traditional oracle buyers. >> Sarbjeet, we had a great thread last night in Twitter, on observability that you started. And there's a couple of examples there. Chaos searches and relatively small company right now, they just raised them though. And they're part of this star showcase. And they could've said, "Hey, we're going to go after Splunk." But they chose not to. They said, "Okay, let's kind of disrupt the elk stack and simplify that." Another example is a company observed, you've mentioned Jeremy Burton's company, John. They're focused really on SAS companies. They're not going after initially these complicated enterprise deals because they got to get it right or else they'll get churn, and churn is that silent killer of software companies. >> The interesting other company that was on the showcase was Tetra Science. I don't know if you noticed that one in the life science track, and again, Peter Wagner pointed out the life science. That's an under recognized in the press vertical that's exploding. Certainly during the pandemic you saw it, Tetra science is an R&D cloud, Dave, R&D data cloud. So pharmaceuticals, they need to do their research. So the pandemic has brought to life, this now notion of tapping into data resources, not just data lakes, but like real deal. >> Yeah, you and Natalie and I were talking about that this morning and that's one of the opportunities for R&D and you have all these different data sources and yeah, it's not just about the data lake. It's about the ecosystem that you're building around them. And I see, it's really interesting to juxtapose what Databricks is doing and what Snowflake is doing. They've got different strategies, but they play a part there. You can see how ecosystems can build that system. It's not one company is going to solve all these problems. It's going to really have to be connections across these various companies. And that's what the Cloud enables and ecosystems have all this data flowing that can really drive new insights. >> And I want to call your attention to a tweet Sarbjeet you wrote about Splunk's earnings and they're data companies as well. They got Teresa Carlson there now AWS as the president, working with Doug, that should change the game a little bit more. But there was a thread of the neath there. Andy Thry says to replies to Dave you or Sarbjeet, you, if you're on AWS, they're a fine solution. The world doesn't just revolve around AWS, smiley face. Well, a lot of it does actually. So (laughing) nice point, Andy. But he brings up this thing and Ali brought it up too, Hybrid now is a new operating system for what now Edge does. So we got Mobile World Congress happening this month in person. This whole Telco 5G brings up a whole nother piece of the Cloud puzzle. Jeff Barr pointed out in his keynote, Dave. Guys, I want to get your reaction. The Edge now is... I'm calling it the super Edge because it's not just Edge as we know it before. You're going to have these pops, these points of presence that are going to have wavelength as your spectrum or whatever they have. I think that's the solution for Azure. So you're going to have all this new cloud power for low latency applications. Self-driving delivery VR, AR, gaming, Telemetry data from Teslas, you name it, it's happening. This is huge, what's your thoughts? Sarbjeet, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I think Edge is like bound to happen. And for many reasons, the volume of data is increasing. Our use cases are also expanding if you will, with the democratization of computer analysis. Specialization of computer, actually Dave wrote extensively about how Intel and other chip players are gearing up for that future if you will. Most of the inference in the AI world will happen in the field close to the workloads if you will, that can be mobility, the self-driving car that can be AR, VR. It can be healthcare. It can be gaming, you name it. Those are the few use cases, which are in the forefront and what alarm or use cases will come into the play I believe. I've said this many times, Edge, I think it will be dominated by the hyperscalers, mainly because they're building their Metro data centers now. And with a very low latency in the Metro areas where the population is, we're serving the people still, not the machines yet, or the empty areas where there is no population. So wherever the population is, all these big players are putting their data centers there. And I think they will dominate the Edge. And I know some Edge lovers. (indistinct) >> Edge huggers. >> Edge huggers, yeah. They don't like the hyperscalers story, but I think that's the way were' going. Why would we go backwards? >> I think you're right, first of all, I agree with the hyperscale dying you look at the top three clouds right now. They're all in the Edge, Hardcore it's a huge competitive battleground, Dave. And I think the missing piece, that's going to be uncovered at Mobile Congress. Maybe they'll miss it this year, but it's the developer traction, whoever wins the developer market or wins the loyalty, winning over the market or having adoption. The applications will drive the Edge. >> And I would add the fourth cloud is Alibaba. Alibaba is actually bigger than Google and they're crushing it as well. But I would say this, first of all, it's popular to say, "Oh not everything's going to move into the Cloud, John, Dave, Sarbjeet." But the fact is that AWS they're trend setter. They are crushing it in terms of features. And you'd look at what they're doing in the plumbing with Annapurna. Everybody's following suit. So you can't just ignore that, number one. Second thing is what is the Edge? Well, the edge is... Where's the logical place to process the data? That's what the Edge is. And I think to your point, both Sarbjeet and John, the Edge is going to be won by developers. It's going to be one by programmability and it's going to be low cost and really super efficient. And most of the data is going to stay at the Edge. And so who is in the best position to actually create that? Is it going to be somebody who was taking an x86 box and throw it over the fence and give it a fancy name with the Edge in it and saying, "Here's our Edge box." No, that's not what's going to win the Edge. And so I think first of all it's huge, it's wide open. And I think where's the innovation coming from? I agree with you it's the hyperscalers. >> I think the developers as John said, developers are the kingmakers. They build the solutions. And in that context, I always talk about the skills gravity, a lot of people are educated in certain technologies and they will keep using those technologies. Their proximity to that technology is huge and they don't want to learn something new. So as humans we just tend to go what we know how to use it. So from that front, I usually talk with consumption economics of cloud and Edge. It has to focus on the practitioners. And in this case, practitioners are developers because you're just cooking up those solutions right now. We're not serving that in huge quantity right now, but-- >> Well, let's unpack that Sarbjeet, let's unpack that 'cause I think you're right on the money on that. The consumption of the tech and also the consumption of the application, the end use and end user. And I think the reason why hyperscalers will continue to dominate besides the fact that they have all the resource and they're going to bring that to the Edge, is that the developers are going to be driving the applications at the Edge. So if you're low latency Edge, that's going to open up new applications, not just the obvious ones I did mention, gaming, VR, AR, metaverse and other things that are obvious. There's going to be non-obvious things that are going to be huge that are going to come out from the developers. But the Cloud native aspect of the hyperscalers, to me is where the scales are tipping, let me explain. IT was built to build a supply resource to the businesses who were writing business applications. Mostly driven by IBM in the mainframe in the old days, Dave, and then IT became IT. Telcos have been OT closed, "This is our thing, that's it." Now they have to open up. And the Cloud native technologies is the fastest way to value. And I think that paths, Sarbjeet is going to be defined by this new developer and this new super Edge concept. So I think it's going to be wide open. I don't know what to say. I can't guess, but it's going to be creative. >> Let me ask you a question. You said years ago, data's new development kit, does low code and no code to Sarbjeet's point, change the equation? In other words, putting data in the hands of those OT professionals, those practitioners who have the context. Does low-code and no-code enable, more of those protocols? I know it's a bromide, but the citizen developer, and what impact does that have? And who's in the best position? >> Well, I think that anything that reduces friction to getting stuff out there that can be automated, will increase the value. And then the question is, that's not even a debate. That's just fact that's going to be like rent, massive rise. Then the issue comes down to who has the best asset? The software asset that's eating the world or the tower and the physical infrastructure. So if the physical infrastructure aka the Telcos, can't generate value fast enough, in my opinion, the private equity will come in and take it over, and then refactor that business model to take advantage of the over the top software model. That to me is the big stare down competition between the Telco world and this new cloud native, whichever one yields in valley is going to blink first, if you say. And I think the Cloud native wins this one hands down because the assets are valuable, but only if they enable the new model. If the old model tries to hang on to the old hog, the old model as the Edge hugger, as Sarbjeet says, they'll just going to slowly milk that cow dry. So it's like, it's over. So to me, they have to move. And I think this Mobile World Congress day, we will see, we will be looking for that. >> Yeah, I think that in the Mobile World Congress context, I think Telcos should partner with the hyperscalers very closely like everybody else has. And they have to cave in. (laughs) I usually say that to them, like the people came in IBM tried to fight and they cave in. Other second tier vendors tried to fight the big cloud vendors like top three or four. And then they cave in. okay, we will serve our stuff through your cloud. And that's where all the buyers are congregating. They're going to buy stuff along with the skills gravity, the feature proximity. I've got another term I'll turn a coin. It matters a lot when you're doing one thing and you want to do another thing when you're doing all this transactional stuff and regular stuff, and now you want to do data science, where do you go? You go next to it, wherever you have been. Your skills are in that same bucket. And then also you don't have to write a new contract with a new vendor, you just go there. So in order to serve, this is a lesson for startups as well. You need to prepare yourself for being in the Cloud marketplaces. You cannot go alone independently to fight. >> Cloud marketplace is going to replace procurement, for sure, we know that. And this brings up the point, Dave, we talked about years ago, remember on the CUBE. We said, there's going to be Tier two clouds. I used that word in quotes cause nothing... What does it even mean Tier two. And we were talking about like Amazon, versus Microsoft and Google. We set at the time and Alibaba but they're in China, put that aside for a second, but the big three. They're going to win it all. And they're all going to be successful to a relative terms, but whoever can enable that second tier. And it ended up happening, Snowflake is that example. As is Databricks as is others. So Google and Microsoft as fast as they can replicate the success of AWS by enabling someone to build their business on their cloud in a way that allows the customer to refactor their business will win. They will win most of the lion's share my opinion. So I think that applies to the Edge as well. So whoever can come in and say... Whichever cloud says, "I'm going to enable the next Snowflake, the next enterprise solution." I think takes it. >> Well, I think that it comes back... Every conversation coming back to the data. And if you think about the prevailing way in which we treated data with the exceptions of the two data driven companies in their quotes is as we've shoved all the data into some single repository and tried to come up with a single version of the truth and it's adjudicated by a centralized team, with hyper specialized roles. And then guess what? The line of business, there's no context for the business in that data architecture or data Corpus, if you will. And then the time it takes to go from idea for a data product or data service commoditization is way too long. And that's changing. And the winners are going to be the ones who are able to exploit this notion of leaving data where it is, the point about data gravity or courting a new term. I liked that, I think you said skills gravity. And then enabling the business lines to have access to their own data teams. That's exactly what Ali Ghodsi, he was saying this morning. And really having the ability to create their own data products without having to go bow down to an ivory tower. That is an emerging model. All right, well guys, I really appreciate the wrap up here, Dave and Sarbjeet. I'd love to get your final thoughts. I'll just start by saying that one of the highlights for me was the luminary guests size of 15 great companies, the luminary guests we had from our community on our keynotes today, but Ali Ghodsi said, "Don't listen to what everyone's saying in the press." That was his position. He says, "You got to figure out where the puck's going." He didn't say that, but I'm saying, I'm paraphrasing what he said. And I love how he brought up Sky Cloud. I call it Sky net. That's an interesting philosophy. And then he also brought up that machine learning auto ML has got to be table stakes. So I think to me, that's the highlight walk away. And the second one is this idea that the enterprises have to have a new way to procure and not just the consumption, but some vendor selection. I think it's going to be very interesting as value can be proved with data. So maybe the procurement process becomes, here's a beachhead, here's a little bit of data. Let me see what it can do. >> I would say... Again, I said it was this morning, that the big four have given... Last year they spent a hundred billion dollars more on CapEx. To me, that's a gift. In so many companies, especially focusing on trying to hang onto the legacy business. They're saying, "Well not everything's going to move to the Cloud." Whatever, the narrative should change to, "Hey, thank you for that gift. We're now going to build value on top of the Cloud." Ali Ghodsi laid that out, how Databricks is doing it. And it's clearly what Snowflake's new with the data cloud. It basically a layer that abstracts all that underlying complexity and add value on top. Eventually going out to the Edge. That's a value added model that's enabled by the hyperscalers. And that to me, if I have to evaluate where I'm going to place my bets as a CIO or IT practitioner, I'm going to look at who are the ones that are actually embracing that investment that's been made and adding value on top in a way that can drive my data-driven, my digital business or whatever buzzword you want to throw on. >> Yeah, I think we were talking about the startups in today's sessions. I think for startups, my advice is to be as close as you can be to hyperscalers and anybody who awards them, they will cave in at the end of the day, because that's where the whole span of gravity is. That's what the innovation gravity is, everybody's gravitating towards that. And I would say quite a few times in the last couple of years that the rate of innovation happening in a non-cloud companies, when I talk about non-cloud means are not public companies. I think it's like diminishing, if you will, as compared to in cloud, there's a lot of innovation. The Cloud companies are not paying by power people anymore. They have all sophisticated platforms and leverage those, and also leverage the marketplaces and leverage their buyers. And the key will be how you highlight yourself in that cloud market place if you will. It's like in a grocery store where your product is placed and you have to market around it, and you have to have a good story telling team in place as well after you do the product market fit. I think that's a key. I think just being close to the Cloud providers, that's the way to go for startups. >> Real, real quick. Each of you talk about what it takes to crack the code for the enterprise in the modern era now. Dave, we'll start with you. What's it take? (indistinct) >> You got to have it be solving a problem that is 10X better at one 10th a cost of anybody else, if you're a small company, that rule number one. Number two is you obviously got to get product market fit. You got to then figure out. And I think, and again, you're in your early phases, you have to be almost processed builders, figure out... Your KPIs should all be built around retention. How do I define customer success? How do I keep customers and how do I make them loyal so that I know that my cost of acquisition is going to be at least one-third or lower than my lifetime value of that customer? So you've got to nail that. And then once you nail that, you've got to codify that process in the next phase, which really probably gets into your platform discussion. And that's really where you can start to standardize and scale and figure out your go to market and the relationship between marketing spend and sales productivity. And then when you get that, then you got to move on to figure out your Mot. Your Mot might just be a brand. It might be some secret sauce, but more often than not though, it's going to be the relationship that you build. And I think you've got to think about those phases and in today's world, you got to move really fast. Sarbjeet, real quick. What's the secret to crack the code? >> I think the secret to crack the code is partnership and alliances. As a small company selling to the bigger enterprises, the vendors size will be one of the big objections. Even if they don't say it, it's on the back of their mind, "What if these guys disappear tomorrow what would we do if we pick this technology?" And another thing is like, if you're building on the left side, which is the developer side, not on the right side, which is the operations or production side, if you will, you have to understand the sales cycles are longer on the right side and left side is easier to get to, but that's why we see a lot more startups. And on the left side of your DevOps space, if you will, because it's easier to sell to practitioners and market to them and then show the value correctly. And also understand that on the left side, the developers are very know how hungry, on the right side people are very cost-conscious. So understanding the traits of these different personas, if you will buyers, it will, I think set you apart. And as Dave said, you have to solve a problem, focus on practitioners first, because you're small. You have to solve political problems very well. And then you can expand. >> Well, guys, I really appreciate the time. Dave, we're going to do more of these, Sarbjeet we're going to do more of these. We're going to add more community to it. We're going to add our community rooms next time. We're going to do these quarterly and try to do them as more frequently, we learned a lot and we still got a lot more to learn. There's a lot more contribution out in the community that we're going to tap into. Certainly the CUBE Club as we call it, Dave. We're going to build this actively around Cloud. This is another 20 years. The Edge brings us more life with Cloud, it's really exciting. And again, enterprise is no longer an enterprise, it's just the world now. So great companies here, the next Databricks, the next IPO. The next big thing is in this list, Dave. >> Hey, John, we'll see you in Barcelona. Looking forward to that. Sarbjeet, I know in a second half, we're going to run into each other. So (indistinct) thank you John. >> Trouble has started. Great talking to you guys today and have fun in Barcelona and keep us informed. >> Thanks for coming. I want to thank Natalie Erlich who's in Rome right now. She's probably well past her bedtime, but she kicked it off and emceeing and hosting with Dave and I for this AW startup showcase. This is batch two episode two day. What do we call this? It's like a release so that the next 15 startups are coming. So we'll figure it out. (laughs) Thanks for watching everyone. Thanks. (bright music)

>>Mhm >>Yes, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm lisa martin excited about this conversation. It's combining my background in life sciences with technology. Please welcome Mike Tarsa Lee, the chief scientific officer at Tetra Science. Mike I'm so excited to talk to you today. >>Thank you lisa and thank you very much to the cube for hosting us. >>Absolutely. So we talk about cloud and data all the time. This is going to be a very interesting conversation especially because we've seen events of the last what are we on 14 months and counting have really accelerated the need for drug discovery and really everyone's kind of focused on that. But I want you to talk with our audience about Tetra science, Who you guys are, what you do and you were founded in 2014. You just raised 80 million in series B but give us an idea of who you are and what you do. >>Got it. Tetro Science, what are we? We are digital plumbers and that may seem funny but really we are taking the world of data and we are trying to resolve it in such a way that people can actually pipe it from the data sources they have in a vendor agnostic way to the data targets in which they need to consume that data. So bringing that metaphor a little bit more to life sciences, let's say that you're a chemist and you have a mass spec and an NMR and some other piece of technology and you need all of those to speak the same language. Right? Generally speaking, all of these are going to be made by different vendors. They're all going to have different control software and they're all going to have slightly different ways of sending their data in. Petro Science takes those all in. We bring them up to the cloud or cloud native solution. We harmonize them, we extract the data first and then we actually put it into what we call our special sauce are intermediate data schema to harmonize it. So you have sort of like a picture and a diagram of what the prototypical mass spec or H P. L. C. Or cell counting data should look like. And then we build pipelines to export that data over to where you need it. So if you need it to live in an L. N. Or a limb system or in a visualization tool like spot fire tableau. We got you covered. So again we're trying to pipe things from left to right from sources to targets and we're trying to do it with scientific context. >>That was an outstanding description. Data plumbers who have secret sauce and never would have thought I would have heard that when I woke up this morning. But I'm going to unpack this more because one of the things that I read in the press release that just went out just a few weeks ago announcing the series B funding, it said that that picture science is pioneering a $300 billion dollar Greenfield data market and operating this is what got my attention without a direct cloud native and open platform competitor. Why is that? >>That's right. If you look at the way pharma data is handled today, even those that long tend to be either on prem solutions with a sort of license model or a distribution into a company and therefore maintenance costs, professional services, etcetera. Or you're looking at somebody who is maybe cloud but their cloud second, you know, they started with their on prem journey and they said we should go and build out some puppies, we should go to the cloud migrate. However, we're cloud first cloud native. So that's one first strong point. And the second is that in terms of data harmonization and in terms of looking at data in a vendor agnostic way, um many companies claim to do it. But the real hard test of this, the metal, what will say is when you can look at this with the Scientific contextual ization we offer. So yes, you can collect the data and put it on a cloud. Okay great. Yes. You may be able to do an extract, transform and load and move it to somewhere else. Okay. But can you actually do that from front to back while retaining all the context of the data while keeping all of the metadata in the right place? With veracity, with G XP readiness, with data fidelity and when it gets over to the other side can somebody say oh yeah that's all the data from all the H. P. L. C. S we control. I got it. I see where it is. I see where to go get it, I see who created it. I see the full data train and validation landscape and I can rebuild that back and I can look back to the old raw source files if I need to. Um I challenge someone to find another direct company that's doing that today. >>You talk about that context and the thing that sort of surprises me is with how incredibly important scientific discovery is and has been for since the beginning of time. Why is why has nobody come out in the last seven years and tried to facilitate this for life sciences organizations. >>Right. I would say that people have tried and I would say that there are definitely strides being made in the open source community, in the data science community and inside pharma and biotech themselves on these sort of build motif, right. If you are inside of a company and you understand your own ontology and processes while you can probably design an application or a workflow using several different tools in order to get that data there. But will it be generally useful to the bioscience community? One thing we pride ourselves on is when we product eyes a connector we call or an integration, we actually do it with a many different companies, generic cases in mind. So we say, OK, you have an h p l C problem over at this top pharma, you have an HPC problem with this biotech and you have another one of the C R. O. Okay. What are the common points between all of those? Can we actually distill that down to a workflow? Everyone's going to need, for example a compliance workflow. So everybody needs compliance. Right. So we can actually look into an empower or a unicorn operation and we can say, okay, did you sign off on that? Did it come through the right way? Was the data corrupted etcetera? That's going to be generically useful to everybody? And that's just one example of something we can do right now for anybody in bio pharma. >>Let's talk about the events of the last 14 months or so mentioned 10 X revenue growth in 2020. Covid really really highlighted the need to accelerate drug discovery and we've seen that. But talk to me about some of the things that Tetra science has seen and done to facilitate that. >>Yeah, this past 14 months. I mean um I will say that the global pandemic has been a challenge for everyone involved ourselves as well. We've basically gone to a full remote workforce. Um We have tried our very best to stay on top of it with remote collaboration tools with vera, with GIT hub with everything. However, I'll say that it's actually been some of the most successful time in our company's history because of that sort of lack of any kind of friction from the physical world. Right? We've really been able to dig down and dig deep on our integrations are connections, our business strategy. And because of that, we've actually been able to deliver a lot of value to customers because, let's be honest, we don't actually have to be on prem from what we're doing since we're not an on prem solution and we're not an original equipment manufacturer, we don't have to say, okay, we're going to go plug the thing in to the H. P. L. C. We don't have to be there to tune the specific wireless protocols or you're a W. S. Protocols, it can all be done remotely. So it's about building good relationships, building trust with our colleagues and clients and making sure we're delivering and over delivering every time. And then people say great um when I elect a Tetra solution, I know what's going right to the cloud, I know I can pick my hosting options, I know you're going to keep delivering more value to me every month. Um Thanks, >>I like that you make it sound simple and that actually you bring up a great point though that the one of the many things that was accelerated this last year Plus is the need to be remote that need to be able to still communicate, collaborate but also the need to establish and really foster those relationships that you have with existing customers and partners as everybody was navigating very, very different challenges. I want to talk now about how you're helping customers unlock the problem that is in every industry data silos and point to point integration where things can talk to each other, Talk to me about how you're helping customers like where do they start with? Touch? Where do you start that? Um kind of journey to unlock data value? >>Sure. Journey to unlock data value. Great question. So first I'll say that customers tend to come to us, it's the oddest thing and we're very lucky and very grateful for this, but they tend to have heard about what we've done with other companies and they come to us they say listen, we've heard about a deployment you've done with novo Nordisk, I can say that for example because you know, it's publicly known. Um so they'll say, you know, we hear about what you've done, we understand that you have deep expertise in chromatography or in bio process. And they'll say here's my really sticky problem. What can you do here? And invariably they're going to lay out a long list of instruments and software for us. Um we've seen lists that go up past 2000 instruments. Um and they'll say, yeah, they'll say here's all the things we need connected, here's four or five different use cases. Um we'll bring you start to finish, we'll give you 20 scientists in the room to talk through them and then we to get somewhere between two and four weeks to think about that problem and come back and say here's how we might solve that. Invariably, all of these problems are going to have a data silos somewhere, there's going to be in Oregon where the preclinical doesn't see the biology or the biology doesn't see the screening etcetera. So we say, all right, give us one scientist from each of those, hence establishing trust, establishing input from everybody. And collaboratively we'll work with, you will set up an architecture diagram, will set up a first version of a prototype connector, will set up all this stuff they need in order to get moving, we'll deliver value upfront before we've ever signed a contract and will say, is this a good way to go for you? And they'll say either no, no, thank you or they'll say yes, let's go forward, let's do a pilot a proof of concept or let's do a full production rollout. And invariably this data silos problem can usually be resolved by again, these generic size connectors are intermediate data schema, which talks and moves things into a common format. Right? And then also by organizationally, since we're already connecting all these groups in this problem statement, they tend to continue working together even when we're no longer front and center, right? They say, oh we set up that thing together. Let's keep thinking about how to make our data more available to one another. >>Interesting. So culturally, within the organization it sounds like Tetra is having significant influences their, you know, the collaboration but also data ownership. Sometimes that becomes a sticky situation where there are owners and they want to read retain that control. Right? You're laughing? You've been through this before. I'd like to understand a little bit more though about the conversation because typically we're talking about tech but we're also talking about science. Are you having these technical conversations with scientists as well as I. T. What is that actual team from the customer perspective look >>like? Oh sure. So the technical conversation and science conversation are going on sometimes in parallel and sometimes in the same threat entirely. Oftentimes the folks who reach out to us first tend to be the scientists. They say I've got a problem, you know and and my research and and I. T. Will probably hear about this later. But let's go. And then we will invariably say well let's bring in your R. And D. I. T. Counterparts because we need them to help solve it right? But yes we are usually having those conversations in parallel at first and then we unite them into one large discussion. And we have varied team members here on the Tetris side we have me from science along with multiple different other PhD holders and pharma lifers in our business who actually can look at the scientific use cases and recommend best practices for that and visualizations. We also have a lot of solutions architects and delivery engineers who can look at it from the how should the platform assemble the solution and how can we carry it through? Um And those two groups are three groups really unite together to provide a unified front and to help the customer through and the customer ends up providing the same thing as we do. So they'll give us on the one call, right? Um a technical expert, a data and QA person and a scientist all in one group and they'll say you guys work together to make sure that our orders best represented here. Um And I think that that's actually a really productive way to do this because we end up finding out things and going deeper into the connector than we would have otherwise. >>It's very collaborative, which is I bet those are such interesting conversations to be a part of it. So it's part of the conversation there helping them understand how to establish a common vision for data across their organization. >>Yes, that that tends to be a sort of further reaching conversation. I'll say in the initial sort of short term conversation, we don't usually say you three scientists or engineers are going to change the fate of the entire orig. That's maybe a little outside of our scope for now. But yes, that first group tends to describe a limited solution. We help to solve that and then go one step past and then they'll nudge somebody else in the Oregon. Say, do you see what Petra did over here? Maybe you could use it over here in your process. And so in that way we sort of get this cultural buy in and then increased collaboration inside a single company. >>Talk to me about some customers that you've worked with it. Especially love to know some of the ones that you've helped in the last year where things have been so incredibly dynamic in the market. But give us an insight into maybe some specific customers that work with you guys. >>Sure. I'd love to I'll speak to the ones that are already on our case studies. You can go anytime detector science dot com and read all of these. But we've worked with Prelude therapeutics for example. We looked at a high throughput screening cascade with them and we were able to take an instrument that was basically unloved in a corner at T. Can liquid handler, hook it up into their Ln. And their screening application and bring in and incorporate data from an external party and do all of that together and merge it so they could actually see out the other side a screening cascade and see their data in minutes as opposed to hours or days. We've also worked as you've seen the press release with novo Nordisk, we worked on automating much of their background for their chromatography fleet. Um and finally we've also worked with several smaller biotechs in looking at sort of in stan shih ation, they say well we've just started we don't have an L. N. We don't have a limbs were about to buy these 50 instruments. Um what can you do with us and we'll actually help them to scope what their initial data storage and harmonization strategy should even be. Um so so we're really man, we're at everywhere from the enterprise where its fleets of thousands of instruments and we're really giving data to a large amount of scientists worldwide, all the way down to the small biotech with 50 people who were helping add value there. >>So big range there in terms of the data conversation, I'm curious has have you seen it change in the last year plus with respect to elevating to the C suite level or the board saying we've got to be able to figure this out because as we saw, you know, the race for the Covid 19 vaccine for example. Time to value and and to discovery is so critical. Is that C suite or board involved in having conversations with you guys? >>It's funny because they are but they are a little later. Um we tend to be a scientist and user driven um solution. So at the beginning we get a power user, an engineer or a R and D I. T. Person in who really has a problem to solve. And as they are going through and developing with us, eventually they're going to need either approval for the time, the resources or the budget and then they'll go up to their VP or their CIA or someone else at the executive level and say, let's start having more of this conversation. Um, as a tandem effort, we are starting to become involved in some thought leadership exercises with some larger firms. And we are looking at the strategic aspect through conferences, through white papers etcetera to speak more directly to that C suite and to say, hey, you know, we could fit your industry for dato motif. And then one other thing you said, time to value. So I'll say that the Tetro science executive team actually looks at that as a tract metric. So we're actually looking at driving that down every single week. >>That's outstanding. That's a hard one to measure, especially in a market that is so dynamic. But that time to value for your customers is critical. Again, covid sort of surfaced a number of things and some silver linings. But that being able to get hands on the day to make sure that you can actually pull insights from it accelerate facilitate drug discovery. That time to value there is absolutely critical. >>Yeah. I'll say if you look at the companies that really, you know, went first and foremost, let's look at Moderna right? Not our customer by the way, but we'll look at Madonna quickly as an example as an example are um, everything they do is automated, right? Everything they do is cloud first. Everything they do is global collaboration networks, you know, with harmonized data etcetera. That is the model we believe Everyone's going to go to in the next 3-5 years. If you look at the fact that Madonna went from sequence to initial vaccine in what, 50, 60 days, that kind of delivery is what the market will become accustomed to. And so we're going to see many more farmers and biotechs move to that cloud first. Distributed model. All data has to go in somewhere centrally. Everyone has to be able to benefit from it. And we are happy to help them get >>Well that's that, you know, setting setting a new record for pace is key there, but it's also one of those silver linings that has come out of this to show that not only was that critical to do, but it can be done. We have the technology, we have the brain power to be able to put those all user would harmonize those together to drive this. So give me a last question. Give me an insight into some of the things that are ahead for Tetra science the rest of this year. >>Oh gosh, so many things. One of the nice parts about having funding in the bank and having a dedicated team is the ability to do more. So first of course our our enterprise pharma and BioPharma clients, there are plenty more use cases, workflows, instruments. We've just about scratch the surface but we're going to keep growing and growing our our integrations and connectors. First of all right we want to be like a netflix for connectors. You know we just want you to come and say look do they have the connector? No well don't worry. They're going to have it in a month or two. Um so that we can be basically the almost the swiss army knife for every single connector you can imagine. Then we're going to be developing a lot more data apps so things that you can use to derive value from your data out. And then again, we're going to be looking at helping to educate everybody. So how is cloud useful? Why go to the system with harmonization? How does this influence your compliance? How can you do bi directional communication? There's lots of ways you can use. Once you have harmonized centralized data, you can do things with it to influence your order and drive times down again from days and weeks, two minutes and seconds. So let's get there. And I think we're going to try doing that over the next year. >>That's awesome. Never a dull moment. And I, you should partner with your marketing folks because we talked about, you talked about data plumbing the secret sauce and becoming the netflix of connectors. These are three gems that you dropped on this this morning mike. This has been awesome. Thank you for sharing with us what teacher science is doing, how you're really helping to fast track a lot of the incredibly important research that we're all really um dependent on and helping to heal the world through data. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Haley says I'm a real quickly. It's a team effort. The entire Tetro science team deserves credit for this. I'm just lucky enough to be able to speak to you. So thank you very much for the opportunity. >>And she about cheers to the whole touch of science team. Keep up the great work guys. Uh for mike Roselli, I'm lisa martin. You're watching this cube conversation. >>Mhm.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Yeah, good afternoon. Welcome to Orlando, Florida The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect. Twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin with my co host to Minuteman Stew and I have been Here's starting on Day two stew. Good afternoon, >> Lisa. Great to see Yeah. Day two of three. Enterprise Connect. >> It's not that sunny >> here in the Sunshine State, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walk by. I saw the alligator for bid. They've got nice planning. They've got I love in the atrium there. There's great branding of thie E c. Nineteen. Everybody's taken photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So >> it's a It's a nice >> event way said sixty five hundred intended, which is nice. It's not one of these, you know, twenty thirty thousand. You're just buried by people toe big Expo Hall. But, you know, you could really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. >> Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended. Facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned a number of attendees about one hundred forty vendors, and you can hear the noise behind soon. MIAs were in the ex ball in the booth of five nine and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting state because we talk about the contact center were all consumers every day. And we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an Omni Channel customer experience meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a shot is initiated and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward before we get into. Today's key knows a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on when we were talking with Blair Pleasant. One of the things that she and five nine uncovered with some research is that an employee's satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective that if employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, it's going to be directly relating Tio customer Lifetime Value. >> Yeah, it was a little bit surprising, you know, if you think about just in general, you know, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's I need to get business outcomes. I need to get R. A Y. You know what I care about is, you know, how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers. If I don't have an agent that's engaged, really, how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that, You know? How will the technology help them do their job? Better help them game mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel toe conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, you know, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue it is, you know, the organization and the people issue in the keynote this morning there was a big customer panel and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said We're going to make all these changes And they had the Don't panic towels, which, of course, harkens back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy S O. You know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through. But don't worry, we're there to help on. We will get through this and at the end, it should be better. >> No, I like that. You brought that up. I love that Tabal. Don't panic because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising, empowered consumer also the agent experience. But then, of course, there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this. And as I think, the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental G talking about Hey, we don't have all the answers. But adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of stepwise process. I thought that was very cool, that they actually were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. >> Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting. Listen, the panel there was one of the companies up there. They're pretty large and they said, Look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board. And I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus you know, the Contact Centre. There's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate. But thing like, you know, one tool to rule them all. You know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but, you know, we see that in the cloud world. You know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on. But if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's ah, feature functionality, they can't get elsewhere. I need tohave that, and we see that at this show there's just such a diverse ecosystem meant, and there's one hundred forty there's people that make device. There's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs. And then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here. Some cool software, things that we're hoping toe, you know, take everything from, you know, White Board and voice two speech and globalization to the next phase. >> Yeah, that was very interesting. Especially the Microsoft teams demo. That Lori writing team this morning, The panel Now that you talked about, there were seven, uh, customers from a variety of industries. Kurtz was their continental. We mentioned, I think, paychecks. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday stew in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts? They're about those things. All in Depends on what makes sense. >> Yeah, It reminds me of what we were talking about in the public loud discussion two years ago. Way No cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friend here at five. Nine they were growing at a much faster pace, then the contact center. Overall, I believe they're growing somewhere twenty five percent as opposed The industry as a whole is growing at about nine percent. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of moderated. The panel said that today is about a third, a third, a third on premises hybrid in public and where that kind of steady state will be. I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely I burst a little bit when it's like, Well, you will never do this one this way. Well, you know, never is not something that we like to say in it because you never know when when that will be possible. You know, my background I worked on virtual ization, started out in test Devon. It reached a point where really there was no technical reasons that it couldn't do it when he rolled. The really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really. Who is better it scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment then those hyper scale players. You know, Microsoft got a big present here. You don't ask him. Like her soft customer. Uh oh. You're running off his three sixty five. You're living on Azure. What version of that are you running? And do you have the latest security patch as opposed to? If I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing up a weight, have I done my patron? If I Donald this stuff and you amplify that by thousands of you know of agents and Contact Center, we know that Cloud has certain speed, agility and being up to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization, >> right? And so we talked yesterday with the number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud in the end, the sum of the non obvious ones cost obviously, is one that we talk about all the time rights to it. Any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of a I. Of course, every show we go Teo Isa Buzzword Machine learning. And of course, the cloud provides the opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at context and her overall. And, of course, internal communications. >> Right. And something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about a PC compatibility. You talk about the partnerships that are going on, It is not one software stack we're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has the cool new thing that does, you know, a real time engagement better than what I had before. Well, I could probably plug that in, and it's going to work on my platform. You know, everybody here talks about Well, whether you're, you know, a web, acts of Microsoft teams a zoom shop O r. You know any of those various environment, other? Everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardisation here s O so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment. And you know, I can help modernized the pieces as a need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come >> Absolutely all right. So, stew, you're a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard in some of the folks that you met Way. >> It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while And what are they doing today? What is their focus? And couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party there was a line and I managed to get myself in. Is Polly So Polly has rebranded? Of course it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, they're branding is there, So look kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the programme tomorrow, but, you know, you know, the CEO talked about, you know, their new logo. It's like the meaning behind it. Of course, Polly means many, but there's three piece, and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phone. So, you know the room was in there. Everybody is enjoying the appetizers and the open bar. But, you know, there was people, people, no polycom. I'm back in our conference room. We've got one of those speaker phones in there in the nineties. I usedto, you know, sell their conference phones in their video conferencing When I worked for was now a via but was lucid at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. Thie. Other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, you know, at one point in their career either work for Cisco or worked for, you know, the Lucent family. You know, of course, T back in the day had the whole telecom space, but it is like many other shows. We go to a rather interconnected community here on DH. You know, we'd guess on It's like, Oh, yeah, Cisco, Skype. And now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the, you know, some of the places we go There's bitter rivalries between, you know, key competitors, and yeah, while you know, all the contact centers don't love, you know that they're there. Brothers and sisters, a two competitors there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there on, you know, Sometimes the future will be working with again. So it's it's a it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show, a Zoe said at the top. >> And this show has evolved over the last night. We were talking about yesterday twenty eight, twenty nine years, starting out as being called PBX and then re branding to Voice Con and then in about twenty eleven to Enterprise Connect. And it was interesting that because the word innovation comes up all the time, as does evolution of communications and collaborations. But when the king it was his kicked off this morning they talked about This is the biggest ever enterprise connect that they've had. So you can feel and you can hear it behind us the momentum, the excitement he talked about. There's a lot of cover artery here. There's a lot of two degrees of separation and tech, but the opportunities for every business, whether yours selling a small particles service on the Amazon marketplace or you're a big a global enterprise, the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior a competitive advantage to your customer experience. This table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity. Those capabilities. There's going to be something that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. >> Yeah, absolutely. At least I have a background in space. But there were places where our walk Drano said, Wow, there's applicability for our business. I mean, we use a number of the collaboration Sweets, You know, I mentioned, I've got I've got maps for, you know, not just the Google sweet, but all the collaboration tools on there's technology that I'm like Gucci. I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app. You can start using them for free. And then there's a Freeman model and and others arm or enterprise licenses on. It's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to, you know, it is the pricing. Is Mohr built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional? You know, I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So >> what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup, how much easier your job have been? If you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about >> now least I wish, you know, back in the nineties, you know, if I just had linked in alone, I could have supercharged s o much of what I did. But all these other tools, right? Putting at my fingertips information. It was like, you know, Lisa tell you date myself in the nineties and taking a call where everybody that works in the call center You knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it wass you would be like, Oh, yeah, I, too want to hide in New York. How you doing? You could be whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like. Oh, wait, I'm talking Arizona. They don't follow daylight savings time. We'd remember all that stuff today. There's too many exchanges. Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go. S o it was It was a smaller country back then. But in the other hand, the technology is actually going to give us the opportunity to be ableto imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. >> Exactly. We need that empathy in that connectedness. So, stew, we have a great program today. Stick around. We've got some folks from Selah Jin we've got. It's now on the programme within communications Fuse. Tetra VX five nine, of course. And there in that little and zoom this afternoon. Yes, thank you. Five O'Clock for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.