>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West event at the Thirsty Bear. It's Salesforce Dreamforce downtown San Francisco. Marc Benioff, he said it, 171,000 people. I don't know where they all fit. Please don't bring your car, but we're here, Thirsty Bear is a place to hang. There's no lines at the bar, no lines at the food, this a the place to be. So we're happy to be here. Have our next guest from Conga. We've got Sawyer Martin, he's the Director of Product Management from Conga. >> Sayer Martin. >> Sayer, I'm sorry. Sayer good to see you. Also Mason White, the Director of Product Strategy. Mason great to see you. >> Nice to meet you Jeff. >> Absolutely. So Sayer, you came in on an acquisition we're looking at almost exactly six months ago. >> That's right. >> Orchestrate. So what is Orchestrate, and how's it been so far? >> Yeah, it's been really good. So Orchestrate started as really a wealth management tool for process orchestration, so inside of Salesforce. So managing end to end processes for wealth management firms inside of Salesforce. That's the combination of human and automated work that are happening, tasks being generated-- >> So I was going to say, what type of tasks and stuff? What is it? >> So tasks to tell someone, so a tasks in Salesforce is essentially an instruction to have someone do something. >> Right, but I'm curious because you said very specifically it was for financial management. >> Yeah, so financial management, there's moving money, generating investment policies statements for clients, all kinds of different things that you might do, review meetings for clients. >> And how did you pick that vertical to get started? >> Well we came out up, so the company was actually spun out of a wealth management firm, and that wealth management firm was on Salesforce, couldn't find a way to automate their business basically. Wanted to take those processes that they were living everyday or that were in someone's head and put it down in a system that they could then use to train people as they grew. And so it was born out of that wealth management firm, and knowing that industry we thought, as a small company, let's establish a beachhead in that market and then move elsewhere. The tool's built generically so it applies to any industry really, but we knew that industry the best. So that we focused there. >> So did you spin out of, oh no you were, you spin out of the wealth management company or did those people who founded it left and figured if these guys need it there's probably few more that do as well. >> Yep, so it was the former. Spun out of the wealth management firm, and then took it as this independent entity, not doing wealth management at all, but doing technology exclusively. >> Right, and doing process flow and task management and those types of things. >> That's right. >> Alright, so Mason how does this fit in your portfolio strategy? >> That's a great question, and actually Sayer and I met at Dreamforce '17 last year. In terms of Orchestrate what we've done is really, certainly we are keeping the existing customer base, but we're bringing that type of work flow capability into other areas of Conga. So as you look at the Conga suite of products, that work flow and approval processes is really something that is vital for things like contract life cycle management. Who needs to be involved in reviewing and approving a contract depends greatly on the size of the contract, the level of complexity, the types of changes that are being asked for. So we're in the process of bringing Orchestrate capabilities into various of our product lines. First one we're showing to customers is how we've brought it into Conga contracts through Salesforce, and we'll be bringing it into other elements really through a suite type of play. We're calling it a platform internally, and as we mature that it will become available to other members of The Conga Product Suite. >> Right, so you guys have this interesting collection of products that I assume all started as silos, but they've all got this kind of interplay between the process flow, with the contracts, the document creation, the contract kind of management, they're all very very, you know, kind of different tranches of the same tree. >> Yeah very much so. In fact I'd throw in our recent acquisition of Counselytics with the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities related to contract analysis. There's a fairly consistent thesis in a lot of our recent, whether it's been product launches or product acquisitions around building out capabilities related to contract life cycle management. It's not the only place where those things come into play, but it's certainly the one that is exciting people as we go to market. >> Right, right, so Sayer you've been with him for six months now, how's been the absorption? >> It's been really good. We didn't fully understand when we were acquired that, sort of what the plan was, and we didn't get a lot of direction when we first came aboard, but we knew that contract life cycle management is a powerful piece of the business. It's a growing piece and it's one that's is increasingly important to customers. And so we looked at that from a process perspective, and we've really been focused on finding the gaps there and taking what was as you said, a silo, going from the contract management piece, generating the documents, doing the negotiations, and ultimately signing the documents, and tying it all together with the process engine we'd already built. >> Right, so is Orchestrate's go to market today still as a single product, or are you just getting completely embedded in the other ones? >> I think to Mason's point it becomes obvious to use more than one Conga product. When you buy one at least one other one will make sense for you, and Orchestrate included. >> Right, because Orchestrate is kind of like AI And I'm sure where and how you guys are going to apply AI in all these various applications. And I don't want to buy a bucket of AI, I want all of my applications to work better, work faster, auto-fill, auto-select, you know, take more and more of those manual steps out of the process. >> That's right, augment the human mind in many ways. Right? Come in at those points in the process where it can add value or give you insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had. >> Right, right. So Mason I'm just curious from a product strategy point of view, you've guys have made a lot of acquisitions, got some new money in the war chest, and you know, a really solid team of senior execs that have worked together a lot. The band is back together is a big theme that I've seen all day today. So when you are looking at kind of buy versus build decisions what are some of the things you're thinking about as you kind of continue to build out this suite of kind of cross-functional capability? >> We're always looking at things whether in buy, build, or license. So there are things that as we're looking at them right now, and I'm not going to mention them, the decision is between buy, build, or license in certain types of capabilities. Really depends on what's the maturity of the technology out there, is it something that we need that others have right now and they've got strong, could be a strong OEM business model, or could be something that is a rapidly growing area that we need to get in on. Own it and tune it for our needs specifically. >> Right, well great story and I'm sure you're going to see that Orchestrate stuff all over the place. >> That's what we hope! >> That's what we're working towards. >> Alright, so Sayer, Mason, thanks for taking a few minutes to tell your story, and inviting us here to Conga Connect West. >> Great, thanks Jeff. >> It's nice to talk to you Jeff, thanks. >> Oh my pleasure. Alright, you're watching theCUBE, like I said we're at Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018 brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Thirsty Bear at Salesforce Dreamforce, 170,000 people, we're in a small side of it put on by Conga, it's called Conga Connect West, think they had 3000 people last year. if you can see behind us the Thirsty Bear is packed to the gills, they're here for three days with free food, free drink, theCUBE and some entertainment. But as you know, we like to get the smartest people we can, get the knowledge from them and we're really excited to have a super smart person from 451, she's Sheryl Kingstone, the VP of Research for Customer Experience and Commerce at 451 Sheryl, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too and thanks for inviting me. >> Oh absolutely, so you've been coming to this thing you said for a number of years. Every time I come to Dreamforce, it's like oh my goodness, how can it get any bigger? >> So, I can think back to the year 2000 when I did roadshows with Salesforce and we couldn't even get 40 people in the room. >> Oh my goodness. >> And now we have what, 170,000? >> That was kind of the dark, the dark and... >> That was when we were convincing people >> The dark days. >> That SaaS was the way to go and everyone was like wait, what? >> Right. >> Saas? >> When ASP was not Average Selling Price >> Oh god. >> But Application Service Provider. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Very good. So let's jump into it. So now it's 2018, time flies. Digital transformation is all the rage and I know you do a lot of work on digital transformation. So where do people get started, what is digital transformation? >> Yeah, yeah >> So how do you help people kind of, you know, I got to do it, the boss wants me to do it, my competitors are doing it. >> Yeah >> Where do they go? >> And here's the thing, you could say digital transformation has been pretty much evolving for two decades, it really is leveraging software. But what's really changed is digital transformation is more than just an IT strategy, right? So digital transformation is a business strategy. It's a culture, it's understanding how to leverage these new, more modern technologies so that we're reducing customer friction points, or empowering employees, or helping our partners sell more. So it's really more of an overarching strategy instead of independent, I'm going to go out and get software A versus software B. >> Right, and there's so many components of it, in not only the technology piece, but as we always see at shows, also the people and the process. The technology by itself is just another tool. >> Yeah, and we've been also talking in decades about people, process and technology, and one of the things I've said for a long time is what's missing in that, is the overlying or underlying data element of it. And that's another thing that's changed, is what are we doing to harness the power of the data that we get through these digital transformation processes that were undertaken? >> Right. >> And data's absolutely critical. >> But data by itself's just data, right? And to turn it in for information you got to have context. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right data to the right person at the right time make the right decision. >> Yeah, but I've said all along, it's not about he who holds the right data, most data, it's really who has the right data. >> Right. >> So absolutely. >> Right. So as you look at some of the significant kind of glacial shifts in terms of infrastructure, in terms of CPU, in speed of CPUs compared again to 2000, you know, compared to the data that we have, the storage economics, and obviously Cloud. Now, finally, it seems like we're getting to the tipping point, where you've got enough horsepower, you've got enough storage, you Compute, and networking that you can start to implement some of these things that were just a pipe dream when you couldn't get 40 people, >> Yeah, well, >> In a room. >> So Compute has definitely changed and it's one of the things that's changed with respect to machine learning. The storage, because if you really think about intelligence, it's all about making sure you have all of that data. So yes, absolutely, that's changed. But one of the things that we really have to understand, and at 451 we just launched a lot of research around Foresight, right, and it's so about, hindsight is 20/20 and Foresight is 451, right? So it is all about looking more forward. >> Right, right. >> And one of the things that we talk about is just that. What are we doing with invisible infrastructure? Because no one really cares about what the infrastructure it is today, it's what's the intelligence that's coming out of it? So our four themes are around invisible infrastructure, pervasive intelligence, contextual experiences and then the ability to deal with the risk. So those four themes come together to create Foresight, and we actually launched that this week at our own conference, HCTS. >> I used to joke, we used to operate on a sample of historic data, right? Take a little bit of something that already happened. As opposed to now, you actually have the opportunity to get all the data and you have the opportunity to get it in real-time and have that feed your decision making processes. >> Well, what's really changed is we're no longer working from just operational data, we're bringing a lot more of that behavioral data that has to be streamed in real-time, and that's the architectural changes that have shift. >> Right. >> And the other thing you have to do with the infrastructure changes, if you're really making a decision, you have to make that decision on the edge. (announcements in background) >> So I think Marc Benioff is going to start speaking. >> Yeah, that's what we're going to have to adjust, to cut this off. >> So Sheryl, it's great to catch up and we'll see you next time. >> Not a problem, thank you. >> Marc Benioff's coming on. Thanks for watching theCube. (announcements in background) (upbeat music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back. Get ready, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco. It's Salesforce, Dreamforce. They're telling me it's 170,000 people which I find hard to believe but I'm not out there walking around in the traffic or stuck in an Uber. Hopefully you aren't either. We're excited, we're at the Conga Connect West of it. Here at the Thirsty Bear, they're giving out free drinks, free entertainment, free food. Stop on by, just a couple steps over from Moscone South and they'll be here for all three days. So we're excited to be here, too. First Salesforce, we've got some great guests lined up for you today. Talk about the whole life cycle of this cash-to-quote, or quote-to-cash, excuse me. To Sharmon Moss first, she is the Practice Lead at ATG for CLM. Sharmon, great to see you. >> It's great to be with you, Jeff. >> Absolutely, and with her is Bob Grewal. He is VP of Enterprise Contract Sales for Conga. Bob, great to see you. >> You as well. Glad that we are here. >> So, what an event. Just before we jump into it, you guys said you did this last year, you had such a great turnout, you had kind of up the investment. >> Yeah, so last year, we did a phenomenal amount of events, we wanted to provide our customers opportunity to come in and have a place where they can meet with us, socialize, meet our technical folks but at the same time, enjoy themselves and find a place to relax and work. We do a disco party, a silent disco party last year, that was phenomenal and over-subscribed so this year we ended up having to put a tent in the back and maybe even a bigger investment so our people and partners can come in here and have a great place work, meet and greet, and learn. >> Great. So Sharmon here, she is a Practice Lead out in the field with all the customers. >> It's true. >> So we talk a lot, we go to a lot of tech events at theCUBE and we always talk about people processing tech. And more often than not, the tech is the easiest part. >> It's true. >> To really make this stuff work, so give us kind of what you see in the field, kind of the state of the market in contract management. >> So what we're seeing at ATG, we are a technology management consulting firm and what we've seen recently is, you know, we had the whole optimization of CPQ over the last four or five years and right now, we're really seeing the digitalization of contract management really take a front place in what companies are trying to automate. And that's why we're so excited to work with the team at Conga because our synergies and the way we work together and our cultures are so similar that we're really able to provide just a great compliment to our customers. >> So when you say automating contract management, the first thing the probably goes into most people's heads, at least the first time I heard it, was no way, there's so much nuance, there's so much you know, legalese and maybe negotiated terms and settlements in a contract. How do you possibly automate that beyond, which is state-of-the-art ten years ago, where is it and when is it due? So what are some of the things that people, you know, what can you do today, what does the future hold, what is the state-of-the-art in contract management? >> Well, I think you nailed it on both points. So it's not just about the technology and us as the technology provider would probably argue it's not the easiest part of the solution. But I think it's the combination and the reason why ATG partnership with Conga makes so much sense for us, is that, to capture the digital transformation, or the contract automation value, we really got to do two things. One, you got to get the right technology which Conga provides today. And then you got to have the partner to work with you where we've partnered with ATG to really look at your business processes and as you do that, this is a great opportunity to review how you're doing it today, optimize that, because it's not just about going digital with it, it's really about making sure that we have the right approval process. And then you say, what's possible today? Well, today, CLM has been around for a long time, right, and we think that it's hit a tipping point where it's not just about creating workflows and approval processes. In fact, in many cases, those are table stakes. We seem to do it better, we've designed it so it's easier to use, easier to manage, but the piece that we're seeing as really a focus on the datasite. How do we make that data that lives in those contracts valuable to the organization? So when you're engaging with your customers, now you have a better engagement strategy based on real data, what's changes, what being utilized in your contract. So for us, a big part of it is that we can do the workloads, we can do the approval processes, but where we're really going to differentiate ourselves is that data and making sure that we can make that work, to optimize revenue, to mitigate risk but most importantly, to be able to understand what's happening in the contract world, what you're negotiating so we can make your engagements in the future easier and faster. >> Right, right. So just curious, Sharmon, because you negotiate the contract, you go through all the pain, you know, and you finally get it signed but then generally it would just go in a drawer, or somebody's hard drive on a laptop and let's just hope they're working for us in a year from now, we didn't give them the laptop. But how does that get baked A, into making sure, there was an example earlier, that the right payment terms get into the ERP system and then also, going forward, how does that not just become a stale document that's just sitting in a repository but how do we extract the value to your point to get more benefit from that tough negotiated piece of paper that we worked so hard on. >> Right, and I think that's where we're seeing the change now. Because, historically, it was our legal teams that wanted to automate things, to make their lives simpler, and now we're seeing we need not just to support the legal teams with this information, we need to support reporting, we need to support renewals, we need to support amendments and we need those data elements that are associated. So like you said, the payment terms or the length of the term of a specific service, we needed to datatize that, put that in a system where people can search for it, discover it. So many cases, even like companies with MNA, do due diligence based on this content, right? It can't just be a piece of paper in a box somewhere anymore. It needs to be out there and that's what the future of contract management offers. We are, at this point, in the emergence of this technology where customers are starting to realize the value in that digitalization. >> Go ahead. >> If that helps. >> I was just going to say that the other thing is happening too, is the nature of business relationships is changing so much with new revenue models, right. Subscription models, you know, and kind of prorated and how do you work in your discount structure. It's so much more complicated and so much variety in the ways people are engaging with their customers. I would imagine most of the time that just kind of happens in that contract is still in that guy's laptop that we don't know where it is and we just kind of execute those things. So how is that getting surfaced and kind of bait back so that it's more of a closed loop process? >> Yeah, so a couple of things and we can talk about the processes as Sharmon walking us through kind of hey, we can automate this, we can do this. There's a couple of things in the technology side that Conga's really done and when we think about that, one is a True-up. So when we built this on the Salesforce platform, one of the things that we really did was how do we take what's been in that contract, so simple thing like the terms for payment change from 30 days to 45. Well today or traditionally, people would go and have to update that manually. Well we created a technology called True-up where you're able identify all those key factors, these key data points, and automatically have that update within your Salesforce instance. A challenge for one of our customers is renewals, right? Often we have standard policies of we're going to have to notice customers 60 days in advance of their renewal. Well sometimes we have to negotiate that and sometimes it's 90 days or six months. We've made that really easy when those terms change, we have the ability to true those up and that actually will be reflected in Salesforce automatically. So without any human intervention, outside of approving the term that you've accepted it, it automatically uploads into Salesforce. >> So Truing-up, just to repeat what you said to make sure I understand, so it's basically taking a negotiated terms and the contract and making sure it's getting into the system of records, system of engagement. >> Exactly. >> So it's implemented. >> Yup. >> It's true and another factor within the integration of the Salesforce, is that you can make some of that negotiation happen upfront. So, if you're using CPQ solution for instance, you may negotiate the quote before it even gets to the contract and that can limit the amount of Truing-up we even have to do at the end. >> Right, right. >> And that's the other piece is that one of the things we've done is when it comes to just a cash to quote, we've built a product specifically designed for the cash-to-quote. We call it Conga Contracts Negotiator Edition. And what that really is designed of is, for those customers that have quotes that are going out, that are getting quantities in negotiated, maybe a price propose change, maybe a different terms that are already listed on that quote, we've provided a technology that basically can support that so when the customer comes back with those changes, it also can be Trued-up with Salesforce without having to go in and go back and rework the quote and redo all those quantities. We've made that sync in that True-up capability available even for that quote thing. So very complimentary to the CPQ practice that ATG has today. >> Right. Just curious, Sharmon, from some of your experience with customers. What is the hardest thing that people think is going to be easy and then what's the low-hanging fruit that people go "oh my goodness, this is phenomenal," that maybe is not that hard but the value delivery is consistently over the top for people that are kind of in this journey? >> The thing that I think companies often struggle to do implement into their vision here, is that when you are buying a piece of technology to solve a problem, is that, that piece of technology on its own is not going to solve your problem. You have to take a look at the processes that you use and figure out how to optimize those along with the tools, these awesome tools, that you get with the technology and not pave your cart path. So don't keep doing the same things you've been doing for 20 years and just make them automated. Take advantage of this tool that you have. I think what people underestimate how easy it is, is all the things that they have available to them with this automation. The approval process that can be automated. I don't have to email four people and get their responses back to say "yeah, those changes are OK". That I can build that approval process, that I can build in the acceptance of changes to clauses. My legal department can say "I'll accept this as governing law or that as governing law" and give my salespeople the opportunity to do that without involving legal. And people often don't understand how easy that can be. >> Right. Fewer emails? That's got to be an easy case. >> Yeah, I wish it was just that simple but absolutely right, we're eliminating everything that lives outside of it and getting control. I mean, I couldn't agree more. Customers sometimes think the technology is going to solve the problem and it's really not just the technology when it comes to CLM. It's about the technology and the process and I think with the processes we've done and the practices we've developed, that's really helping customers get greater at adoption, greater rate of ROI, really optimize that so that they're getting a higher value. And time to evaluate what the process we use when they're looking at CLM. >> It's almost a waste of money if you don't go the extra mile for the people in the process, to really take advantage of the investment. Well Bob, Sharmon, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and Bob, specifically, congrats on this great event and thank you for having us. >> Yeah, thank you for joining us as well and thank you for the time. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Bob, she's Sharmon, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Conga Connect West at the Thirsty Bear at Dreamforce, San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> From San Francisco, it's The Cube Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Salesforce Dreamforce, they say a hundred and seventy thousand people have descended into downtown San Francisco, it's absolutely bananas. We found a little respite, a little oasis if you will. Couple doors down to the Thirsty Bear's, the Conga Connect West event, come on down they've rented out The Thirsty Bear for three days of, I just was told, free food, free drink and a lot of entertainment, also a lot of great Conga people as well, and The Cube's here, so come on by. We're excited to have, for our next segment, people that are really getting close to the customer because at the end of the day, it's really about the customer. So we've got Natasha Reid, she is the senior product management for Conga, good to see you. And also Justin Mongroo, the VP of sales excellence from Conga, also great to see you. >> Thanks. Before we get in I got to ask you, Justin, that is a great title, VP of sales excellence. I mean there really, it says something about what you think is important which is being good at selling, not a used car sales approach at all. How did you come up with that title and what does that personify for your team? >> Yeah, well I didn't come up the title but I think for us, Conga, what it means, sales excellence is about selling with integrity, our product provides real benefits to customers and so unlike a lot of products where they can't talk about the full set, sales excellence to us is being able really let the product shine and identify how it's going to help the businesses we work with. >> Right, and Natasha that's what I hear you spend a lot of your time with customers on. You know, you're product management, but you're using a lot of customer input to drive what you prioritize how you're kind of setting out your road map, what you're working on. >> Yes, absolutely. So, from a customer perspective, we really pride ourselves on customer interviews. There's really nothing that helps you understand what customers are doing and using with your products than watching them firsthand in their own environment, and it really just provides invaluable feedback to help drive where we take our products in the future. >> It's funny, we did the Intuit Quickbooks Connect show a couple years ago, we had Scott Cook on, and he used to talk about it at Intuit, they would just go, like you said, and sit and watch people engage with the application, not even surveys but actually see how users use it and it's interesting even if you watch someone else just use Excel, we all use it in a very different way, so that must be incredibly valuable feedback. >> Yes, I mean you really see the good parts of the application, you see the parts that maybe need improvement as well, but it's feedback that you really can't gather in any way except watching somebody. >> Right, I think it also is the philosophy that's very very different than kind of looking at the competitors all the time, if you listen to Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos at Amazon who are just kicking tail and taking names, they're maniacally focused on what the customer wants. They don't really look at the competition, they don't really talk about the competition, they're always looking at that customer. What do they need, what do they need next, and you guys continuing to evolve your product line to kind of continue to go down that path. >> Well, and the reality is is the customer defines the product in a lot of cases, right? What better way to understand your market than to talk to the people who are already working with you and finding out what they want to buy next? >> Right, right. So you guys have some exciting announcements here at Salesforce this year, Salesforce is now integrating some of the Conga functionality inside of some of their core applications if you could give us a little bit more color on that. >> Sure, so we just launched Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, and Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ. So, these two products are taking the power of the flagship document generation product Conga Composer, and we're leveraging that functionality for very purpose-specific built document generation with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing. >> That's pretty awesome. >> Yes, that is pretty awesome. >> So why did pick you guys? What were some of the feature sets, or working with Conga that helped Salesforce come to this decision? >> Sure, so Conga Composer, well known for best in class document generation, pixel perfect documents, so when you need to get your formatting just right, when you need very sharp, clean lines, et cetera, leveraging things like the ability to provide more information or merge more product line items into your documents, as well as supporting the formats that people want, things like Word and PDF. >> Yeah, and I would say in addition to the functionality, Salesforce also is able to trust just by seeing our customer experience through our net promoter score and our reviews online knowing that they could partner with us and that we would take care of our joint customers they way they want them to be. >> That's a pretty significant move by them to adopt your guys' technology as part of the core within some of their offerings >> It is, it's not something that Salesforce does often, so we're very proud and we're very grateful that they looked to us to help provide these solutions. I think another component of this is just ease of use. So very easy to install, Lightning-ready, very forward thinking in that capacity. >> Yeah, the Lightning thing is interesting, you get used to the old, "Who moved my cheese?" I was the old school front end on Salesforce and they finally made me jump over to Lightning, but I'm sure that opened up all types of new opportunities for you to deliver new functionality in that. >> It does, and I'll empathize with that sentiment. I think change is always hard, right? People always struggle a little bit when they're used to doing something one way and Lightning is a very different look and feel from Salesforce Classic. I will say though that once you move to Lightning, Salesforce has done a really great job of, Lightning is more than just a CRM, It helps you do your job better. It makes suggestions, they put a lot of work into UI, user interface and user experience, you don't have to think about how to do your job better, it actually just helps you do your job better. >> Right. >> So being able to build and develop on the Lightning framework is actually a tremendous benefit. >> It has been, and in the last piece you guys are sitting on a bunch of different pieces in this document life cycle, if you will. You don't call it that, but you're into the contracts, you're into the document generation, you're into the life cycle management, so all these things too, I imagine now are coming together in a more kind of synchronized, cohesive way. >> Well I mean it's really if you think about the customer's story they need a generated document to communicate with their customers before they are a customer, and then they need to do a quote to show them how much it's going to cost, and they may or may not need to negotiate that and then they need to sign it, and every business has this sort of interaction with their customers, from, "Here's what we do." to "Do you like it "enough to buy it from us?" To, "Here's how we make it legally binding". I mean that's business, and Conga has met our customers along every stage of that journey that they go through in making a customer a customer, and doing that in a visually stimulating, professional way. >> So, fun fact about Conga Sign, our e-signature product we launched in February of this year. E-signature was the #1 feature request, or problem to solve that the conga customer base has provided in the last couple of years. So, everybody wanted e-signature. We listened, we heard, and we built you e-signature. >> So how long did it take you to get it out, from the time you decided, okay we'll go ahead? >> Well, as the original product manager I can actually answer that very specifically. So, we started building in July of last year and we launched on February thirteenth of this year. >> So, less than a year? >> Yes. >> Definitely less than a year. >> Okay, great. And just final thoughts on this event? Dreamforce, obviously a huge event for you guys, big investment in this Thirsty Bear celebration at Connect West. What do you hope to get out of this week, what are you excited to see from both the Salesforce folks across the street, as well as this kind of gathering with all your customers? >> You know, for me I hope to learn. I want to learn what our customers are interested in, I want to learn what our reps are seeing in the market as they walk around, and what other businesses are doing, and then learn from the ecosystem and what tools are available that we can use ourselves to better help our customer which is our employees. >> My favorite part of Dreamforce is actually the Conga booth at the Moscone main hall. So we actually get lots of our customers who come to find us, who come to find specific people. They'll come and ask for, "Hey, this support person "helped us", and they'll actually identify that person by name, or "Hey, this professional "service person helped us, can I meet them? "Are they here?" And it's just incredibly gratifying, like it's very difficult to describe. You have literally hundreds of people coming to find you to just say, "Thank you, we love your products, "it makes my life so much easier, "what else are you guys doing?" >> That's great, and it's always so gratifying to know that there's always someone on the other side that appreciates the work and it's always fun when you get some kind of an electronic relationship, to cement that with a face and a voice and a name and a handshake. Well, thanks again for stopping by and congratulations on the big announcement. >> [Natasha And Justin] Thank you. >> Alright, he's Justin, she's Natasha, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're here at Conga Connect West at Salesforce at Thirsty bear, see you next time.

(exciting electronic music) >> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Thirsty Bear. We're at Dreamforce. I can't get an official number, I keep asking, but the number they're throwing around is 170,000 people, so if you're coming, do not bring your car. It will take you four days to get here from AT&T and I think the Giants have a home game today, too, which just makes things even more interesting. But we're at a special side event, it's the Conga Connect West event here at the Thirsty Bear, three doors down from Moscone South, so we're excited to be here. It's our first time at Salesforce, and to kick things off, we've got Bob DeSantis, the chief operating officer of Conga, and with him, Jason Gabbard, the head of AI strategy. So gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Good morning, great to be here with you. >> So what a cool event. You guys have this thing rented out for three days. >> Yep. You've got entertainment, you've got the silent disco. I think tomorrow night, some crazy bands. >> Yeah, we've got an open bar, food going all day and all night, actually we did this last year, and we were so crowded that this year we rented the parking lot behind and we built two circus tents so we actually extend all the way out to the next block. We have multiple sponsors here helping us to bring their customers and their partners in. So, open bar, open food, meeting rooms, demo stations, a place to come and relax and kick back a little bit from the chaos of those 170,000 people just a block away. >> It's just crazy, so come on down and meet the Conga crew and all the people, you have a good time. Let's jump into it. The topic at hand is AI. We are all the buzz about AI, AI, AI, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and what we hear time and time again is no one, I just need to go buy some AI. Really that's not the way the implementation is going to work, but where we see it in a great example I like to use a lot that people are familiar with is Gmail, those little tiny automated responses back to that email, there's actually a ton of AI behind those setting context and voice, and this that and the other. How are you guys leveraging AI in your solutions? You've been at this for a while. AI represents a great new opportunity. >> Yeah, it really is, Jason do you want to? >> Yeah, sure, you may not be aware, but Conga has actually been developing AI inside of the contract management system for a few years now, and I came over to Conga in connection with the acquisition of a company I founded focused on AI, and so obviously, things are getting a lot more interesting, technology is getting a lot more robust. You know, I think you made a great analogy to Gmail. Inside of the Conga CLM, Conga Contracts, you'll actually see that we're starting to make suggestions around contracts, so you may load a document in and you might see a popup over in the margin that says, "Hey, is this a limitation of liability clause?" So that's one example of AI working in the background of CLM. >> Well, I was going to say, what are some of the things you look for? I had a friend years ago, he had a contract management company, and I was like, "How?" And this was before OCR, and it was not good. "How? How are you doing this?" He goes, "No, if we just tell them where's the document and when does it expire, huge value there." He sold the company, he made a ton of money. But obviously, time has moved along. A lot of different opportunities now, so what are some of the things you do in contract lifecycle management? >> Think of that example as phase one of contract lifecycle management. Just get all my contracts into a common repository, give me some key metadata, like what's the value, who are the counterparties, and what's the expiration date? That's huge. So, ten years ago, 15 years ago, that was the cutting edge of CLM, contract lifecycle management, now the evolution has continued, we're in what we think of as sort of the third phase of CLM. So now, how do we actually pull actionable data out of contracts? So having the contract, you mentioned OCR, having machine readable data in a repository is great, but what's actually in the contract? What did we negotiate six months ago that now could have an impact on our business if we knew it? If we could act on it? And so with Conga AI, and the machine learning technology that Jason's company developed, and that we've now embedded in our CLM products, we can unlock the data that's hidden in documents, and make it actionable for our customers. >> So one of the things that you used to trigger that action, because the other thing about contracts we always think about, right, is you negotiate them, it's a pain in the butt, you sign them, then you put them in the file cabinet, nobody thinks about it again. So in terms of making that more of a living document beyond it's just simply time to renew, what are some of the things that you look for using the AI? Are you flagging bad things, are you looking for good things, are you seeing deltas? What are you looking for? >> I'll give you a really concrete example. We recently had a customer that negotiated a payment term to their benefit with one of their suppliers, but that payment term was embedded in the document, and their payables team was paying on net 30 when their negotiators had negotiated net 90. That data was locked in the contract. With Conga AI, we can pull that data out, update the system of record, in that case, it would have been SAP, and now the payables team can take advantage of those hard fought wins in that contract negotiation. That's just one example. >> Yeah, so two obvious use cases we're seeing day in and day out right now, number one, I'll call an on ramp to the CLM, so that's likely a new customer or relatively new customer at Conga that says, "Hey, I have 50,000 contracts." I was on the phone this morning with this precise use case. "I have 50,000 contracts, really happy to be part of the Conga family, get my CLM up and running, but now I got to get those 50,000 contracts into the system, so how do we do that?" Well, there's one way to do that, get a bunch of people together and work for a couple years and we'll have it done. The other way is to use AI to accelerate some of that. Classic misconception is that the AI is going to do all of the work, that's just not the case. At Conga, we tend to take more of a human computer symbiosis sort of working side by side, and the AI can really do the first pass. You might be able to automate something like 75% of the fields, so you can take your reduced team of people then and get the rest of the information into the system and verified, but we may be able to cut that down from a couple years to 30, 60 days, something like that, so that's one obvious use case for the technology, and then I think the second is more of a stare and compare exercise. Historically, you would see companies come in and say, "If I'm going to sign an NDA, it's got to have the following ten features, and I'll never accept x, y, and z." So we can sort of key to that with our AI, and take the first pass of a document and really do the triage, and so again, while it may not be 100%, we'll get to 80-90% and say, "Here are the three or four areas where you need to let your knowledge workers focus." >> And are there some really discrete data points that you call out in a defined field for every single contract because there always are payment terms, I imagine, obviously dates and signatures, so some of those things that are pretty consistent across the board versus, I would imagine, all of the crazy, esoteric-y stuff, which is probably their corner cases that people focus too much on relative to the value that you can get across that entire pop, 50,000 contracts is a lot of contracts. >> I don't know what your view is, but for me, I think it's follow the money. Everyone always cares about dollars, when I'm getting my dollars, and the other is follow very high risk stuff. Like indemnities, limitations and liability, occasionally you're seeing people interested in change in control, what happens if I sell my company or take on a bunch of financing, does that trigger anything? >> What's interesting about contracts is there are hundreds if not thousands of different potential clauses that could live in a contract, but in general, sort of the 90-10 rule is that there's about 40 clauses that you find in most commercial agreements, most business to business, or even business to consumer commercial agreements, so with Conga Machine Learning, we train based on the sort of use cases that extend that for a specific domain. So for example, we've done a lot of work in commercial real estate, right? So those commercial real estate agreements have that core base, but then they have unique attributes that are unique to commercial real estate, so Conga Machine Learning, as part of the Conga AI suite, can be trained to learn so that we can reduce that cycle time. You know, when we go into our tenth commercial real estate use case, it's going to be a lot more efficient, a lot faster, and a lot higher initial hit than we start training it at the beginning. For us, it's about helping customers consume the documents that make sense for their business. And machine learning is intuitively about learning, so there is this process that has to take place, but it's amazing how quickly it can learn. You use the google example, I like to think of the Amazon.com suggestion service example. They literally know what I'm going to buy before I'm going to buy it. >> Right, right. >> That didn't just happen yesterday, they've been learning that from me for the last 20 years or 15 years. We're at sort of the beginning of that phase right now in terms of B to B CLM, but it's amazing how quickly it's moving, and how quickly it's having an impact on our customers businesses. >> Yeah, I was going to ask, so where are we on the lifecycle of the opportunity of using AI in these contracts beyond just the signature date and the renewal date for some of these things? And also I would imagine, you guys can tie some of that back into your document creation process >> That's right. >> So that you again remove a lot of anomalies, and get more of a standardized process >> Yeah, so Conga provides a full digital document transformation suite, and that includes, as you mentioned, document generation capabilities, contract management, Conga AI >> Signature, the whole thing, right? >> Conga sign. So we're not here yet, but imagine if through Conga AI, we're able to learn what type of clause structure actually has a higher close rate, or a faster cycle time, or a higher dollar value for a given book of business, so customer x is selling their products to consumers or other businesses, and if we can learn, we can, how their contracts streamline and improve their effectiveness, then we can feed that right back into the creation side of their business. So that's just over the horizon. >> And then the other thing, I would imagine, is that you can get the best practices both inter-department, inter-company, and then I don't know where the legal limits are in terms of using it anonymized and the best practice data to publish benchmarks and stuff, which we're seeing more and more because people want to know the benefits of using so many of these things. You know, what's next? And then do you see triggers? Will some day it will be a trigger mechanism or is it really more a kind of an audit and adjust going forward? >> From my perspective, I think the some day is more, we're extremely focused on the analytics and the kind of discovery of documents right now, but I think looking out over the one year horizon, it's less about triggers and more about more touchpoints in the work close, and so really optimizing the contracting process, so being able to walk into a company and say, "Hey, I know you would like for this to be in all your contracts, but as a matter of practice, it's not, so maybe we need to abandon that policy, and get to a signed document faster. So more of that type of exercise with AI, and also integrating with sibling systems and testing what you expected to happen in the document versus what actually happened. That may be vis-à-vis an integration with ERP or something like that. >> It's pretty amazing, because as we know, the stuff learns fast. >> It does. >> From watching that happen with the chess and the go and everything else, and you read some of the books about exponential curves, you'll get down that path probably faster than we think. >> Yes. >> Well, Bob, Jason, thanks for taking a few minutes, and again thanks for inviting us to this cool event, and everybody come on down, there's lots of free food and drinks. >> Come down to the Thirsty Bear. >> Thanks so much. >> Alright, he's Bob, he's Jason, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West event at Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, come on down and see us. Thanks for watching. (energetic electronic music)