(gentle music) >> Hello, beautiful humans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, where we are combating the dry air of the desert and all giggling about the rasp of our voice at this stage. We're theCUBE and we are live from AWS reinvent. I am Savannah Peterson, joined by the fabulous Paul Gillin. Paul, how are you holding up? How are your feet doing? >> My feet are, I can't feel them anymore. (both laugh) >> We can't feel much after these feet. >> Two miles. Just to get from, just to get to to the keynotes this morning. >> Did you do your cross training to prepare >> For, >> Apparently not well enough. (Savannah laughs) Not well enough. >> Well, it's great to have you here >> likewise. and I'm very excited for our next conversation. We've got Ramesh from Prosimo. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: Welcome to the show. How is the show going for you? How's your voice? >> Oh my God. I woke up this morning and I could not hear my own voice. I'm like, this is not me. I think it's the dry air here, so if I cough, I apologize in advance. But no, the show has been great. It's been nonstop at the booth. It's wonderful to see all the customers in one place so you don't have to schedule lots of meetings spread across three, four weeks. So you get to >> Savannah: Right. I, yeah >> So yesterday was like eight to six, nonstop and it was awesome, right? Because you get to meet all these guys. The other important thing is the focus on the right layer, right? Like, I loved the keynote from Adam. It was about applications, services, data. Nowhere in there was there like infrastructure. Like we are infrastructure, right? I actually love that because that's where the focus should be and that's what customers are caring about right? So it's, it's been great so far. >> Yeah. I'm so happy to hear your booth's packed. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, we're going to be talking about optimization. It's a theme, but we also optimize our time here >> Ramesh: Yeah. >> on the show floor by getting to engage with our community. Prosimo's been around for three years just in case folks aren't familiar, give us the pitch. >> Sure. We are in the cloud networking space, solving for two problems. What happens within the cloud as you bring up VPCs, vnet and workloads, how are they able to talk to each other, secure each other, and how to use those access workloads? Those are the two problems that we solve for. It stemmed from really us seeing a complete diversion in what cloud wants versus what network really focuses on. Cloud has been always focused on applications and speed of operations and network has always been about reliability, scalability, and robust architecture. And we didn't really see these things come together. So that's when prosimo was born. >> So what are some of the surprises newcomers to the cloud may encounter with networking, with cloud networking that was not a factor when they were fully on-prem? >> So the first thing is in the cloud, you can't deal with the workload the same way you dealt with in the data center. In the data center, you usually had pools of service. They were all allocated some level of addressing. And it was not about the workload, it was more about the identity, IP addresses and so forth. In the cloud, those things have completely gotten demolished, right? You have to refer to a S3 service as an S3 service. It's not an IP endpoint. IP endpoint comes and goes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so you have to completely shift around that, right? >> Now, this actually challenges almost 10 years, 12, 20 years maybe, of networking that we knew about, right? So that's why cloud networking is almost night and day difference compared to regular networking right? And, we're seeing that and that's what we are really helping customers with. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I, well actually, let me ask you this question. Do you, is there an industry or vertical you work with specifically? I would imagine most people across, >> Ramesh: The Yeah, across. >> Yeah. >> Anybody that has workloads in the cloud right? >> Yeah, right. >> Ramesh: That's, >> I mean I can't imagine any companies that would have that. >> Exactly. (Savannah laughs) >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing? I know we talk about time to value. We talk about cost optimization. Is that the top priority for your customers? >> Yeah. Up until end of last year, a lot of the focus was about speed of operations. And so people would look at what are the type of workloads? How do I enable things? How do I empower my development team? So, if I'm the cloud platform team responsible for connecting, securing and making sure my applications can get deployed smooth and fast, that was the primary focus. Fast forward to this year, we started to see this a little bit at the beginning of the year. Now it's in full force. It's about cost control, right? It's about egress charges coming out of the cloud. Suddenly the cloud bill and every single line item on the cloud bill is in focus, right? And so that has a direct impact on what does this mean for networking. Cloud networking for many may not be familiar, it's about 14% of the cloud bill. And so anything that materially moves the needle on the cloud networking costs can actually have a have a big impact, right? And so we have seen the focus on the speed of operations are still there but cloud cost control has become a big part of it. >> So where are the excesses? I mean, it's, it's a big part of the bill. Where can company, where do companies typically waste money in networking costs? >> So, if you bring a person who understands networking and networking architecture really, really well, they'll can build a solid architecture, but they'll not focus on operations and automation. If you bring a 25 year old, they will automate the heck out of it. They know python day in and day out. And so they'll automate the heck out of it but it will not be with a robust architecture, right? And so you, on one hand, you end up wasting because you do things very suboptimally. It's a solid architecture, it's a really good design but it's really bad for operations. In the other hand, with push of a button you can get anything done but underneath the covers, underneath the hood, if you look at it, it's a mess, right? And so you have more competence than necessary. And so, what customers want is really a best of both, right? You need solid architecture that has all the right principles but also you need the automation so that you don't employ four, five people and a whole toolkit in order to make things work, right? And that's where we see most of the efficiencies come from >> You said you were you were super busy at your booth. Do customers understand that this is a problem now? >> So more so now than I would say last year. The last reinvent when we had a session. >> Yeah. >> We had to educate a lot of people on these are the requirements for cloud networking. Thanks to Gartner, thanks to many of the sessions you guys have been doing as well. The focus and the education for what cloud networking requires has started to come about. Now, this is where the savviness of the customer is important, right? Like there are customers in different stages of their journey. Those that have been operating in the cloud for three years plus, know that they've crossed that initial phase, right? Like you have basic hygiene, you have certain things and moving from hundreds of VPCs to maybe about thousand, right? And so at that time, the set of challenges I need to work with are very, very different, right? So now increasingly we are seeing at the booth the challenges are, "Hey, I know how to operate in the cloud". Right? Like, "Don't talk to me about that." Right? "But how do I get from hundred to a thousand?" Because I have a gun to my head. My CIO has said, I need to decommission my data centers in the next couple of years and I need to go all in on cloud. Help me with that, right? And so it's the, I wouldn't call it like massive scale it's the scale from kind of the trivial to the next stage that's actually causing a lot of these problems to surface. >> It's that layer of transformation. >> Ramesh: Yeah. It's when you've made the commitment and now we've got to catch everything up >> [Ramesh} exactly. >> across the company locations and probably a variety of different silos doing different things. >> Ramesh: Exactly. Yeah. >> Super complex. So, how do folks get started with you? >> Yeah, so typically we start with like, even if the customer says, "Here's what my blueprint looks like." We say, "Bring two regions." That's it, two regions, a few workloads. We'll help you set up the connectivity, set up the secure access required, set up the foundational things There's a certain level of automation, right? Let's get to that point because governance is different. The cloud privileges are different so let's work through all of that, right? Usually this takes about a week or so. The actual proof of concept, proof of value can be done in a day, but getting permissions and what not takes about, about a week, right? And once you show two regions then it's actually game on, right? Then you go from 10 VPCs to a hundred to a thousand and it's just like one to one thing after another. So that's usually how we see customers get started. We have a full stack that covers kind of what does this mean for the network to application services to kind of layer seven and so forth. We tell the customer, as much as we want you to focus on the entire stack, let's start with one, right? Start baby steps, start with one. Because for many, cloud itself is, I wouldn't say new but they're in a region that's not comfortable, right? So you wannna, you don't want to throw too much at them. >> Savannah: Right. >> So we help them kind of progressively move towards different types of workplace. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And you have a multicloud story as well. >> Ramesh: That's correct. >> So when companies begin to cross clouds with workloads, move them between clouds, what kinds of issues emerge then? >> Yeah, so there are two parts for this, right? There is the AWS and data center and then there is the AWS plus other clouds. Two different set of problems, actually, >> Paul: Hm-hmm. Hm-hmm. The AWS plus connectivity, back into my data center almost every single enterprise. We deal with kind of the global 2000. Every single one of them has that, right? And so we kind of, we go through a series of steps, come up with an architecture, deploy a solution. After that, it's, Hey, I have BigQuery in Google that needs to talk back to an S3 bucket out here. Like, no networking solution can help you with that. Like, you need like cloud native principles in order to come into the picture. So increasingly we are seeing requests for, hey I have a distributed workload. It's not, it's not that one single application is spread across multiple clouds, but I have these islands of workloads that all need to talk to each other. >> Paul: Right. And what I don't want to do is actually build highways that actually connect all these things together because that's a waste of time. I actually want to make sure that only these applications that care about the talking to each other, are allowed to talk to each other. So that's kind of one foundational thing that we see. A few others are around compliance and governance. So we say, Hey, if I'm a retailer, I need to have some workloads in Azure some in the GCP and so forth. So it depends on kind of the industry compliance, regulatory requirements and so forth. >> So many different needs >> Ramesh: Exactly. for so many different types of companies. But also, you know, creating that efficiency is so great. >> Ramesh: Yup. >> And especially that time to value tune, cost reduction >> Ramesh: Yup. doing a lot of great things for your customers. There's a note on my run sheet here that you've seen some success with Topgolf and I suspect we have some golfers in the audience. John even used to be a caddy. We had a caddy segment with someone who was a pro caddy. Drew, when we were at Cape Con. Tell us about that story. >> So it was a really wild idea. We said, okay people are going to be walking around 22,000 steps right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And so >> Like Paul, >> And, they're going to be talking to people, listening to sessions. So we said, let's, what do most others do? You set up some time in a restaurant, you come, you have a social time, and what not. We said, let's give people something different. So we reserve the Topgolf here and we opened it up. We initially paid for a certain number of things. It's actually gone three x of that right now. So we had in the Topgolf, can you give us like the entire thing? I think people just want to go do something different, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And of course the topic is important but equally important is like, I just want to have a good time, right? >> Yeah. And if you, hit a few And there you go. >> It doesn't have to relate back to network >> Cloud, network. >> Yeah, exactly. And so >> Well, it's all about building community. >> Exactly. >> And especially right now, we all, you know, we're stronger together. >> Ramesh: Yup. We're entering a unique time, we're coming out of a unique time. >> Ramesh: Exactly. >> And, no, I think that's great. And we actually do a swag segment here on theCUBE, differentiating on the show floor. I mean, it's clear because of how thoughtful you are >> Ramesh: Yeah. there's a reason that your, that your booth is so busy. >> Ramesh: That's right. >> So what's next? What can you, can you give us a little sneak preview? What's coming out for you? >> Yeah, so, I'm sensitive and sympathetic to all the macroeconomic conditions that are happening but there's been, we have not skipped a beat. So our business is growing really well. Thanks to all the things that are happening in the cloud. Increasingly, folks are looking at, you know, how how do I move in mass into the cloud? And so a few themes have come about as a result. One, certainly around cost control. How do I, how do I make, how do we make sure that we help our customers in that journey, right? So we have a few things around those lines. Modernization, especially after you go through the first few workloads, the next few that come about are invariably modern workloads. And modern workloads is this sensitive thing where I think the ultra savvy developers know what to do but the infrastructure guys don't know what to do in order to serve, right? And so we have actually developed a set of capabilities to help with that kind of modernization, right? Because it's not enough if your apps are modernized, your infrastructure that serves the apps also need to be modernized. And so those are the, those are the things and certainly, getting our customers less than us. We want to get our customers to talk. And so you'll see quite a bit of that as well. >> I want to ask you about a statement that was in the notes that we were reading, running up this interview. Zero Trust network access is the next solution that will be disrupted. What do you mean by that? >> So, when we started the company about three years ago, zero test network access was there. It was about maybe two, three years old at that time. And so we said, it needs to be done differently in the cloud. Why? Because you are a user. You're trying to access an application in the cloud. Do you care what's in the middle? You really don't, you just want to be able to open up your laptop, go to dub dub something.com and you should be able to access, right? But that's not how the experience is today. There's invariably something that comes, a middle mile solution that comes in the middle, right? And then the guy needs to operationalize all of that. And that now passes on to you. You need to launch a an agent on your thing, connect into something. It just brings a lot of complexity, right? So we looked at that problem and we said, cloud has done really really a few things really, really well, right? It's literally at your doorstep. Cloud presence is literally at your doorstep. So as you open up your browser, connect from your home, I don't need anything in the middle. I am jumping straight into the cloud. And so when you do that, then you actually have the luxury of bringing a few capabilities to the entry point of the cloud so that security can be done better, posture control can be done better and so on and so forth. So we developed those capabilities almost three years ago. We have quite a few large enterprises that have deployed this. And we fundamentally believe on building on top of the hyperscale network because billions of tens of billions of dollars go into the investment here. And we want to be building a layer of value on top, right? And so we've been working closely with our AWS buddies here and actually built capabilities so that the infrastructure presence, the massive reach and also the underlying capabilities for zero trust are provided. But what the customer regains in terms of value is through our platform, right? And so we'll see a whole lot more innovation along these lines. Probably bad news for the Middle Mile provider who sit in the, in the middle because hey AWS is literally at your doorstep, so you have to rethink your strategy. >> Going to be a lot of agility >> Ramesh: Yes, absolutely. >> In a very different context than we normally use it in Nerdland. And no, I think that's great. So we have, it's an exciting time for you as a company. We have a new challenge here at Reinvent. >> Okay. >> On theCUBE. I know you're a venerable alumni. >> Yep. >> You have been on theCUBE multiple times with multiple companies which is very impressive. Which says a lot about you. Although given how fun this interview's been, I'm not surprised. Give us your 30 second, Instagram real highlight, sound bite on the biggest or most important theme or takeaway from this year's show. >> From this show? Yeah, so if you look across the keynotes in all the sessions, the focus is on data, services and the applications. So the biggest takeaway I would offer anybody is focus on that first because that's where the outcome needs to shine. The rest of the stuff is a means to an end. I am an infrastructure guy through and through, I have been for the last 20 years. It hurts me to say infrastructure is a means to end but it is, right. Let the people dealing with the infrastructure deal with the infrastructure. If you are a customer or a client of the service, focus on the outcome, focus on the apps, focus on the services focus on on the data. That would be the biggest takeaway. >> Savannah: I appreciate your >> Paul: Words of wisdom >> Savannah: transparency. Yeah, no, exactly. Words of wisdom and very honest words of wisdom. Really great to talk to you about intelligent infrastructure. >> Absolutely. >> Savannah: Thank you so much for being on the show, Ramesh. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: It's been, it's been awesome. Paul, it's always a pleasure. >> Likewise. Thank you all for tuning in today here live from the show floor at AWS, reinvent in beautiful sin city, in the high desert and the high end dry desert with Paul Gillin. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (gentle music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018 brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage. This is day three of VMworld 2018. We're live in Las Vegas this is theCUBE's special coverage. Our ninth year covering VMworld. Kicking off day three, we've got two sets. Our next guest, Brian Reagan, who's the CMO of Actifio, theCUBE alumni. Great to see you. Great company doing some great things on the marketing side. You guys taking a different approach than others. Let the product do the talking. Let the solution speak for itself. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. It's great to be back and, Dave, it's always a pleasure. It's great to be at VMworld. >> You guys, I don't want to say, a different approach, but you're here at VMworld. There's a lot of pomp and circumstance. There's a lot of big booths, a lot of glam, a lot of attention getting. You got to do that but you don't want to overspend on that. You really want to just be in the community. What's your strategy? How are you as a CMO going into a world that wants more content? They want more data. They want to get solutions built. They love the glam, but the meat and potatoes is what they want. >> Monday night we had an event at TopGolf and I was talking to a couple customers and they basically were all saying the same thing to me which was, I come to VMworld to basically collect squeezy balls for my kids. They're going back to school. I'm going to collect a lot of toys. I'm going to do the solution expo. Great, great opportunity to really breakthrough from a swag standpoint, but no one's coming here to necessarily research the company that they want to disrupt or transform their business around. What we believe for VMware and, quite frankly, just in general is this is a great place to engage with customers. They're all here. This is the IT, this is COMDEX 2018. We need to be here, but we don't necessarily need to be in a solutions exchange where it's just an arms race about swag. >> What's your relationship with VMware? How do you guys fit in the ecosystem? What's the value proposition? What is the Actifio relationship to the community? How do you guys walk that line and how do you deliver those solutions? >> Pretty much throw a rock and you'll hit a vendor out here who has a great VMware solution, right? We are no exception. Everyone does VMware. Quite frankly, it's actually really easy nowadays. There's zero differentiation. I hate to say it, but everyone does VMware the same way. There is really no disruption in this marketplace because everyone does VADP. Everyone does Snapshot. Quite frankly, what we major on and what we focus on is actually the workloads that are franchise critical to businesses, which really are databases. Yeah, they might run out of VM, but often times they run on physical machines. Let's focus on databases. If they happen to be VMware, great. You know what, we like everybody else has a great VMware solution, but it's easy. Let's focus on the hard stuff which is databases which run the business and dX is all around databases and applications that run the business. That's where we major on. That's where our value comes in. That's where our customers see the most value from Actifio. >> My take away is, five/ten years ago it was all about integration and that was a differentiation, who could get the SDK faster, >> Exactly right, yeah. >> And you say, we were, we own them and that app would be right there. Okay, fine. That's done, okay. Fast forward to 2018, what's your perspective on VMware, what they're doing, the market momentum. You mentioned databases. You see them with Amazon bringing database now on prem. A lot has changed. What's your perspective? >> I think VMware is really... You talk to any CIO, any IT leadership, VMware is a critical part of the conversation so I don't mean to, in any way, diminish the value that VMware brings to the enterprise. And actually they are enabling cloud in every enterprise today whether it's private, whether it's hybrid, whether it's I'm going to do public, but I'm going to do public in VMware in the Amazon Cloud. VMware is table stakes in terms of running mission critical applications. What we believe is the next level of integration is what's the app running in VMware, right? What is it Oracle? I'm running Oracle rack inside of VMware. I'm running SAP inside of VMware. That's the next level of integration that becomes the differentiation and, quite frankly, the value creation in a lot of these enterprises. >> How do you guys differentiate, John was talking about all the glam and all the noise, a lot of noise, tons of noise around data protection. You guys pioneered the whole copy data management space. Where are you seeing growth? Where's the momentum, maybe you can give some examples. >> 2/3 of our business is now actually leading with DevOps and cloud. The real lever there is time. People want more time back in their day and they want more time back because whether it's-- there was a great article that SearchITOperations published about Aetna where they have tens of multi-terabyte databases and, quite frankly, it breaks every piece of infrastructure that they had, but they want to be able to serve those multi-terabyte databases out to their developers within minutes, as opposed to weeks or months or however long it takes traditional operations. Let's serve that need. Let's solve the time problem and all of a sudden digital transformation becomes a reality. dX and continuous integration, continuous development is really easy when you're talking about megabyte-sized JSON files. When you talk about 100 terabyte databases, it becomes really hard. With Actifio, we solve that problem. Now, we're enabling dX at scale in these large enterprises. It's really a time problem. >> Aetna's a customer obviously. We heard a similar story from Live Nation, which is another customer, but go ahead, John, sorry. >> What's the drivers in this because this is a unique thing? Because databases, as we said on theCUBE here on our analysis, the battleground in cloud, on premise in cloud database is the crucial thing. Look at Amazon, they're going after Oracle. RDS, their relational database service, on VMware on premise. Amazon's never done that before so clearly the database is a hard nut to crack, one. Two, it's super important. It's the pacing item on all migrations, all activity. What's driving your business because you're targeting that, trying to improve ease of use, but what's the market force? Migration, developer scale? What are some of the things that are driving your business? >> Yes and yes, right? It's help me collapse my cycle time. Typically, the time to actually get a copy of data for a developer is measured in weeks or months. >> In the old way. >> In the old way. CICD is talking about a daily check-in. And daily check-in, weeks and months, it just doesn't jive. If I can actually collapse that down into, yes, no matter how big that database is, I can give it to you in a 15 minute, 30 minute SLA. >> The mismatch between data pipelining to developer need is a gap, huge problem that you solve. What about some of the consequences if that's not solved? >> What do people do to compromise the time problem? They subset. They give their developers, it's a 100 terabyte production database, they give them a terabyte or 1/2 a terabyte of actual subsetted data so they run their queries in development and they work great. Then they roll them into production, all of a sudden they break because 100 terabytes is a different animal. >> And that could be a terrible experience for the application where data has to drive all the value. So speed of data insertion into the application is the critical cloud negative and/or developer need. >> It drives quality. It drives customer satisfaction. It drives, quite frankly, in regulated industries, it drives compliance. >> I feel like the Geico commercial. Everybody knows that this is a problem. Why aren't people doing this? Is it just too hard? I mean, this is a card. What specifically do you guys have for IP? What makes it happen? What do you guys do? >> 57 patents later, we have cracked the code on how to do really application native virtualization of data and the ability to serve it up through workflows, through automation in some of the largest enterprises in the world. We are enterprise tested, battle tested. Quite frankly, the applications and data that serves the largest enterprises, that's where we shine. >> What are some of the value points you can point to anecdotally or publicly around the value your customers have gotten from having thae ability to have data addressable and almost in real-time for developers because there's got to be some new experiences or new capabilities that they're realizing. Can you share just some of things that come out of this? >> An IT leader in a major bank that you've heard of said to us after we went through the initial phase of deployment, you've just given me an extra quarter of development in every year. >> Extra quarter of time. >> Extra quarter of time. We've collapsed down and we now have five quarters of development cycles as opposed to four. That, quite frankly, if you put a dollar value on it is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. >> Developer productivity, any new cool things that have happened, top line revenue growth, any impact to applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you think about what is the battle front now, whether it's online banking, whether it's retail, whether it's healthcare even. What is the battle front? It is your app, your phone, your mobile device. It is the ability to self-serve content, information and transactions. All of that is happening because people are transforming the way they're doing business around applications today. >> Customers are going to eat this up. You solve the holy grail problem. It's so obvious to us, but getting data in real-time, having speed and scale and relevance is super critical. How do you guys compare with the competition? Are you guys ahead? How do you guys compare versus other solutions? Are there anything like you guys? What's out in the marketplace? Share your perspective on the landscape on how you guys compare. >> You're asking a marketing guy how we compare to the competition. >> Of course you're going to say you blow them away? >> Of course, I have this very convenient chart that shows us being the leader compared to everybody. The reality is 3,000 customers, 37 countries, nine years in the marketplace. We have been there and done that at scale in the enterprise. Five of the top global 20 financial institutions. Four of the 10 energy companies in the world. Four of the 10 top retail organizations in the world. We have done it for the largest companies in the world and we continue to deliver value at scale in the enterprise. >> You said before hundreds of millions of value. That sounds like a lot and people might go, oh, but how do you do that? Your cloud and your devops which is all about agility and speed, if you take a net present value, a discounted cash flow, a break even or whatever curve you draw, and I think I heard three months, right? You compress that by a quarter and then look at the numbers, that's the value. >> Huge. >> So if it's $200 million in revenue, do the math. If it's $10 in revenue, okay, it's not going to be as much, but the companies that you're talking about, the industries, talking about big, big projects and a lot of revenue associated with them. You talked about cloud and devops, how is your business model cloud and devops? Can you talk about that in terms of the way we do business, customer to Actifio? >> Increasingly, cloud has been for us a place where all of these use cases are executed. As a result, the business model has been BYO. I'm going to buy a license from Actifio. I'm going to bring it to Amazon, Azure, Google, what have you. More and more we're seeing a mixture of marketplace transactions plus the traditional cloud marketplace. You mentioned Live Nation. They are in many ways way ahead of the curve in terms of just going wholesale. I'm out of the data center business. I'm all in on cloud and I'm just going to buy everything through the marketplace. Increasingly, we're seeing marketplace transactions becoming a relevant part of our business. The fact that we've integrated with the top six public cloud providers and increasingly we're going to expand out to Huawei and Alicloud and more, it's not just a destination to connect a use case. It is becoming a platform to conduct transactions as well. >> And a really important channel. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Brian, great to hear from you. Congratulations on your success. Love the business model. We've been saying on theCUBE, so many years, data's at the center and the time to get the data from any database or a database into the application speed is critical. That makes great value so thanks for doing that. Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Check out Actifio. Of course, we're bringing the data to you in real-time here on theCUBE at VMworld. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18, #Know18 we are theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Dan Rogers. He is the CMO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE Dan. >> Thanks for inviting me. I always have a great conversation with you guys. >> Yeah, you're, you're back, you're back. So, this conference is amazing. There's so much buzz happening. 18,000 people. It gets bigger and better every year. >> How ironic, 18,000, K18. >> You got it. >> Oh my gosh. >> Well done. >> I didn't even, you did it you must've done it that's marketing genius, genius Dan. >> We might bend the curve next year though. We might bend the curve a little bit more. >> So, so what it, what in your opinion is the most sort of knew exciting things happening? >> Well you know we start the planning process as you can imagine, about six months prior. And we're really super focused this year on customer success. So, one of our principles was it's all about our customers, it's all for our customers. You probably know, unlike any other conference, most of the sessions are delivered by customers. So we have 85% of our breakouts are delivered by customers. So this is really our customers' event. And in the background here, you know we've created this customer success zone, which is where I've taken all the best practices from our customers and we're sharing that and you'll see we've got Genius Lounge, customer success clinics, customer theaters, and the whole vibe is supposed to be helping our customers be more successful. In some ways it's the anti-marketing conference. This isn't buy more stuff, this is we want to help you be successful. And so we wanted to keep the authenticity throughout. The keynotes were celebrating people, celebrating our users how users can use our products. The experiences that they can have. So I think that was the principle. Hopefully we pulled it off. >> So I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges you have from a marketing standpoint. So let me just set it up. So, in the keynote this morning, if you didn't see it ServiceNow had kind of a fun little play on words where they had cave people in the cave trying to light a fire. We all know that, right? Light a fire under somebody's butt. And then fast forward to today's world and there's this thing called the saber tooth virus coming and so that was kind of really fun. And it explained things, you know, it resonated, I think, with a lot of people. But as you enter this new world beyond IT, I mean 2013, 5% of your business was outside of IT. You know, today it's you know, a third of your business. So you're reaching a new audience now. How do you handle sort of the marketing and messaging of that hybrid approach? That must've been a challenge for you. >> Well, you know I'm a story teller I love kind of starting with the stories. And, talking with our product leaders, the story that we're most deeply connected to really for our product road map is around experiences. So we knew this needed to be a conference about experiences. And we wanted to put a marker down that says this is the era of great experiences. You deserve great experiences at work. It really is the case that certainly when millennials come in to work they have expectations of what the work experience looks like and they arrive and it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, No you can't, just swipe your finger, No, you have to stand in line. No you, yes, we really use telephones still, you know. And, chat experience isn't really what it ought to be. So we kind of said we're putting a marker down at this conference to say, Welcome to the Era of Great Experiences. You deserve great experiences, and we're going to create that. And if you look at our entire product roadmap, we're trying to create great experiences at work. CJ talked about the Now platform. He said there are three layers to the Now platform. The Now platform has user experiences. That's really how people want to interact with our, our products, how they want to interact with the world. Great service experiences that's all the stuff that's happening in the background. Customers, employees, they just want to touch their phone, the 20 things that happened behind, they need to be obstercated. And then, service intelligence. This idea of prediction. Now these things are not new in the consumer world, but they're very new in the enterprise world. Take the consumer world. You think about Uber, you think about OpenTable, they spend a lot of time on the user experience. Think about the service experience of something like Amazon. Amazon, you touch, you swipe, you click and they're orchestrating hundreds of processes on the, behind the scenes. And then service intelligence. Netflix is a great example. Stuff's predicting for you stuff's being recommended for you. Where are the recommendations at work? Where's the predictions at work? Where's the prioritization that's happening at work? And we've sort of said, that's what our Now platform is all about. It's about delivering those three great things that we think go into making great experiences at work. And that's what the show's about. And therefore, you see the people's centricity of the show. CJ celebrated four personas. He talked about the personas and their life. The IT topic, you know it's happening in a couple hours. We're going to talk about people. Real people and their lives, and how it's making it better. And that all rolls back to the central idea that we believe that technology should be in the service of people. Making work, work better for you. >> So that's the main spring. Love it, go ahead. >> No, I was just going to ask you, you were describing the millennial, or the post-millennial entering the workforce and this, wah, wah, wah, feeling of no it's not like that here, you got to, there's a lot of, onerous administrative tasks that you've got to do. So is that what's driving this, this change, this moment that you're saying that we're at this, this point in time where employees are demanding better and demanding more from their workplace. I mean, is that what's driving the change in your opinion? >> I think we have just this confluence of technologies around AI, around machine learning and a lot of the services being delivered by Cloud platforms. And then we have this contrast between people's work life and their home life. I have a nine-year-old son. I'll share a little experience with him. So he uses things like Khan Academy. Khan Academy, he uses his finger to write the answers and that gets converted into text. Well now when he tries to interact with any application, he's trying to use his finger and he's wondering, why you guys all using keyboards? What is this keyboard thing? And you know, and then when he interacts with any application, TV screen, he's trying to swipe on the TV screen. He can't understand why he can't swipe on the TV screen to get to the next show to the next channel. I look at that, and I'm like, it's so obvious this is where we're going, this is, this next generation, they want to interact with their applications in a very different way. And we need to get to that in the Enterprise. And we want to be first to get there in Enterprise. The acquisitions that we've made five acquisitions that we've made in the last nine months or year. I was actually just walking with some of the guys that, you know from Boas, from SkyGiraffe. SkyGiraffe, DxContinuum, Parlor, Parlo. And these are just kind of adding to our ability to create the experiences that we deserve, opposite all of those technologies, so you can just get your work done, get your work done. Get to the actions that you need. John I thought did an amazing job of explaining what it takes to create great experiences. And he had this, what I call the UX iceberg. This idea that, appearances are on the top, Anyone can make an app, mobile app that has great appearances. Just put nice skin on there, nice colors on it. But the hard work happens below the water line, which is where you think about the behaviors. How do people actually want to work? And we've filmed people, we've watched people, in their daily lives how they want to work. Go down a layer, the relationships who do they need to work with? Who do they interact with? And then, the work flows, what are the systems they need to interact with. And when we think about their entire paradigm of UX experience and then design from that paradigm, we end up not just with a pretty skin, we end up with actually something that fundamentally changes the way you get your work done, and that's what we're going after. >> So I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be a ServiceNow customer anytime soon. When Jeff and I first saw it in like 2013, we were like, we want this. It's not designed for 50 person companies like ours. Okay, I can live with that. You guys aspire to be the next great Enterprise software company. As a marketing executive, you got to kind of be in Heaven, right now, because now, you and I have talked about this, I don't have the marketing gene, I find marketing very challenging, but for someone who has that marketing gene, if I compare you to, the great software companies in the Enterprise, it's Oracle, it's SAP, it's Sales Force. Our HR system, our provider, it's Oracle, it's clunky. We use Sales Force, it's Oracle, right? I don't use SAP. I don't want to use SAP. Okay, so laying down the gauntlet on experience is I think brilliant because you're living in a sea of mediocrity when it comes to experience. Now, you have to stay ahead of the game. Acquisitions are one way to do that. But how does that all play in to your marketing. >> You know, it actually starts with purpose. So we, about nine months ago began a journey to, I'd say get to the essence of our purpose. We talked to all of our employees, went on road shows around the world, Talked to our customers around the world. And we kind of said, both what do we actually do for you, what do you want us to do for you, and we grounded ourself in this central idea we make the world of work work better for people. It turns out, that is a rallying cry a firing signal for everything we do as a company. So when I think of marketing, marketing is about bringing that promise through our brand expression to life. We make the world of work, work better for people. That's a bar, a standard. This conference needs to feel like it's making work, work better for people. This conference needs to exude humanity and their experiences. This isn't a technology conference. You see the thing behind you, very deliberately. We're celebrating people, people's lives, people's work lives, so I think of the connection between our purpose and marketing. It's the standard, it's the bar for us. My website, which we refreshed in time for Knowledge, is no longer a taxonomy of products. It's talking about people, their lives, how we make their experiences better. So I think of it as this show, our keynotes, very deliberately focusing on those personas. I think of it as a watermark that kind of says make everything true to your purpose. It's also a watermark for our products. It's a litmus test for our products. Is this product ready to ship yet? Does it make the world of work work better for people? Yes, no? Yes, let's ship it. No, let's not. It's the litmus test for our sales engagements. Are you talking about how you're making experiences better for people? Or are you talking about some other abstract concept? You talking just about cost savings, you're talking about, if you're not talking about experiences, you're not living our purpose. So, it's going to exude through everything that we do. I think it's a really foundational idea for us. >> It's powerful when a brand can align its sales, its marketing, and its product and its delivery, you know to the customer. >> And the timing too just because we were really at low unemployment, we have this war for talent, particularly in technology but in other industries as well where employees are saying what can I do to attract and retain the best people. Make, make their work lives easier, more fun, more intuitive, simpler. >> I always joke that, you know, there's something that's written on a job description. And if you read the job description, You're like, yeah, I want to do that. I get to lead this thing, drive this thing, duh de tuh. The job description doesn't say, oh and by the way, you're going to spend 2.4% of your time filling in forms and you're going to spend 1.8% of your time handling manual IT requests. 4.2% of your time, you're going to, if it did, you wouldn't take the job. So we actually deserve the jobs just on our job description. And that's kind of what I think is that, you know, where we need to get to with work. >> Right, right, exactly. >> So what have we got goin' the rest of, of K18 here? You got a big show, I think Thursday night, you got the customer appreciation. What else is going on here that we should know about? >> Well the way we structure the event is we have these general session keynotes. And you can kind of think of it as John is explaining a lot about why we're doing what we're doing. CJ's explaining a lot about what are we doing. What have we been doing? What's our innovation road map look like? And then Pat Casey's going to pick up on how. How can you build those experiences that CJ's previewed, that fell into the reason why we're doing the things that CJ previewed. So there's kind of a method to the madness to the, to the three days as it were. And then below that, we have these things called topic keynotes, and as you remember we have these five Cloud services now. Of course HR, customer service, security operations, IT, and then really intelligent apps allowing me to build those up. So you have topic keynotes across each of those five Cloud services. And then beyond that, it's really the customer, customer breakouts. Interspersed amongst that is your ability to go along and have a session or success clinic in this customer success area. Or go into the Genius Lounge. Drop by the pavilion, have demos of our products. So those are some of the really, kind of exciting structural things we have around the conference. And then on Thursday night, you know, we wanted to go bigger and better than ever before, and we call it Vegas Nights. So Thursday night, instead of having, you know, the band, you know, of yesteryear, which many conferences, kind of love to do, we decided to have this kind of experiential thing. You can go and see Cirque De Soleil. You can go to the Tower Night Club. You can go to Topgolf. So there's a little menu you can choose from. We've actually reserved the Cirque De Soleil for the whole night so they're running multiple performances just for ServiceNow customers, which is pretty fun. >> So tailored to the individual. Whatever you want to do. Whatever will make your life better. >> That's the idea. Just drop it in, put it in your agenda and you're good to go. >> I love it. Well Dan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great to have you. >> Thank you, I enjoyed the discussion. >> Good to see ya again. >> Good to see you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)