>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Enterprise Connect 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host for the week Stu Miniman, we are in Five9's booth here at this event, excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Jace Moreno, Microsoft Teams Developer Platform Lead from Microsoft, Jace, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure. >> So we're excited that you're here because you are on the main stage tomorrow morning with Lori Wright. But talk to us about Microsoft Teams. You've been with Microsoft for awhile now, about 10 months with Teams. Talk to us about this tool for collaboration that companies can use from 10 people in a meeting to 10,000? >> Yeah, you'll hear us tomorrow. The phrase we're coining is an intelligent workplace for everyone, right? And I think for a long time, we've been perceived as an organization who builds tools, a lot of times with the Enterprise Knowledge Worker, the whole goal is to dispel that. There's multiple people out there, millions of people who are frontline workers, whatever you want to call 'em but the folks that are interfacing with your actual customers. And so we need to make sure that we are developing tools that are for them. But overall as I look at the product and what we've delivered, it's about bringing you one single place to go to for collaboration, right? So and that is bringing together your tools, whether or not Microsoft built them into one experience and then process these in workflows around them. >> So do you find that in terms of traction that the, like the enterprises and maybe the more senior generations that have been working with Microsoft tools for a long time get it or I mean, 'cause I can imagine there's kind of a cultural gap there with, whether it's a large enterprise like a Microsoft or maybe a smaller organization, There are people in this modern workforce that have very different perspectives, different cultures. How can Teams help to maybe break down some of those barriers and really be a platform for innovation? >> That's a great question. I think we've been battling that cultural, digital clash for a long time to be fair. I think it really comes out with Teams, though. Because it is an entirely different way of working. It's not just chat anymore, right? It's collaboration. It's bringing together all of these experiences and so I think there's a maturity curve for some of our average users to be fair. We're already seeing that curve take off as we speak. But what I often give advice to customers and to partners, I call 'em superpowers but you got to find that one reason that really gets people over the line because we get asked all the time, "Hey, everybody loves it "but we want to get 'em to use this as the one tool, "the one place that I go so I know that everything "I send in our organization goes to that single place. "How do I deliver that?" And I go, "Just give 'em a reason." That's what it comes down to honestly and I genuinely see that with organizations. We're seeing incredible examples of organizations leveraging partner integrations where it's bringing out their culture rather than them trying to evolve it, if that makes sense. >> So Jace, I'm glad you brought up the partners there and when I hear developer platform, all right, bring us inside a little bit. Everything API compatible, when people think about developers, there have been developers in the Microsoft space. .NET's got its great ecosystem there but what is it like to be in the Microsoft ecosystem here in 2019? >> It's a fun place to be. I will say, I've even stopped using the term developer when I say platform though to be fair because, and the reason I bring this up, what we've actually built allows a lot of IT professionals to build as well on Teams. PowerShell Scripts as an example is a huge opportunity for customers. Frankly, I've never written a line of code in my life and I built a bot for Teams. So it's pretty amazing what we're enabling but when we look at a lot of what partners are building, it's where are they seeing opportunities in the marketplace? So Five9 as an example with customer care, great opportunity there where we can extend the capabilities that a contact center as an example might need inside of Teams if they want to explore that. >> I love, I actually got to interview Jeffrey Snover at Microsoft Ignite last year who of course created PowerShell and he was like more excited now than he was when it was created quite a long time ago. So when I look around this platform, tell us some of the partners that you're working with. I saw some of the early notes that things like Zoom, and gosh you know, talk about some of the partners you're working with. >> So one thing I'll touch on too that I don't know if I fully answered your last question is what I'm hearing from our partners who have built on Teams and I'll touch on which ones in a second, we call it the extensibility of our platform but quite literally what it means is they are, we are allowing partners to allow their solutions to render in different ways inside of Teams and what we're hearing from partners, I had a conversation with Disco the other day as an example, so they built a, I'm not doing them a service by explaining it like this but it's a kudos bot essentially that they've delivered and it's actually bringing out that culture. But they told us the beauty of the Teams platform is that they don't only show up as a bot to the end users, they actually, we've offered them other ways to interact with the end user, so whatever's more comfortable for me inside of team, and my interaction with that solution, it's easy for them to have that correspondence. But in terms of top partnerships that we're looking at, we've had some incredible integrations built recently. ADP just launched theirs pretty recently to check payroll and build sort of a time off process flow if you will, with the bot. Polly's been a great one from day one. We have integrations with partners like Atlassian for a DevOps tool, so Jira and Confluence Cloud, Trello for project management, I could go on forever but we have over 250 in the store right now and that is growing very rapidly. This is what we spend most of our time on. So the initial focus was what are the tools out there that most people need to get their job done every day? That's where we'll start and now we're really evolving that and we're seeing some incredible things being built as we speak. >> So Jace, being at Enterprise Connect, this is an event where it's been around for a long time and has evolved quite considerably as Enterprise Communication and Collaborations has but one of things that when I was doing research to prep for the show that I'm reading is that the customer experience is table stakes. It's make or break. But some of the recommendations that when a company is, whether it's within a business unit buying software and services or at the corporate level, the customer has to have a seat there so that the decision is being made. Are we implementing tools and technologies and services that are actually going to delight our customers, not just retain them but drive customer lifetime value? In your role, where are some of Microsoft's customers in terms of helping to evolve the evolution of the platform? >> That's a great question, I'm really glad you asked it. It's been fun in my role because what we're seeing is a lot of customers who have taken the platform and built integrations to their tools. So think outside of productivity for a second, think IT support, think employee resources, they're building those integrations and they're leveraging those as a way to drive that organic broad adoption inside of their companies. Because they don't want to do the IT force anymore, they want people to love it like you said and naturally take to it and so I keep coming back to that, I call it superpowers, again it might be a ridiculous term but it's those superpowers you deliver to your people that allow them to get their work done better, get them to love that product and to your point, not want to ever leave it 'cause you can get a majority of your work done every day in that place. So we've seen some really cool ones. A couple examples that we just shared recently, Dentsu's a great one, so they have a three person Change Management Team for a 50,000 person global organization, okay? Three people, got to scale that right? Can't do that one on one training and so they initially took Teams and integrated it into their current website, internet, internal portals to essentially create a chatbot that helped people learn how to use the technology they delivered. Now they're taken that one step further because they saw such great success and they're going to different centers of excellence inside the organization saying, "Hey, do you want to get on board? "Because we'd like to make this the bot "that you interact with as an employee of Dentsu." So it's just incredible but it's driving again that adoption they're seeing, leveraging some of the simple stuff that we have on the platform. Does that answer your question? >> Yes very well, thank you. >> So when I look at some of the macro trends about communication, where I've heard some great success stories is internally just being able to collaborate with some of my internal people, Teams has done really well. Collaborating between various organizations still seems to have more challenges. Can you just bring us a little bit of insight as to why I hear great success stories there and not negatives on Teams but just it's still challenging if I have multiple organizations? We all understand even just doing a conference call or heck, a video call between lots of different companies still in 2019's a challenge. >> Yeah look, I mean I'll give you a couple answers here. We are young, I mean it's two years old as a product. So the momentum's been incredible but I'm not going to sit here and tell you we don't have things to work on, we absolutely do. What I will say though, take Enterprise Connect for example, we actually have a Teams team for Enterprise Connect. There's, I actually checked this morning, there's 181 people in that team and a majority of them are guests, so external users, So vendors that we work with to help us plan this conference and bring it all together and a lot of that has been seamless. Yes, there are little things here or there that we're working on but in that respect it's been pretty incredible. I constantly am using it with external parties and I find though, I don't necessarily know if the challenge is in the interface itself, I think it ends up becoming this opportunity to really educate people on this new way of working. And so going back to our partners again, we're sitting here with Five9, but that becomes critical. How do we work better with these organizations who we have mutual customers with to create that experience together, right? And bring again, superpowers to the users. >> What about a security as a superpower? Where is that in these conversations? >> I mean everything we build has a layer of security. I actually just got out of a meeting, you'll see, we've got an announcement around this tomorrow. So I can't blow it unfortunately but the bottom, the foundation and core of everything that we do will be security focused, absolutely. >> All right, so I went to the Microsoft show last year, AI is also one of those things besides security. AI's infused anywhere, so where does AI fit into the whole Teams story? >> The way we see it, I look at this in a couple angles. So most people get onto Teams and it's kind of chat and collab at first, right? Not always the case but a lot of organizations do that. Then it goes to meetings then I think, and you'll see a lot of this cool stuff tomorrow, we're doing it on AI but it's how then do you proactively start delivering better experiences to your end users? So I think of things that we're looking at right now is taking data, and sending those as an example to your IT admins about giving them insight into how users are leveraging Teams. How do you improve that experience for them? So again, you drive that natural broad adoption but kind of assist them a little bit along the way. So tons of great examples around the board. I'm not sure if that fully answers your question but just the sky's the limit. I think of some other things we're looking at though, you'll see a lot coming in the form of transcription, translation, those services that really create inclusiveness which is a big focus for us. Again back to that point earlier, it's the intelligent workplace for everyone. We want to be able to provide services with our partnerships that can really reach anybody in the business world, right? And even in the consumer world in some sense. >> Well Jace, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon. We're looking forward to hearing your keynote in the morning and sharing with us some of the excitement and things that are happening and announcements we're going to hear from Microsoft Teams tomorrow. >> My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, appreciate it. >> Our pleasure, fFor Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of day one, Enterprise Connect 2019 from Orlando. Stick around, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. 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>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18, brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're in Bellevue, Washington, and pleased to welcome one of the many customers of Smartsheet to the program, we have the office of the CIO, Jeff Kelly from PayPal. Welcome Jeff, I've got a sandwich of Jeffs here. (laughing) Jeff sandwich, so Jeff, tell us a little bit. Everybody knows PayPal, I was doing some studying over the weekend. 244 million active users, I'm sure that grows by the minute, 200 markets globally served, and you're doing transactions in over 100 currencies. Everybody has been using this for a while now. It's a household term, even my mom knows PayPal, and she can use it. So, tell us about the office of the CIO at PayPal and your role. >> Sure, so my role, specifically I'm a program manager within that office, and my primary responsibility is to make sure that our environment is secure, that it's safe, that it's stable. That way, the other parts of the company, product, can focus on being more strategic. What that really involves is things like hardening our infrastructure, hardening the network, making sure that we can identify all of our assets accurately, so a number of things there just to keep the environment, like I said, stable and secure. >> And, the office of the CIO, I imagine, responsible for communicating regularly with the executive management team, needing to provide visibility? >> Exactly, I mean, our leadership, Brad Strock is the CIO, we work hand-in-hand with the other leaders of the company. But in addition to some of the things I just called out, the CIO, that office is actually responsible for a lot of the enterprise application, so it's basically the software that drives the company, so that's customer, that's our employee facing applications. >> So you're obviously a Smartsheet user which is why you're here and we're grateful for that. Tell us about the pre-Smartsheet era. How were you managing programs and projects? >> I think I've heard this story quite a bit here. So, between spreadsheets, Microsoft Project, Trello, a number of other tools, and we're still in a distributed model, but the good thing is that within the CIO we're able, at this point, in this particular area, right, to come in with a single tool, to serve as a single system of record, to really facilitate bringing the entire portfolio together. So yeah, I'd say before, very distributed, now, it's really consolidated into Smartsheet being our single system, which has really worked well. >> So they showed a video of your case-study during the keynote, and you had a real specific use case, it sounds like, for your initial Smartsheet deployment, which sounds like something that many of us struggle with each and every week, which is to roll up the data to report upstairs. So, I wonder if you can give a little bit of color on what did you have to roll up, what was the scale of effort, and why you decided, this just isn't really working very well-- >> Sure, absolutely, so we set off, around three years ago, we had a three-year program ahead of us, and I'd say at the end of year one, we realized, just, due to the magnitude, the number of people involved, the data involved, and the overall portfolio, we needed a tool to come in and really help us be able to effectively and quickly roll up that information, so that we could present and take that information to our C-suite each week. Yeah, just for effective decision-making, making sure that they're in-tune, they have a line of sight to what's critical, what's not, working on the right things, doing the right thing. So, we considered a number of tools. Again, Microsoft Project, what-not, we landed with Smartsheet, and it was really just word-of-mouth within the company. So we took a look at a handful of tools and really just tried to figure out what fit the bill for what we needed, and a couple of Smartsheet videos on YouTube, we kind of quickly came to the decision, hey, this is certainly a flexible tool, it's easy to ramp, if you know spreadsheets, you pretty much know this, if you're a project manager you know how to build a plan, quite easy. So the ramp time was very minimal. So we made a decision, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, probably spent a month doing that, myself and the team. With the tool being intuitive and those videos, we built a solution basically from the ground up. >> So this is without even having an enga-- this is PayPal, without even having an engagement with an account executive, you were able to find this, like you said, word of mouth, implement this on your own and really enable quite a bit of transformation within the executive team and what they need to see. >> Absolutely, I think, when we look back at the end of year one we made that decision, we realized, hey, we've got some high-price consultants in, and we're probably using half of their time at that point just in relating that data, so you're talking about some heavy dollars that are being spent there, just in administrative-type work. If we can cut that layer out, and go straight to the source, we're saving ourselves a ton, we can redirect those funds to other areas where we actually get some work done. >> So Jeff, how big was the initial deploy, in terms of the team size, because you said you didn't engage Smartsheet directly, you're watching some YouTube videos, and you did see enough there that you wanted to jump in. Did you jump all in from the beginning, did you do kind of a POC, how did you get started, what was kind of the scope? >> Yeah, kind of took a couple demos, straw-man that we just put together on the fly, shared with some of our key stakeholders, you know, "Does this look right? Does it feel right? Are you seeing the information that you think we need?". And the fact that we were able to come up with that so quickly just sold itself, and so yeah vetted it, socialized it a little bit, but it was a pretty easy sell from that point. It was just building it out, and I'd say right from the get go we had already had about 14 programs as part of this portfolio in place at that point in time, so each program having between, I'd say between five and 15 projects within that, so the number of players was quite large, probably about 150 direct players in the program, probably a couple hundred more indirect that want line-of-sight to what we're doing. >> So line-of-sight accountability, how was that embraced by those teams? And we talk a lot about digital transformation, Jeff, at every event, and how cultural transformation is a necessity for that. How have you been able to leverage this tool to kind of evolve that culture within the office of the CIO? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think, with us being able to cut out that middle-man, when I say middle-man I'm talking PowerPoint slides. If we can get away from that, because a number of things happen there, but predominantly, I mean, you can finger of a PowerPoint slide and all of a sudden, 100 turns to 200 or 1000, something like that, so, hey, if we can just go straight to our system of a record, I mean, each project within this portfolio should have a project plan, they should have a risk and issues tracker, so we really decided, here's the baseline for what we need to have in terms of our data model. If we can have that, then we can produce the dashboards that just read directly from those systems of record, from an accountability perspective, right? That means, there's no tweaking a PowerPoint slide, right, you're reading directly from the project plan, so it is what it is. But, it's reality, and that's what we need to deal with, and we ultimately step in front of the C-suite, right? You need to have, here's where we are, and it needs to be an accurate and timely reflection. I mean, that's another thing, is that timeliness, I mean, this is real-time data that we're talking, so, if something changes 10 minutes before, it's there on the dashboard, we're ready to talk to it. >> Yeah, I don't think there's enough talk about the timeliness, because it is connected directly to the database. It's not something that somebody's reporting on, and so often you get these multiple layers of people extracting data, transcribing it, putting it in to whatever reporting tool they want and just, it just gets further and further from the truth with each passing minute and each passing iteration. >> Absolutely, and we've talked about speed so much here, and so that's obviously a critical factor in decision making, especially, so we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest there. >> So just curious of your experience from a project manager point of view. You're a professional project manager. I'm sure you know all of the big heavy-lifting tools. When you see something like this, which is more of a no-code, kind of low-code, kind of cross platform integration, what type of skills does that open up within the teams, within the data sources, within the ability to do something a lot less, I want to say more nimble, you know, less heavy, than kind of a traditional project management-- >> Sure, I think minimal's a great word to describe it there, because it really, it really is a tool that just is, that you can build from, more of like a grass-roots effort, as opposed to a enterprise, kind of top-down. I'm sure it works well in that use case as well, but, for us, it was something that was able to kind of fill needs that were distributed across the portfolio. Once you start building it up, filling in those gaps, then you realize, hey, we've got kind of an end-to-end tool here that really works well. >> And I'm just curious, interest as other people have engaged with your output, in the organization, in terms of, "Hey, Jeff, can you give us, can you share the PowerPoint links with us?". (mumbling) YouTube links. >> Yeah, I joke because it feels like at this point I'm doing about one demo a week to somebody else in the company, which is a great thing, leveraging best practices, and sharing that information, so, there's certainly a growing user-base within PayPal, of Smartsheet, so I try to keep up with the other teams that are using it so that we are taking our best practices from one another, that we're sharing, and then I think ENGAGE is really helping me connect to those other PayPal users, believe it or not, it's like, there's probably a bit more here than I have back home, so this is great. >> One of the things that was funny that popped up during the keynote this morning, Jeff, was a couple of customer quotes. These were anonymous, but this, what you were saying, kind of, Jeff, it sounds like, and you probably wouldn't say this about yourself so I'll say it for you, is that, this one woman who was a user of Smartsheet in her organization said that Smartsheet made her queen of the world. Sounds like there's some status elevation. But, I'm curious, so you started, you found this organically, yourself, this technology, as Jeff was saying, this is built for business users. You didn't have to have, even though you're in the office of the CIO, you didn't have to have IT's involvement here. But here you are one of the evangelists now for Smartsheet out there, even. Tell us about that engagement, pun intended, that you got with Smartsheet to be able to start, maybe, pay a thumb isn't organically, do you have a sales account exec now, if so are you having conversations with them, are you helping to influence new features and things? >> Sure, I think our admin for Smartsheet at PayPal got tired of me giving them calls, so he said, "Hey, you do know Terren Finstra's your rep, right?". So I reached out to Terren, at this point we've conversed quite a bit and she's brought a number of other kind of ideas and forward thinking to the table that we're considering for next steps, what we can do, but the engagement has been great. They've been very responsive, helped us out when we kind of hit a rock in the road and we need some help, so yeah it's been a great relationship. >> Any way to quantify the benefits, one of the things I was reading on the smartsheet website the other day was some pretty big stats on how they're helping companies save time, which in different ways translates to saving dollars. I think I read the average user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours per year, that's a lot of time, and the average organization will save over 60,000 hours a year. What's the impact been on the weekly roll-ups that you're able to do, any way to sort of quantify how much that speed has improved? >> Yeah, I mean, if I go back to kind of the original business case, say we're spending probably half the time of two very high-price consultants doing this, I'd say it's way up there, and we were able to save, I'm sure, a couple hundred thousand dollars at least, at the minimum. So, that in itself was a big win. If we look today, kind of where we are and the time that we're able to save using the tool, given the fact that there is that middle layer's just really not there, we don't spend a lot of time on producing content at all. Instead, we can take that time and we can focus it on, okay, where are our trouble areas, where do we need to double down, where do we need to help in making sure that we're actually getting material work done in the areas that we should be rather than just administrative content-- >> Big productivity gains, well Jeff, thank you so much for joining Jeff Frick and I on the cube and sharing what you guys are doing with Smartsheet in the office of the CIO at PayPal. >> Glad to be here, thank you so much. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Jeff and Jeff, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018, stick around. This Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.