(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here at re:MARS. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the event where it's part of the "re:" series: re:MARS, re:Inforce, re:Invent. MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And a lot of conversation is all about AI machine learning. This one's about AI and business transformation. We've got Stepan Pushkarev CTO, CEO, Co-Founder of Provectus. Welcome to theCUBE. And Russ Lamb, eCommerce Retail Data Engineering Lead at PepsiCo, customer story. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> I love the practical customer stories because it brings everything to life. This show is about the future, but it's got all the things we want, we love: machine learning, robotics, automation. If you're in DevOps, or you're in data engineering, this is the world of automation. So what's the relationship? You guys, you're a customer. Talk about the relationship between you guys. >> Sure, sure. Provectus as a whole is a professional services firm, premier, a AWS partner, specializing in machine learning, data, DevOps. PepsiCo is our customer, our marquee customer, lovely customer. So happy to jointly present at this re:Invent, sorry, re:MARS. Anyway, Russ... >> I made that mistake earlier, by the way, 'cause re:Invent's always on the tip of my tongue and re:MARS is just, I'm not used to it yet, but I'm getting there. Talk about what are you guys working together on? >> Well, I mean, we work with Provectus in a lot of ways. They really helped us get started within our e-commerce division with AWS, provided a lot of expertise in that regard and, you know, just hands-on experience. >> We were talking before we came on camera, you guys just had another talk and how it's all future and kind of get back to reality, Earth. >> Russ: Get back to Earth. >> If we're on earth still. We're not on Mars yet, or the moon. You know, AI's kind of got a future, but it does give a tell sign to what's coming, industrial change, full transformation, 'cause cloud does the back office. You got data centers. Now you've got cloud going to the edge with industrial spaces, the ultimate poster child of edge and automation safety. But at the end of the day, we're still in the real world. Now people got to run businesses. And I think, you know, having you here is interesting. So I have to ask you, you know, as you look at the technology, you got to see AI everywhere. And the theme here, to me, that I see is the inflection point driving all this future robotics change, that everyone's been waiting for by the way, but it's like been in movies and in novels, is the machine learning and AI as the tipping point. This is key. And now you're here integrating AI into your company. Tell us your story. >> Well, I think that every enterprise is going to need more machine learning, more, you know, AI or data science. And that's the journey that we're on right now. And we've come a long way in the past six years, particularly with our e-commerce division, it's a really data rich environment. So, you know, going from brick and mortar, you know, delivering to restaurants, vending machines and stuff, it's a whole different world when you're, people are ordering on Amazon every couple minutes, or seconds even, our products. But they, being able to track all that... >> Can you scope the problem statement and the opportunity? Because if I just kind of just, again, I'm not, you're in, it's your company, you're in the weeds, you're at the data, you're everything, But it just seems me, the world's now more integration, more different data sources. You've got suppliers, they have their different IT back ends. Some are in the cloud, some aren't in the cloud. This is, like, a hard problem when you want to bring data together. I mean, API certainly help, but can you scope the problem, and, like, what we're talking about here? >> Well, we've got so many different sources of data now, right? So we used to be relying on a couple of aggregators who would pull all this data for us and hand us an aggregated view of things. But now we're able to partner with different retailers and get detail, granular information about transactions, orders. And it's just changed the game, changed the landscape from just, like, getting a rough view, to seeing the nuts and bolts and, like, all the moving parts. >> Yeah, and you see in data engineering much more tied into like cloud scale. Then you got the data scientists, more the democratization application and enablement. So I got to ask, how did you guys connect? What was the problem statement? How did you guys, did you have smoke and fire? You came in solved the problem? Was it a growth thing? How did this, how did you guys connect as a customer with Provectus? >> Yeah, I can elaborate on that. So we were in the very beginning of that journey when there was, like, just a few people in this new startup, let's call it startup within PepsiCo. >> John: Yeah. >> Calling like a, it's not only e-commerce, it was a huge belief from the top management that it's going to bring tremendous value to the enterprise. So there was no single use case, "Hey, do this and you're going to get that." So it's a huge belief that e-commerce is the future. Some industry trends like from brand-centric to consumer-centric. So brand, product-centric. Amazon has the mission to build the most customer-centric customer company. And I believe that success, it gets a lot of enterprises are being influenced by that success. So I remember that time, PepsiCo had a huge belief. We started building just from scratch, figuring out what does the business need? What are the business use cases? We have not started with the IT. We have not started with this very complicated migrations, modernizations. >> John: So clean sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> From scratch. >> From scratch. >> And so you got the green light. >> Yeah. >> And the leadership threw the holy water on that and said, "Hey, we'll do this."? >> That's exactly what happened. It was from the top down. The CEO kind of set aside the e-commerce vision as kind of being able to, in a rapidly evolving business place like e-commerce, it's a growing field. Not everybody's figured it out yet, but to be able to change quickly, right? The business needs to change quickly. The technology needs to change quickly. And that's what we're doing here. >> So this is interesting. A lot of companies don't have that, actually, luxury. I mean, it's still more fun because the tools are available now that all the hyper scales built on their own. I mean, back in the day, 10 years ago, they had to build it all, Facebook. You didn't know, I had people on here from Pinterest and other companies. They had to build all of that from scratch. Now cloud's here. So how did you guys do this? What was the playbook? Take us through the AI because it sounds like the AI is core, you know, belief principle of the whole entire system. What did you guys do? Take me through the journey there. >> Yeah. Beyond management decisions, strategic decisions that has been made as a separate startup, whatever- >> John: That's great. >> So some practical, tactical. So it may sound like a cliche, but it's a huge thing because I work with many enterprises and this, like, "center of excellence" that does a nice technology stuff and then looks for the budget on the different business units. It just doesn't go anywhere. It could take you forever to modernize. >> We call that the Game of Thrones environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nothing ever gets done 'till it blows up at the end. >> Here, these guys, and I have to admit, I don't want to steal their thunder. I just want to emphasize it as an external person. These guys just made it so differently. >> John: Yeah. >> They even physically sat in a different office in a WeWork co-working and built that business from scratch. >> That's what Andy Jackson talked about two years ago. And if you look at some of the big successes on AWS, Capital One, all the big, Goldman Sachs. The leadership, real commitment, not like BS, like total commitment says, "Go." But enough rope to give you some room, right? >> Yeah. I think that's the thing is, there was always an IT presence, right, overseeing what we were doing within e-commerce, but we had a lot of freedoms to make design choices, technology choices, and really accelerate the business, focus on those use cases where we could make a big impact with a technology choice. >> Take me through the stages of the AI transformation. What are some of the use cases and specific tactics you guys executed on? >> Well, I think that the supply chain, which I think is a hot topic right now, but that was one use case where we're using, like, data real time, real time data to inform our sales projections and delivery logistics. But also our marketing return on investment, I feel like that was a really interesting, complex problem to solve using machine learning, Because there's so much data that we needed to process in terms of countries, territories, products, like where do you spend your limited marketing budget when you have so many choices, and, using machine learning, boil that all down to, you know, this is the optimal choice, right now. >> What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them in the early days to get things set up, 'cause it takes a lot of energy to get it going, to get the models. What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them? >> Well, I think some of it was expertise, right? Like having a partner like Provectus and Stepan really helped because they could guide us, Stepan could guide us, give his expertise and what he knows in terms of what he's seen to our budding and growing business. >> And what were the things that you guys saw that you contributed on? And was there anything new that you had to do together? >> Yeah, so yeah. First of all, just a very practical tip. Yes, start with the use cases. Clearly talk to the business and say, "Hey, these are the list of the use cases" and prioritize them. So not with IT, not with technology, not with the migration thing. Don't touch anything on legacy systems. Second, get data in. So you may have your legacy systems or some other third party systems that you work with. There's no AI without data. Get all the pipelines, get data. Quickly boat strap the data lake house. Put all the pipelines, all the governance in place. And yeah, literally took us three months to get up and running. And we started delivering first analytical reports. It's just to have something back to business and keep going. >> By the way, that's huge, speed. I mean, this is speed. You go back and had that baggage of IT and the old antiquated systems, you'd be dragging probably months. Right? >> It's years, years. Imagine you should migrate SAP to the cloud first. No, you don't do don't need to do that. >> Pipeline. >> Just get data. I need data. >> Stream that data. All right, where are we now? When did you guys start? I want to get just going to timeline my head 'cause I heard three months. Where are we now? You guys threw it. Now you have impact. You have, you have results. >> Yeah. I mean that for our marketing ROI engine, we've built it and it's developed within e-commerce, but we've started to spread it throughout the organization now. So it's not just about the digital and the e-commerce space. We're deploying it to, you know, regionally to other, to Europe, to Latin America, other divisions within PepsiCo. And it's just grown exponentially. >> So you have scale to it right now? >> Yeah. Well- >> How far are you in now? What, how many years, months, days? >> E-commerce, the division was created six years ago, which is, so we've had some time to develop this, our machine learning capabilities and this use case particular, but it's increasingly relevant and expansion is happening as we speak. >> What are you most proud of? You look back at the impact. What are you most proud of? >> I think the relationship we built with the people, you know, who use our technology, right. Just seeing the impact is what makes me proud. >> Can you give an example without revealing any confidential information? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was an example from my talk about, I was approached recently by our sales team. They were having difficulty with supply chain, monitoring our fill rate of our top brands with these retailers. And they come up to me, they have this problem. They're like, "How do we solve it?" So we work together to find a data source, just start getting that data in the hands of people who can use it within days. You know, not talking like a long time. Bring that data into our data warehouse, and then surface the data in a tool they can use, you know, within a matter of a week or two. >> I mean, the transformation is just incredible. In fact, we were talking on theCUBE earlier today around, you know, data warehouses in the cloud, data meshes of different pros and cons. And the theme that came out of that conversation was data's a product now. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> And what you're kind of describing is, just gimme the product or find it. >> Russ: Right. >> And bring it in with everything else. And there's some, you know, cleaning and stuff people do if they have issues with that. But, if not, it's just bring it in, right? It's a product. >> Well, especially with the data exchanges now. AWS has a data exchange and this, I think, is the future of data and what's possible with data because you don't have to start from, okay, I've got this Excel file somebody's been working with on their desktop. This is a, someone's taken that file, put it into a warehouse or a data model, and then they can share it with you. >> John: So are you happy with these guys? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You're actually telling the story. What was the biggest impact that they did? Was it partnering? Was it writing code, bringing development in, counseling, all the above, managed services? What? >> I think the biggest impact was the idea, you know, like being able to bring ideas to the table and not just, you know, ask us what we want, right? Like I think Provectus is a true partner and was able to share that sort of expertise with us. >> You know, Andy Jackson, whenever I interview on theCUBE, he's now in charge of all Amazon. But when he was at (inaudible). He always had to use their learnings, get the learnings out. What was the learnings you look back now and say, Hey, those were tough times. We overcome them. We stopped, we started, we iterated, we kept moving forward. What was the big learning as you look back, some of the key success points, maybe some failures that you overcome. What was the big learnings that you could share with folks out there now that are in the same situation where they're saying, "Hey, I'd rather start from scratch and do a reset." >> Yeah. So with that in particular, yes, we started this like sort of startup within the enterprise, but now we've got to integrate, right? It's been six years and e-commerce is now sharing our data with the rest of the organization. How do we do that, right? There's an enterprise solution, and we've got this scrappy or, I mean, not scrappy anymore, but we've got our own, you know, way of doing. >> Kind of boot strap. I mean, you were kind of given charter. It's a start up within a big company, I mean- >> But our data platform now is robust, and it's one of the best I've seen. But how do we now get those systems to talk? And I think Provectus has came to us with, "Here, there's this idea called data mesh, where you can, you know, have these two independent platforms, but share the data in a centralized way. >> So you guys are obviously have a data mesh in place, big part of the architecture? >> So it is in progress, but we know the next step. So we know the next step. We know the next two steps, what we're going to do, what we need to do to make it really, to have that common method, data layer. between different data products within organization, different locations, different business units. So they can start talking to each other through the data and have specific escalates on the data. And yeah. >> It's smart because I think one of the things that people, I think, I'd love to get your reaction to this is that we've been telling the story for many, many years, you have horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized domain solutions, you need machine learning that's smart, but you need a lot of data to help it. And that's not, a new architecture, that's a data plane, it's control plane, but now everyone goes, "Okay, let's do silos." And they forget the scale side. And then they go, "Wait a minute." You know, "I'm not going to share it." And so you have this new debate of, and I want to own my own data. So the data layer becomes an interesting conversation. >> Yeah, yes. Meta data. >> Yeah. So what, how do you guys see that? Because this becomes a super important kind of decision point architecturally. >> I mean, my take is that there has to be some, there will always be domains, right? Everyone, like there's only so much that you can find commonality across, like in industry, for example. But there will always be a data owner. And, you know, kind of like what happened with rush to APIs, how that enabled microservices within applications and being sharing in a standardized way, I think something like that has to happen in the data space. So it's not a monolithic data warehouse, it's- >> You know, the other thing I want to ask you guys both, if you don't mind commenting while I got you here, 'cause you're both experts. >> We just did a showcase on data programmability. Kind of a radical idea, but like data as code, we called it. >> Oh yeah. >> And so if data's a product and you're acting on, you've got an architecture and system set up, you got to might code it's programmable. You need you're coding with data. Data becomes like a part of the development process. What do you guys think of when you hear data as code and data being programmable? >> Yeah, it's a interesting, so yeah, first of all, I think Russ can elaborate on that, Data engineering is also software engineering. Machine learning engineering is a software. At the end of the day, it's all product. So we can use different terms and buzz words for that but this is what we have at the end of the day. So having the data, well I will use another buzz word, but in terms of the headless architecture- >> Yes. >> When you have a nice SDK, nice API, but you can manipulate with the data as your programming object to build reach applications for your users, and give it, and share not as just a table in Redshift or a bunch of CSV files in S3 bucket, but share it as a programmable thing that you can work with. >> Data as code. >> Yeah. This is- >> Infrastructure code was a revolution for DevOps, but it's not AI Ops so it's something different. It's really it's data engineering. It's programming. >> Yeah. This is the way to deliver data to your consumers. So there are different ways you can show it on a dashboard. You can show it, you can expose it as an API, or you can give it as an object, programmable interface. >> So now you're set up with a data architecture that's extensible 'cause that's the goal. You don't want to foreclose. You must think about that must keep you up at night. What's going to foreclose that benefit? 'Cause there's more coming. Right? >> Absolutely. There's always more coming. And I think that's why it's important to have that robust data platform to work from. And yeah, as Stepan mentioned, I'm a big believer in data engineering as software engineering. It's not some like it's not completely separate. You have to follow the best practices software engineers practice. And, you know, really think about maintainability and scalability. >> You know, we were riffing about how cloud had the SRE managing all those servers. One person, data engineering has a many, a one to many relationships too. You got a lot going on. It's not managing a database. It's millions of data points and data opportunity. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. And thanks for telling the story of Pepsi. >> Of course, >> And great conversation. Congratulations on this great customer. And thanks for >> coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, thank you. Thanks, Russ, would you like to wrap it up with the pantry shops story? >> Oh, yeah! I think it will just be a super relevant evidence of the agility and speed and some real world applicable >> Let's go. Close us out. >> So when, when the pandemic happened and there were lockdowns everywhere, people started buying things online. And we noticed this and got a challenge from our direct to consumer team saying, "Look, we need a storefront to be able to sell to our consumers, and we've got 30 days to do it." We need to be able to work fast. And so we built not just a website, but like everything that behind it, the logistics of supply chain aspects, the data platform. And we didn't just build one. We built two. We got pantry shop.com and snacks.com, within 30 days. >> Good domains! >> The domain broker was happy on that one. Well continue the story. >> Yeah, yeah. So I feel like that the agility that's required for that kind of thing and the like the planning to be able to scale from just, you know, an idea to something that people can use every day. And, and that's, I think.- >> And you know, that's a great point too, that shows if you're in the cloud, you're doing the work you're prepared for anything. The pandemic was the true test for who was ready because it was unforeseen force majeure. It was just like here it comes and the people who were in the cloud had that set up, could move quickly. The ones that couldn't. >> Exactly. >> We know what happened. >> And I would like to echo this. So they have built not just a website, they have built the whole business line within, and launched that successfully to production. That includes sales, marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, aside within 30 days. And that's just a role model that could be used by other enterprises. >> Yeah. And it was not possible without, first of all, right culture. And second, without cloud Amazon elasticity and all the tools that we have in place. >> Well, the right architecture allows for scale. That's the whole, I mean, you did everything right at the architecture that's scale. I mean, you're scaling. >> And we empower our engineers to make those choices, right. We're not, like, super bureaucratic where every decision has to be approved by the manager or the managers manager. The engineers have the power to just make good decisions, and that's how we move fast. >> That's exactly the future right there. And this is what it's all about. Reliability, scale agility, the ability to react and have applications roll out on top of it without long timeframes. Congratulations. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE here at re:MARS 2020, I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned. We've got more coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (smooth music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome. As you know, I've been interviewing a number of CEOs throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm really excited to have Alan Trefler here. He's the founder and CEO of Pegasystems. Alan, thanks for being part of the program. >> Oh, thanks for having me, Dave. >> So let's get into it. I mean when you were 27 years old, 37 years ago, 1983, you started Pega. Now you've seen a lot of cycles. Never seen anything like this, I know, but certainly there was the '87 crash. You saw, you know, the banking crisis in the late '80s, early '90s, the dotcom bubble, 2008, 2009, and now this. I want to ask you sort of how have you responded to crises in the past? I mean the hallmark of your company, the book you wrote is being able to manage through change. How did you manage through this one? What was your first move? >> Well, you know, what I'll tell you is from the inception we've always been a scrappy company. You know, we never took any venture capital. We bootstrapped this firm. I went public in the late '90s, and you know, we've now got a firm that will do over a billion in revenue this year and has 5,400 staff. So we've built, I think, a cohesive team around a set of principles that really have matched the way the software and technology have evolved, but has still taken a pretty radically different approach to how it should be used by businesses and business users. >> Well, so talk about some of the big waves that you've been riding over the years. I mean you set out to help business people really communicate better with IT. You laid out in your book some of the challenges there, and as you've pointed out many, many times, it gets more complex, people try to understand the customer better with terminology like customer relationship management. People don't necessarily want a relationship, right? Talk about some of the observations that you've made around customer behavior and channels, and how you've approached things a little bit differently as an entrepreneur. >> So I think organizations, when they think about how they want to engage with their customers, typically make a couple of serious mistakes. One is they say they want to do a good job for their clients, but especially if they're a big company they then devolve into actually doing the work in their channel. I mean they have a mobile group that builds the mobile app, which is different than the group that handles the call center, which is different than the group that handles the website, and all this business logic, it's baked into that. And that just destroys their ability to implement change rapidly, which particularly in this COVID era is so important for the organizations that are going to be successful. Now on the other side sometimes they get overly focused on their backend system. They're worrying about how they're going to put in the perfect ERP system or accounting system, that that will somehow support customer engagement better, but frankly it never does. We think you need to think about your business from the center out. How do I apply AI to what I want to do for and with my client? And then how do I apply workflow and work management capability to ensure that those decisions are done optimally and effectively? That's what Pega worked on from our inception, and now as we've gone into our fifth complete generation of software I think we've really crossed some boundaries that are pretty remarkable. >> So I mean, well what you've built is actually quite amazing. Since you've written your book the stock's exploded. I don't know if that's cause and effect, but nonetheless some of the things that you talk about again in the book, you talk about, you know, people looking at data the wrong way. What's impressed me is you've always taken a systems view. You're not trying to optimize, to your point, on one little either technology or maybe optimizing on cost. If you look at the whole system and think about outcomes, that is going to, you know, yield ultimately better businesses. And so I want to ask you-- >> Well, thinking about an end to end way of understanding how the technology should be applied is exactly what we've always believed, but the key is to be able to do this incrementally, iteratively, not monolithically, because no businesses can afford to rip out things. So you need to be able to do this what we call, say, "One microjourney at a time." One set of things that are good for a customer. In today's era it might send, as we do with many of our clients now under stress, we help them help their customers around things like loan forbearing. How do you give people a payment plan because they just don't have the money to pay their loan today. >> Right. >> And how do you do that while you keep them as customers, as opposed to, well, situations that could be far worse. >> Let's talk a little bit about machine intelligence. When you started Pega it was the same year I started in the industry at IDC, and AI was all the rage, and then, you know, it just never happened. You had the very long AI winter, but now it's, you know, starting to come back. You're seeing, you know, obviously there are certain technical capabilities, the amount of data, the processing power, et cetera, and the cost are much more aligned. You're seeing trends like AI. You're seeing things like RPA, you know, which you've brought in to your platform. Talk a little bit about that sort of incremental change that you're adding in to your platform and how you go about doing that. And I want to ask you about some of your thoughts on those trends. >> Certainly. Well, AI has been, from our point of view, a really big thing for the last decade. There was a set of false starts, and we actually saw that they were false starts, so we didn't get sucked into it, but come around 2010 we made an enormous push to bring machine learning and decisioning into our work management platform, and it's in there beautifully and it's doing amazing things. You know, I just saw one of our customers, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, their CEO in his quarterly earnings announcement led by talking about what the Pegasystem, what our system, which they call a customer engagement engine, is doing for them. During the fires that earlier this year were ravaging Australia, they used that to send personalized, not just messages, but also relief to people whose homes were burned out, so they weren't going to be able to pay their credit card bill. They didn't have to call the contact center. We reached out through the brilliant work that they did using our technology, reached out to preemptively make those customers feel great, and now with the COVID epidemic that organization is doing the same types of things, which really both endears them with their customers but also gets tied into that efficiency layer because you stop doing needless work because you're being smart as a result of using AI to figure out what to do, and to learn from the outcomes that come from that. >> So we've seen, you know, the playbook of you see, you know, startups, they get out, they're well-funded, and they point to the large established companies and they say, "Oh, that's an old stack." They can't respond, innovator's dilemma, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things about Pega is you've been able to transform yourselves over the years. You know, build for change, I guess. An example, for instance, going from perpetual to an ARR type of model, which you very successfully have done, and now, you know, as I said, bringing in RPA, but I want to ask you about RPA. A lot of competitors out there, big valuations kind of pointing at you guys as the incumbent. You have RPA, but what do you see within that space specifically? >> I see a lot of delusional behavior. The ability to put robots in to do little pieces of task work can make sense in some situations, particularly if you don't have a good API, a good application programming interface, to get data in and out. A robot in that sort of situation can be a very, very helpful stopgap, but you really need an engine driven by AI and driven by process, process automation, that has to be at the heart. That's the dog to the robotic process automation tail, and a lot of these RPA vendors are running around saying, "You know, all you need's the tail." I'll tell you that in the last week two of the "biggest leaders" have both had massive layoffs. A little google work you can find out exactly who they are, and it's because their stuff isn't working well. >> I want to ask you about entrepreneurship during and coming out of a pandemic. Is it a good time to do a startup? Not that you're thinking about doing a startup, but you know, advice to entrepreneurs. >> Well, I think it's a terrific time to have a startup mentality. You know, part of why I think we've been able to reinvent our technology literally five times over our years is that we're always prepared to look from a new angle and apply that sort of entrepreneurial thinking and scrappiness. However, in terms of starting something right now, it's a very uncertain time. It's uncertain as to when customers will be back in the market. It's uncertain as to exactly how hard certain industry segments would be hit. And so whereas I think that even during recessions it can be a fine time to launch a startup, and in fact that's when I launched Pega was during a time when the economy was not doing that great, I would wait a little bit right now to see exactly when things are going to stabilize. I think that it's just a little too uncertain, but that time will emerge again. >> So I want to ask you, so again, in your book you talked about big data, big problems. I always joke to my friends who have little kids, little kids, little problems, (chuckling) and so little companies, little problems. You're now a billion dollar company, and you're bringing in new talent. You've set your sights on becoming a multibillion dollar company. You've got a great track record. I want you to talk about sort of how you see the future and what your aspirations are. You don't have to give specific numbers, but just frame that for us. >> Well, first of all, just to be clear the numbers in terms of a billion, that's an actual revenue number, as opposed to some of these valuations which we've seen with companies like WeWork might be a little bit tentative. What we see as being central to our growth and value prop are a couple of things. First, we've made our software tremendously easier to use, particularly our last release, which came out about six months ago, really, really straightforward for business people even to take ownership of their projects and work really collaboratively with IT. So that's one aspect of how we grow and want to accelerate the growth. The second aspect is Pega Cloud. Last year Pega Cloud grew enormously. It's now more than half our business, and for people to come on Pega Cloud where we do all of the database work, we do all the heavy lifting for them from a technology point of view, also provides a route to growth, though we also support what we call client cloud, which is where one of our customers wants to run it on their own cloud. And I think the third thing that we're doing that we're hoping is going to allow us to accelerate our growth is to broaden our go-to-market function, make our go-to-market function just larger by continuing to hire, and by the way, this is a great time for a company with a half a billion dollars of cash in the bank to be out looking to hire talent. Looking to hire and broaden and deepen our go-to-market and how we work, especially with those awesome customers, some of whom are suffering but are going to come back, and they're going to increasingly need to change their digital infrastructure. Their digital transformation, we think, is going to benefit from platforms like ours in unique ways. >> Well, Alan, I love the story. As you just pointed out, you just tapped the credit market. You've got a fantastic balance sheet. You've got a lot of tailwinds, you know, despite this pandemic, and as we often say, you've got a founder as the CEO and we've seen how that really culturally makes huge differences at companies. Alan, thanks so much for coming on our CEO series. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. It's been a real pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios and Palo Alto in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studio as kind of our on going leadership coverage of what's happening with the COVID crisis, and really looking out into our community to find experts who can provide tips and tricks, and some guidance as everyone is kind of charting these uncharted waters if you will. And we've got a great cube alarm in our database. He's a fantastic resourcer. We're excited to get him on. Share the information with you. We'd like to welcome once again, Darren Murph. He is the Head of Remote for GitLab. Darren, great to see you. >> Absolutely, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so thank you and. First off, we had you on earlier this year, back when things were normal, in kind of a regular review. Who knew that you would be at the center of the work-from-home universe just a few short months later. I mean, you've been doing this for ever. So it's kind of a wile old veteran of the work-from-home, or not even from home, just work from some place else. What are some top level things that you can share for people that have never experienced this before? >> Yeah, on the working front. If you're one of the people that are working from home, I think there's a couple of things you can do to help acclimate, make your world a little bit better. The first is to try to create some sort of separation between your work life and your personal life. Now if you have a home big enough that you can dedicate a workspace to being your office, that's going to help a lot. Help from a focus standpoint and just. You don't want those lines between work and life to blur too much, that's where isolation kicks in. That's where burnout kicks in. You want to do whatever you can to avoid. You got to remember, when you're not physically walking out of a office and disconnecting from work. You have to replicate that and recreate that. I actually recommend for people that used to have a commute and now they don't. I would actually black something in your calendar, whether that's cooking, cleaning, spending time with your family. Resting more, anything so that you ramp into your day very deliberately and ramp out of very deliberately. Now on the team leading front. I'm going to say it may feel a little counter intuitive, but the further your team is from you, the more distributed they are. The more you really need to let go and allow them to have mechanism for feeding back to you. Managers job in a remote setting switches from just being a pure director, you're actually being an unblocker. A really active listener. And for people who have gotten to a certain point in their career through command and control, this is going to feel very strange, jarring and counter intuitive, but we've seen it time and time again. You need to trust that your workers are in a new environment. You have to give them a mechanism feeding back to you to help them unblock whatever it is. >> You know that's funny, we had someone on as part of this the other day, talking about leaders need to change their objectives that they're managing to, from kind of activity based, to deliverals based. And it actually floored me that someone is still writing in a blog in 2020, that people have to change their management deliverables from activity to deliverables. And it was so funny, you know, you had Martin Mikos on, we had him on too. My favorite comment was, "It's so easy to fake it in the office and look busy, "but when you're at home all you have is your deliverable." so it really, it seems like there's kind of a forcing function to get people to pay attention to the things they should be managing to anyway. >> You said it, forcing functions. I talk about this all the time, but there are so many forcing functions in remote that help you do remote well. But not only just do remote well, just run your business well. Even if you plan on going back to office. On some level there's a lot of things you can do now to help pave the infrastructure to creating a better and more effective team. And as a manager, if you have it in a writing down. The metrics or expectations for your direct reports in the office, now's the time to do it. Subjectivity is allowed to flourish in the office. You can praise or promote people just kind of how much you like them or how easy they are to work with. That really has nothing to do with metrics and results. I've often been asked, "How do you know if "someone's been working remotely?" And my response is, how do you know if they were working in the office. If you can't clearly answer that in the office, then you're not going to be able to answer it remotely. So frankly, in these times a lot of the burden falls more on the manager to actually take a hard look at what they're clarifying to their team. And if the metrics aren't laid out. It's on the manager to lay that out. It's not the responsibility of the direct report to figure out how to prove their worth. The manager has to be very articulant about what that value looks like. >> Right, and not only do they have to be articulate about what the deliverables are and what their expectations are, but. You guys have a remote play book GitLab has published, which is terrific. People should go online, it's 38 pages of dense, dense, dense material. It's a terrific resource, it's a open source, you got to love the open source, eat those. But one of the slides that jumped out to me, and it's consistent with a lot of these conversations that we're having, is that your frequency of communications when people are not in the same room together. Has to go up dramatically, which is a little counter intuitive, but what I found even more interesting was the variety of types of communication. Not just you kind of standard meeting, or you standard status on a project, or maybe a little bit of a look forward to some strategic stuff. But you outlined a whole variety of types of communication. Objectives or methods, or feel if you will, to help people stay connected and to help kind keep this team building going forward. >> So here's the thing about communication. You've got to be intentional about it in a remote setting. And in fact, you need to have more intentionality across the board in a remote setting. And communications is just a very obvious. So for a lot of companies, they leave a lot of things to spontaneity Inter-personal relationships and communications are two of the biggest ones. Where you may not actually lay out a plan for how work is communicated about, or what opportunities you give people to chat about their weekends, or sports, or anything like that. You just kind of put them in the same building and then people just kind of figure it out. In a remote setting that's unwise. You're going to get a lot of chaos and disfunction when people don't know how to communicate and on what channel. So at GitLab we're very prescriptive that work communication happens in a GitLab issue or a merge request. And then informal communication happens through Zoom calls or Slack. We actually expired our Slack messages after 90 days, specifically to force people not to do work in Slack. We want the work to begin where it needs to end up, and in that case it's a very, it's a tool, GitLab, that's built for asynchronous communication. We want to continue to encourage that bias towards asynchronous communication. So yeah, we write down everything about how we want people to communicate and through what channels. And that may sound like a lot of rules, but actually it's very much appreciated by our global team. We have over 1200 people, in more that 65 countries. And they all just need to know where communication is going to happen. And our team is really cohesive and on the same page because we're articulant about that. >> So I want to double down on that. On 'A secret is peace', 'cause you brought this up, or you and Stu brought it up in your conversation with Stu, and Stu raised an interesting point, right. Unfortunately in the day of email and connected phones, and this and that, there has grown an expectation that used to be business, okay was, "I'll get back to you within 24 hours "if you leave me a voicemail." And lord knows what it was when we were still typing letters and memos, and sticking stuff in the yellow envelop with the string, right, as multiple days. But somehow that all got changed to, "I need to hear back form you now." And often it feels like, if your trying to have just some uninterrupted work time, to get something done. It's like, why is your lack of planning suddenly my emergency. And you talked about, you can't operate that on a global, asynchronous team because everyone's in different timezones. And just by rule, there are going to be a lot of people that are not awake when you need the answer to that question. But that you've developed a culture that that's okay, and that that is kind of the flow and the pacing which A, forces people to ask in advance, not immediately when you need it. But also gives people unfettered time to actually plan to do work versus plan to answer communications. I wonder if you can dig into how did that evolve and how do you enforce that when somebody comes in from the outside world. >> The real key to that is something that might not be immediately apparent to everyone. Which is, at GitLab we try to shift as much burden as we possibly can humans to documentation. And this even starts at onboarding, where to get onboarded at GitLab, you get an onboarding issue within GitLab, with over 200 check boxes of things to read and knowledge assessments to take. And humans are a part of it, but very minimal compared to what most companies would do. And the thing that you just outlined was, we're talking about asking questions. Or tapping someone on the shoulder to fill in a knowledge gap. But at GitLab we want to write everything down in a very formalized structured way. We try to work handbook first. So we need to document all of our processes, protocols and solutions. Basically everything that we've ever seen or done, needs to be documented in the handbook. So it's not that GitLab team members just magically need less information, it's just that instead of having to ask someone on our team, we go ask the handbook. We go consult the documentation. And the more rich that your documentation is, the less you have to bother other people, and the less you need to rely on synchronicity. So for us it all starts with operating handbook first. That allows our humans to reserve their cycles for doing truly creative things, not just answering your question for the thousandth time. >> Right, another thing you covered, which I really enjoyed was getting senior executives to work from home for an extended period of time. Now obviously, before COVID that would probably be a lot harder to do. Well now COVID has forced that. And I think to your point about that is, it really forces the empathy for someone who had no interest in working from home. Didn't like to work from home. Loves going to the office, has their routine. Been doing it for decades, to kind of wake up to A, you need to have more empathy for what this is all about. And B, what's it all about by actually doing it. So I wonder, kind of your take in the movement to more of a work from anywhere future. Now that all the senior executives have been thrown into this work from home situation. >> Look Jeff, you never want to waste a crisis. We can't wish away the crisis that's in front of us, but we can choose how we respond to it. And this does present an opportunity to lay ground work, to lay infrastructure, to build a more remote organization. And I have absolutely advocated for companies to get their leadership teams out of the office for a meaningful amount of time. A month, ideally a quarter. So that they actually understand what the remote life is. They actually have some of those communication gaps and challenges so they can document what's happening. And then help fix it. But to your point, executives love going to the office because they're on a different playing field to begin with. They usually have an executive assistant. Things are just. There's less friction in general. So it behooves them to just kind of keep charging in that direction, but now what we have is a situation where all of those executives are remote. And I'm seeing a lot of them say, "You know what, I'm seeing the myths that I've perpetrated "break down in front of me." And this is even in the most suboptimal time ever to go remote. This isn't remote work, this is crisis induced work from home. We're all dealing with social isolation. Our parents are also doubling as homeschool teachers. We have a lot going on. And even on top of all of that, I'm amazed at how adaptable the human society has been. In just adjusting to this and figuring it out on the fly. And I think the companies that take this opportunity, to ask themselves the right question, and build this into their ongoing talent and operational strategy, will actually come out stronger on the other side. >> Yeah, as you said. This is as challenging as it's ever been. There was no planning ahead, you're spouse or significant other's also working from home. And has the same Zoom schedule as you do, for some strange reason, right. The kids are home as you said, and your homeschooling them. And they also have to get on Zoom to do their classes. So it's really suboptimal. But as you said, it's a forcing function and people are going to learn. One of the other things in your handbook is the kind of definitions. It's not just work from home or work at the office, but there's actually a continuum and a spectrum. And as people are doing this for weeks and months. And behaviors turn into habits. People are not going to want to go back to sitting on 101 for two hours every morning to go work on a laptop in the office. It just doesn't make sense. So as you kind of look forward. How do you see the evolution. How are people taking baby steps, if you will. To incorporate more of this learning as we go forward. And incorporate into more of their regular, everyday procedures. >> I'm really optimistic about the future because what I see happening here is people are unlocking their imaginations. So once they've kind of stabilized, they're starting to realize, "Hey, I'm getting a lot more time with my family. "I'm spending a lot less on gas. "I just feel better as a person because I don't show up "to work everyday with road rage. "So how can I keep this going." And I genuinely think what's going to happen in four or five months, we're going to have millions of people collectively look at each other and they say, "The boss just called me back into the office "but I just did my job from home. "Even in suboptimal conditions. "I saw my family more, I exercised more. "I had more time to cook and clean. "How about no, I'm not going to go back to the office "as my default location." And I think what's going to happen is the 80, 20 rule is going to flip. Right now people work from home only for a special occasion, like the cable company's coming or something like that. Going forward it think the offices are going to be the special occasion. You're only going to commute to the office, or fly to the office when you have a large contingent of people coming in and you need to wine and dine them, or something like that. And the second order of this is, people that are only living in expensive cities because of their location. When their lease comes up for renewal, they're going to cast a glance at places like Wyoming and Idaho, and Ohio. Maybe even Vietnam and Cambodia, or foreign places. Because now you have them thinking of, "What could life look like if I decouple geography at work. "I still want to work really hard "and contribute this knowledge. "But I can go to a place with better air quality, "better schools, better opportunity to actually "invest in a smaller community, "where I can see real impact." And I think that's just going to have massive, massive societal impacts. People are really taking this time to consider how tightly their identity has been woven into work. Now that they're home and they've become something more than just whatever the office life has defined them as. I think that's really healthy. I think a lot of people may have intertwined those two things too tightly in the past. And now it's a forcing function to really ask yourself, you aren't just your work, you're more than your work. And what can that look like when you can do that job from anywhere. >> Right, right. And as you said, there's so many kind of secondary benefits in terms of traffic and infrastructure, and the environment and all kinds of things. And the other thing I think that's interesting what you said, 80, 20 I think that was pretty generous. I wouldn't give it a 20 percent. But if people, even in this hybrid steps, do more once a week, twice a week. Once every two weeks, right. The impact on the infrastructure and peoples lives is going to be huge. But I wanted to drill on something as we go into kind of this hybrid mode at some point in time. And you talked about, and I thought it was fascinating, about the norms and really coming out from a work from home first, or a work from anywhere first. Your very good at specifying anywhere doesn't mean home. Could be the library, could be the coffee shop. Could be an office, could be a WeWork. Could be wherever. Because if you talked about the new norms and the one I thought was really interesting, which probably impacts a lot of teams, is when some of the team's in the office and some of the team isn't. The typical move, right, is to have everyone in the office go into the conference room. We sit around one big screen. So you get like five people sitting around one table and you got a bunch of heads on Zoom. And you said, "You know, no. "Let's all be remote. So if we just be happen to be sitting at our desk. If we happen to be in the office, that's okay. But really normalize. And like we saw the movement from Cloud got to Cloud-e to Cloud first, why not Cloud. And then you know, kind of mobile and does it work in a mobile. No, no, no it has to. It's mobile first. Really the shift to not, can it be done at home, but tell me why it shouldn't be done at home, a really different kind of opening position as to how people deploy resources and think about staffing and assigning teams. It's like turning the whole thing upside down. >> Completely upside down. I think remote first to your point, is going to be the default going forward. I think we're just one or two quarters away from major CEO's sitting on the hot seat on CNBC, when it's their turn for quarterly earnings. And they're going to have to justify why they're spending what they spend on real estate. Is if your spending a billion dollars a year on real estate, you could easily deploy that to more people, more R&D. Once that question is asked in mass, that is when you're going to see the next phase of this. Where you really have to justify, even from a cost stand point, why are you spending so much? Why are you tying so much of your business results to geography. The thing about remote first is that it's not a us versus them. A lot of what we've learned at GitLab, and how we operate so efficiently. They work really well for remote teams, and they are remote first. But they would work just as well in an office. We attach a Google doc agenda to every single business meeting that we have, so that there's always an artifact. There's always a documented thread on what happened in a meeting. Now this would work just as well in a co-located meeting. Who wouldn't want to have a meeting where it's not just in one ear and out the other. You're going to give the time to the meeting, you might as well get something out of it. And so a lot of these remote forced. Remote first forcing functions, they do help remote teams work well. But I think it's especially important for hybrid teams. Offices aren't going to vanish overnight. A lot of these companies are going to have some part of their company return to the office, when travel restrictions are lifted. It think the key here is that its going to be a lot more fluent. You're never going to know on a day to day basis, who is coming into the office, and who is not. So you need to optimize for everyone being out of the office. And if they just so happen to be there, they just so happen to be there. >> Right, right. So before we. I want to get into one little nitty gritty subject, in terms of investment into the home office. You know, we're doing 100% remote interviews now on theCUBE, we used to go to pretty much. Probably 80% of our business was at events, or at peoples offices, or facilities. Now it's all dial-in. You talked a lot about people need to flex a little bit on enabling people to invest in the little bits and pieces of infrastructure for their home office, that they just don't have the same set ups. You're talking about multiple monitors, a comfortable chair, a good light. That there's a few things you can invest in, not tremendous amounts of money. But a couple of hundred bucks here and there, to make a big difference on the home work environment. And how people should think about making that investment into a big monitor that they don't see. It's not sitting at the desk in the office. >> 100%, look if you're coming from a co-located space, you're probably sitting in a cube that costs five, 10, maybe 20 thousand dollars put together. You might not notice that, but it's not cheap to build cubicles in a high rise. And if you go to your home and you have nothing set up, I would say it's on the people group to think really hard about being more lax and more lenient about spending policy. People need multiple monitors. You need a decent webcam, you need a decent microphone. You need a chair that isn't going to kill your back. You want to help people create healthy ergonomics. Sustainable workspaces in their home. This is the kind of thing that will inevitably impact productivity. You force someone to just be hunched over on their couch, in front of a 13 inch laptop. I mean, what kind of productivity do you really expect from that. That's not a great long term solution. I think the people group actually has a higher burden to bare all the way around. You know when it comes to making sure teams feel like teams and they have the atmosphere to connect on a meaningful level. It comes down to the people group, to not letting that just go to spontaneity. You want to have a happy hour virtually, you're going to have to put a calendar invite on peoples calendar. You're going to create topical channels in Slack for people to talk about things other than work. Someone's going to have to do that. They don't just happen by default. So, from hardware all the way to communication. The people group really needs to use this opportunity to think about, "Okay, what can we unlock in this new world." >> Right, I'm glad you said the people group and not the resources group because they're not coal, or steel, or a factory. >> No, if anything COVID has humanized this in a way, and I think it's actually a really big silver lining, where we're all now peering into each others homes. And it is glaringly obvious, that we're all humans first, colleagues second. And of course that always been the case, but there's something about a sterile or co-located work environment. You check a piece of you at the door. And you just kind of get down to business. Why is that, we have technology at out fingertips. We can be humans with each other. And that going to actually encourage more empathy. As we've seen at GitLab, more empathy leads to better business results. It leads to more meaningful connections. I mean, I have people, friends, located all over the world that I feel like I have a closer bond with. A closer, more intimate connection with that a lot of people I've met in office. To some degree you don't know who they really are. You don't know what they really love and what makes them tick. >> Right, right. All right Darren, so before I let you go and again thank you for the time, the conversation. I'm sure everyone is calling you up and I just love the open source ETHOS and the sharing. It's made such a huge impact on the technology world and second order impacts that a lot of people take advantage. Again, give us the place that people can go for the playbook, so they can come and leverage some of the resources. And again, thank you guys for publishing 'em. >> Absolutely, so we're an open source. We try to open source all of our learnings on remote. So go to allremote.info that will redirect you right into the All Remote section of GitLab handbook. All of which is open source. Right at the top you can download the remote playbook, which is PDF that we talked about. Download that, it takes you through all of our best information on getting started and thriving as a remote team. Just under that there's a lot of comprehensive guides on how we think about everything. And how we operate synchronously. How we handle meeting, and even hiring and compensation. allremote.info and of course you're welcome to reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @darrenmurph. >> All right, well thanks a lot Darren. And I find it somewhat ironic that you have a jetliner over your shoulder. Waiting for the lockdown and the quarantine to end so you can get back on the airplane. And we're looking forward to that day. >> Can't wait man, I miss, I miss the airplanes. I told someone the other day, I never thought I'd say I miss having a middle seat at the very back of the airplane, with someone reclined into my nose. But honestly, I can't wait. Take me anywhere. >> I think you'll be fighting people for that seat in another month or so. All right, thanks a lot, Darren. >> Absolutely, take care all. >> All right, he's Darren. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, from our Palo Altos Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE! Covering Coupa Insp!re'19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re'19. Can you hear all the buzz around me? You probably can hear it, it's electric. The keynote just ended, and I'm very pleased to welcome, fresh from the keynote stage, we have Rachel Botsman, author and trust expert from Oxford University. Rachel, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you for having me. >> Your talk this morning about the intersection of trust and technology, to say it's interesting is an understatement. You had some great examples where you showed some technology brands, that we all know, and have different relationships with: Uber, Facebook, and Amazon. And the way that you measured the audience is great, you know, clap the brand that you trust the most. And it was so interesting, because we expect these technology brands to, they should be preserving our information, but we've also seen recent history, some big examples, of that trust being broken. >> Rachel: Yeah, yeah. >> Talk to us about your perspectives. >> So what I thought was interesting, well kind of unexpected for me, was no one clapped for Facebook, not one person in the room. And this is really interesting to me, because the point that I was making is that trust is really, really contextual, right? So if I had said to people, do you trust on Facebook that you can find your friends from college, they probably would've clapped. But do I trust them with my data, no. And this distinction is so important, because if you lose trust in one area as a company or a brand, and it can take time, you lose that ability to interact with people. So our relationship and our trust relationship with brands is incredibly complicated. But I think, particular tech brands, what they're realizing is that, how badly things go wrong when they're in a trust crisis. >> Talk to me about trust as a currency. You gave some great examples this morning. Money is the currency for transactions, where trust is the currency of interactions. >> Yeah, well I was trying to frame things, not because they sound nice, but how do you create a lens where people can really understand, like what is the value of this thing, and what is the role that it plays? And I'm never going to say money's not important; money is very important. But people can understand money; people value money. And I think that's because it has a physical, you can touch it, and it has an agreed value, right? Trust I actually don't believe can be measured. Trust is, what is it? It's something there, there's a connection between people. So you know when you have trust because you can interact with people. You know when you have trust because you can place their faith in them, you can share things about yourself and also share things back. So it's kind of this idea that, think of it as a currency, think of it as something that you should really value that is incredibly fragile in any situation in any organization. >> How does a company like Coupa, or an Amazon or a Facebook, how do they leverage trust and turn it into a valuable asset? >> Yeah, I don't like the idea that you sort of unlock trust. I think companies that really get it right are companies that think day in and day out around behaviors and culture. If you get behaviors and culture right, like the way people behave, whether they have empathy, whether they have integrity, whether you feel like you can depend on them, trust naturally flows from that. But the other thing that often you find with brands is they think of trust as like this reservoir, right? So it's different from awareness and loyalty; it's not like this thing that, you can have this really full up battery which means then you can launch some crazy products and everyone will trust it. We've seen this with like, Mattel, the toy brand. They launched a smart system for children called Aristotle, and within six months they had to pull it because people didn't trust what it was recording and watching in people's bedrooms. We were talking about Facebook and the cryptocurrency Libra, their new smart assistants; I wouldn't trust that. Amazon have introduced smart locks; I don't know if you've seen these? >> Lisa: Yes. >> Where if you're not home, it's inconvenient for a very annoying package slip. So you put in an Amazon lock and the delivery person will walk into your home. I trust Amazon to deliver my parcels; I don't trust them to give access to my home. So what we do with the trust and how we tap into that, it really depends on the risk that we're asking people to take. >> That's a great point that you bring about Amazon, because you look at how they are infiltrating our lives in so many different ways. There's a lot of benefits to it, in terms of convenience. I trust Amazon, because I know when I order something it's going to arrive when they say it will. But when you said about trust being contextual and said do you trust that Amazon pays their taxes, I went wow, I hadn't thought of it in that way. Would I want to trust them to come into my home to drop off a package, no. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> But the, I don't know if I want to say infiltration, into our lives, it's happening whether we like it or not. >> Well I think Amazon is really interesting. First of all because so often as consumers, and I'm guilty, we let convenience trump trust. So we talk about trust, but, you know what, like, if I don't really trust that Uber driver but I really want to get somewhere, I'll get in the car, right? I don't really trust the ethics of Amazon as a company or like what they're doing in the world, but I like the convenience. I predict that Amazon is actually going to go through a major trust crisis. >> Lisa: Really? >> Yeah. The reason why is because their trust is largely, I talked about capability and character. Amazon's trust is really built around capability. The capability of their fulfillment centers, like how efficient they are. Character wobbles, right? Like, does Bezos have integrity? Do we really feel like they care about the bookshops they're eating up? Or they want us to spend money on the right things? And when you have a brand and the trust is purely built around capability and the character piece is missing, it's quite a precarious place to be. >> Lisa: I saw a tweet that you tweeted recently. >> Uh oh! (laughs) >> Lisa: On the difference between capability and character. >> Yes, yeah. >> Lisa: And it was fascinating because you mentioned some big examples, Boeing. >> Yes. >> The two big air disasters in the last year. Facebook, obviously, the security breach. WeWork, this overly aggressive business model. And you said these companies are placing the blame, I'm not sure if that's the right word-- >> No no, the blame, yeah. >> On product or service capabilities, and you say it really is character. Can you talk to our audience about the difference, and why character is so important. >> Yeah, it's so interesting. So you know, sometimes you post things. I actually post more on LinkedIn, and suddenly like, you hit a nerve, right? Because I don't know, it's something you're summarizing that many people are feeling. And so the point of that was like, if you look at Boeing, Theranos was another example, WeWork, hundreds of banks, when something goes wrong they say it was a flaw in the product, it was a flaw in the system, it's a capability problem. And I don't think that's the case. Because the root cause of capability problems come from character and culture. And so, capability is really about the competence and reliability of someone or a product or service. Character is how someone behaves. Character gets to their intentions and motives. Character gets to, did they know about it and not tell us. Even VW is another example. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So it's not the product that is the issue. And I think we as consumers and citizens and customers, where many companies get it wrong in a trust crisis is they talk about the product fix. We won't forgive them, or we won't start giving them our trust again until we really believe something's changed about their character. I'm not sure anything has changed with Facebook's culture and character, which is why they're struggling with every move that they take, even though their intentions might be good. That's not how people in the world are viewing them. >> Do you think, taking Boeing as an example, I fly a lot, I'm sure you do as well. >> Rachel: Yeah. >> When those accidents happened, I'm sure everybody, including myself, was checking, what plane is this? >> Rachel: Yeah. >> Because when you know, especially once data starts being revealed, that demonstrated pilots, test pilots, were clearly saying something isn't right here, why do you think a company like Boeing isn't coming out and addressing that head on from an integrity perspective? Do you think that could go a long way in helping their brand reputation? >> I never, I mean I do get it, I'm married to a lawyer so I understand, legal gets involved, governance gets involved, so it's like, let's not disclose that. They're so worried about the implications. But it's this belief they can keep things hidden. It's a continual pattern, right? And that they try to show empathy, but really it comes across as some weird kind of sympathy. They don't really show humility. And so, when the CEO sits there, I have to believe he feels the pain of the human consequence of what happened. But more importantly, I have to believe it will never happen again. And again, it's not necessarily, do I trust the products Boeing creates, it's do I trust the people? Do I trust the decisions that they're making? And so it's really interesting to watch companies, Samsung, right? You can recover from a product crisis, with the phones, and they kind of go away. But it's much harder to recover from what, Boeing is a perfect example, has become a cultural crisis. >> Right, right. Talk to us about the evolution of trust. You talked about these three waves. Tell our audience about that, and what the third wave is and why we're in it, benefits? And also things to be aware of. >> Yes! (laughs) I didn't really talk about this today, because it's all about inspiration. So just to give you a sense, the way I think about trust is three chapters of human history. So the first one is called local trust; all running around villages and communities. I knew you, I knew your sister, I knew whoever was in that village. And it was largely based on reputation. So, I borrowed money from someone I knew, I went to the baker. Now this type of trust, it was actually phenomenally effective, but we couldn't scale it. So when we wanted to trade globally, the Industrial Revolution, moving to cities, we invented what I call institutional trust. And that's everything from financial systems to insurance products, all these mechanisms that allow trust to flow on a different level. Now what's happening today, it's not those two things are going away and they're not important; they are. It's that what technology inherently does, particularly networks, marketplaces, and platforms, is it takes this trust that used to be very hierarchical and linear, we used to look up to the CEO, we used to look up to the expert, and it distributes it around networks and platforms. So you can see that at Coupa, right? And this is amazing because it can unlock value, it can create marketplaces. It can change the way we share, connect, collaborate. But I think what's happened is that, sort of the idealism around this and the empowerment is slightly tinged, in a healthy way, realizing a lot can go wrong. So distributed trust doesn't necessarily mean distributed responsibility. My biggest insight from observing many of these communities is that, we like the idea of empowerment, we like the idea of collaboration, and we like the idea of control, but when things go wrong, they need a center. Does that make sense? >> Lisa: Absolutely, yes. >> So, a lot of the mess that we're seeing in the world today is actually caused by distributed trust. So when I like, read a piece of information that isn't from a trusted source and I make a decision to vote for someone, just an example. And so we're trying to figure out, what is the role of the institution in this distributed world? And that's why I think things have got incredibly messy. >> It certainly has the potential for that, right? Looking at, one of the things that I also saw that you were talking about, I think it was one of your TED Talks, is reputation capital. And you said you believe that will be more powerful than credit history in the 21st century. How can people, like you and I, get, I want to say control, over our reputation, when we're doing so many transactions digitally-- >> Rachel: I know. >> And like I think you were saying in one of your talks, moving from one country to another and your credit history doesn't follow you. How can somebody really control their trust capital and creative positive power from it? >> They can't. >> They can't? Oh no! >> I don't want to disappoint you, but there's always something in a TED speech that you wish you could take out, like 10 years later, and be like, not that you got it wrong, but that there's a naivety, right? So it is working in some senses. So what is really hard is like, if I have a reputation on Airbnb, I have a reputation on Amazon, on either side of the marketplace, I feel like I own that, right? That's my value, and I should be able to aggregate that and use that to get a loan, or get a better insurance, because it's a predictor of how I behave in the future. So I don't believe credit scores are a good predictor of behavior. That is very hard to do, because the marketplaces, they believe they own the data, and they have no incentive to share the reputation. So believe me, like so many companies after, actually it was wonderful after that TED Talk, many tried to figure out how to aggregate reputation. Where I have seen it play out as an idea, and this is really very rewarding, is many entrepreneurs have taken the idea and gone to emerging markets, or situations where people have no credit history. So Tala is a really good example, which is a lending company. Insurance companies are starting to look at this. There's a company called Traity. Where they can't get a loan, they can't get a product, they can't even open a bank account because they have no traditional credit history. Everyone has a reputation somewhere, so they can tap into these networks and use that to have access to things that were previously inaccessible. So that's the application I'm more excited about versus having a trust score. >> A trust score that we would be able to then use for our own advantages, whether it's getting a job, getting a loan. >> Yeah, and then unfortunately what also happened was China, and God forbid that I in any way inspired this decision, decided they would have a national trust score. So they would take what you're buying online and what you were saying online, all these thousands of interactions, and that the government would create a trust score that would really impact your life: the schools that your children could go to, and there's a blacklist, and you know, if you jaywalk your face is projected and your score goes down. Like, this is like an episode of Black Mirror. >> It's terrifying. >> Yeah. >> There's a fine line there. Rachel, I wish we had more time, because we could keep going on and on and on. But I want to thank you-- >> A pleasure. >> For coming right from the keynote stage to our set; it was a pleasure to meet you. >> On that dark note. >> Yes! (laughing) For Rachel Botsman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re London '19. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World '19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin at Boomi World 2019 in Washington DC, with John Fareer this week. John and I are very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE, the COO of Boomi, Chris Port. Chris, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So, yesterday was the partner summit. >> Yep. >> Today kicks off everything. Let's look at where we were only 11 months ago at Boomi World '18, when we sat down with you in Las Vegas. >> Sure. >> You now have 9,000 plus customers in 80 plus countries. 580, I think, partners globally. It's amazing the growth, and those are just some of the stats that were shared this morning. 97% renewal rate, which is huge. Really exciting news coming out this morning for Boomi. You guys have done a great job of listening to your customers, and evaluating their data to deliver outstanding cloud-native technology. Talk to us about what's transpired since we last saw you, that really has you excited. >> Yeah, well, look, growth is exciting. So, a lot of growth. Yeah, we just finished an almost 50% growth quarter. So, you know, the teams continue to grow. I mean, I think we talked about three pillars last year, around product, go to market, and success. So I can tell you, our product team, you know, we've got new people from the leadership level, you know, kind of like Steve Wood was here, you know, as the Chief Product Officer. He's still here, but now he's bringing in people, you know, from a leadership perspective, augmenting our incredible leadership team that we've already got, as well as kind of as we think about building out that layer, as we kind of built out our development teams and our product management teams. So, lot of growth there. From a go to market, you know, you just talked about 80 countries, 9,000 plus customers. Adding six to seven a day, depending upon the day. So, and then success. You know, the one thing that we've really done, is we've kind of hardened the methodology. We've added a significant number of team members under me, as we kind of think about that success equation and really build it out, driving towards the 97, 98%, kind of, you know, direct side retention on the dollar, you know, calculation. And we're now really starting to do some things where we're really starting to look at when we have our success people engaged, and what that drives from a cross-sell and expansion, what we really enable our customers to do. You know, and what we've seen is just about a 30 to 40% uplift. So, we're really kind of giving us even more ammunition to double down on that. >> So, I just saw some demos on the conventional AI that Chris McNab was demoing with Mandy, actually with the voice attendant there, and they were referencing head count. Were those actual numbers, 700 new employees added to Boomi in the last quarter? >> Oh, not in the last quarter, but in the last two years, three years, I'll just give you a perspective, I mean, it's grown seven x since I've been back, and that's three and a half years. >> John: Can you talk about headcount numbers at all? >> Yeah, we don't really publicly disclose that, but we're north of 1000, we had a goal in terms of, you know, Chris used to talk about the road to certain dollar figures, and I can tell you we just blew through our third goal since I've been here in three and a half years. Ahead of schedule of all of them, >> John: Got some good leverage from Dell Technologies now kicking in? >> Oh, absolutely, you know, Dell Technologies and what they've done to really start to be a little bit more of an accelerant. We're incredibly excited about what Dell Technologies can do with us in the fed space, I was just in a Federal break out and Dell has such a great presence in the Federal space, and such great relationships, and that should absolutely be a force multiplier and accelerator for us there as well. >> Let's talk about that a little bit more from a Federal perspective. Here we are, in Washington, DC, Boomi announced, maybe six or so weeks ago in August, Fed Remp authorization and one of the first IPAZ venders in the marketplace. But interestingly what Chris McNab shared this morning, was that Boomi achieved Fed Ramp certification in five months, and one of your competitors, I think I know who it is, took 18 months. >> Yes >> So John and I have been talking about time to value with every interview today, talk to us a little bit about what that Fed Ramp marketplace means not just to your Federal businesses, but to Boomi's platform and capabilities in general. >> Yes, and I think Chris started that this morning, is when you think about the number of controls we had to go through to get that certification, and the ability to do it in that five month period, I think it highlights, A, where we're at, but the investment that we've made, but candidly, the architecture and back to the end customer, why do they care? Because, granted, Federal is very important to us, but candidly, we've got 9,000 plus customers because we just got started, right? We do have our first Fed customer, but we're not allowed to disclose who it is yet. But 9000 plus customers that aren't in Fed, obviously. And why do they care? It's about the increased security, it's affectively the stamp of approval in terms of our scalability, and just what we've done to invest in their future, because it's so paramount, and being kind of a trusted advisor. You know, being a software provider is one thing, but trust has just become so much of the forefront I don't know how many discussions I have on the pre sale cycle. And if it's not in every discussion, it's in nine out of 10 now. >> Yeah Chris, and today's business client I mean, you can't really go a couple minutes without hearing about, you know, WeWork, you know, pulled their IPO. Software economics are driving evaluations of really profitable companies like Zoom, and others. And there's the unicorns that aren't making any money, losing money. Kind of, the wolves of Wall Street kind of reacted to that. But the customers look at the business model. Of companies that they partner with. I want you to take a minute to explain Boomi's business model. You guys are a modern software company, so you have good emergence with engagement journeys, and sales, partnerships, the ecosystem. But you've also got the cloud dynamic, and you got SaaS. >> Yes. >> I mean SaaS companies are getting great evaluations. They are highly profitable, so the operating leverage with SaaS, combined with how you guys are deploying it is very interesting. Can you explain for people that aren't yet Boomi customers what the business model is and how they engage with you and what should they expect. >> Yeah, well look, I think it all starts with our architecture, right? So, the way the software's architected is, it just absolutely facilitates an ease of use, and a time to value that's unmatched in the space. So, bringing to that the 9000 plus customers, you're honestly talking about, 'cause when you look at our space, it all starts there, from a strategic construct. You have legacy providers, as well as some of the newer names that are, you know, what I would call high control. And we may have talked a little bit about this last year, but they're in this high control, they require a fair amount of development, they have long lead times, in terms of getting to that time to value. Then you have kind of, the new school, you know, and Boomi is certainly over here, we pioneered it, which is high productivity, high time to value. Again, we want to cut projects from nine months, historically, that a customer will maybe engage on, we want to make that 90 days. We want to make that nine days, right? So everything starts from there and our entire go to market has been built off that, so what does that mean? When you think about that backs of our partners, you know we really started out with other ISV's, that were in the SaaS space, and how could we add to their value prop. 'Cause candidly, integration can be a barrier to a SaaS application, take a concur, a success factor, to their adoption. So we removed that barrier, but in the same time, the same speed, the same agility as they do. >> So, agility, great value prep is, look, that's great. Check, love that. How do they buy, they pay, how do they pay you? Just talk about the economics real quick. >> Yep, and that's the other thing, so we've moved obviously from this perpetual, kind of, CapEx model, to the SaaS model, which is much more OpEx focused, but again, in smaller bites. I mean, our customers aren't paying us, you know, hey, it'd be great if they did, but they don't have to. And we're getting bigger and bigger, but it's typically though expansion, versus this massive long sale cycle, pay us five million up front and then pay us a 20% drip for the rest of your life. It's all, you know, it's basically a fixed fee annually, they pay us for that first year, and they pay us for the second year, and it's my team's job to make sure they're renewing every year so that we continue to be good stewards, good partners with them. And hopefully, as they find value, and we find that they do, typical Boomi customer, particularly in enterprise, doubles their use of Boomi within about an 18 month time frame. >> And that's the Amazon pioneering model, which is, you lower the price for your customer, but your mix of business just gets bigger, so you're dropping the price for the customer, but you get more customers. >> Exactly >> It's good economics. >> Yeah, and I mean it's just about getting in there, proving the value of the technology and look, you heard it this morning, you heard just so many compelling stories. Our customers will absolutely continue to find one more use and one more use and they will just constantly double, and double again, and double again, their use of Boomi, so. >> Integration isn't going away, it's kind of like storage and data, like, you got to store data. Like, there'll always be storage, always be integration. >> I talked to some customers yesterday, Chris, who articulated just that, in terms of the unexpected benefits that integrating Boomi with, whether it's a transport management system, or sales force, and suddenly they're starting to see so many more downstream benefits that they couldn't even have forecast when they first started, going, "We got to integrate these two things" and the opportunities, but one of the things that came up in some of those customer conversations that I want to talk with you about, is, from an architectural differentiation standpoint, Boomi says, "We're cloud-native, single instance multi-tenant cloud application delivered as a service". Talk to us architecturally about how that is, what is that? And why is that so unique for Boomi to deliver? >> Sure, that's a great question. So single-instance means that every single one of our 9000 plus customers is on the same version of Boomi. So we do 11 releases a year, we don't do it in December, because you know, a lot of retail customers and a lot of customers go on a moratorium in December. So, we don't disrupt business in December, but 11 releases a year, and what that means is every time we do a release, that all 9000 plus customers, on it's way to 10000 and 20000, they get the same version of Boomi, every month. They're all working off that same version. Now, they like that, because there's no physical upgrades, but the reason single-instance means so much is, again, Chris talked about the 30 terabytes of anonymized data. You can't do that unless you have a single instance software. So, that's kind of the secret sauce, our ability to do things, like Boomi suggest, that Chris talked about. Which candidly, the first real use of AI and Middleware. Right? Michael Morton is going to talk tomorrow about this insights platform, you know, that we're now launching. That really, we'll start to get into data privacy to start, but there's so many different things, I mean again, this is literally our fundamental fair advantage, I mean, nobody else has this, nobody else has it even close to 9000 plus customers. We see everything they do, and it's our opportunity to unlock that, and show them the value. Not just suggest, not just automated regression testing, not just insights tomorrow, but what are the next three, five, 10 things we can do to absolutely accelerate their (cross-talk drowns out speaker) >> John: That's data driven. >> That's absolutely data driven >> That's the definition of data driven, okay, so I got to get your definition of something I'm hearing a lot of, I kind of got my view on this, but I want to get yours. What is, in Boomi's world, what is event driven mean? Because, we hear about event driven architecture, what is that? >> Well, I mean, look, think about real time, I mean, historically there's been a lot of, you know, from a process perspective, you know, batch. It's not necessarily done in real time. Event driven is more listening and responding. So, how do I become much more, from a software perspective, how do I become much more real time, to listen to those different events that are in my ecosystem, could be something a customer's doing, could be something that you're doing as a finance employee. So it depends on what the use case is, but how do I respond to that event with a subsequent event, but more in a real time, you know, way. >> So the classic definition of event, something happened, triggers, software policies, stuff that you can react to. >> Yeah, and that's my definition, you should talk to Steve Wood, talk to Michael Morton, I'm sure they'll be much more eloquent, but that would be my perspective. >> We're going to pin them down. My final question is culture. Boomi has got a cool culture, I asked this last year, you guys are still feeling very much like a startup and the culture, and the customers, you got great customer loyalty, Lisa was pointing that out at our opening. So this has got a good momentum with the culture, your thoughts on how it goes next level, 'cause as you're growing, you got to keep an eye on culture, you want to grow as fast as you can, but within the norms of what's workable. >> Yeah, well look, I'll say it's the number one priority for the entire company, and that starts from Chris, all the way down. So we have leadership meetings that then cascade down. I have my own leadership meetings, my leaders have their meetings. There's only one topic that is non negotiable, that should be on every agenda: how are we doing, how are our people doing, how are we doing as humans, right? 'cause, look, I've been at a lot of companies, I got to be in management consulting, so I got to see a lot of leadership teams that were both good and maybe had opportunities for improvement. I got to see a lot of companies, I've now been part of something, you know. But candidly, these three and a half years, I've never been part of something like this, and it's a family, and it's just totally different. Totally different, you know, I say it all the time at our town halls, but I mean it. I look at this as a once in a lifetime, these opportunities just don't come around that often and, you know, to go from how many people we had, just even when I got back three and a half years ago, to how many we have today, to think that my team, my own personal team now is two and a half times bigger than Boomi was three and a half years ago. To give you a scale perspective. And so it's a topic every day, is how do we invest in people and how do we keep this going. >> You guys got a lot of challenges too, with the growth, and I want to get your thoughts on this. One, is, the new branding looks awesome, we wore some Boomi t-shirts out last night, we were at the Washington National's game, and give it a test drive, people were like, "What's Boomi?". Very strong reaction, >> Love it! >> But that's the question, what's Boomi? You got to answer that question, so that's one comment I want to get from you. The other one is, the focus on community and education, is some work areas for you guys. So, the new brand's going to get awareness, what's Boomi? You got to answer that, what is Boomi? And then, community and education's a focus area, as COO, how are you going to tackle those opportunities and challenges as a leader? >> Yeah, well look, on the brand I think this is a real opportunity for us to really accelerate and amplify our voice in the market. Like, and Mandy's here, I think the things we're doing, I think you're going to see us really start to target the CX level, like, what is that CEO, that COO, that CIO, what are he or she thinking about, and really go after them to make sure that when they start thinking about integration flow, hub, whatever it may be, that Boomi absolutely is part of their vernacular. And I think it's, today, the number of times I hear that today, that you were saying, "What's Boomi?" is so much less than it was three and a half years ago, so I think that we've made some good in roads there, but I really think this is our next level, our opportunity to completely, let's get that out of the way we want to be a household name, we want the B2B iconic, you know, so, I think we're on our way, right? It's going to be a journey but I think that this is a great, kind of, launching pad. In terms of learning certifications, so we talked about today, we launched Boomi-verse, very excited. >> 65000 members! >> Absolutely, you know, we need that to be double, triple, quadruple, and that's all part of accelerating this journey. We were literally doing five certifications, this is a global number, but five certifications a day, three years ago, we literally just closed a week where we did 50 a day, so 10x, we've opened it up and that's kind of, our big thing is like, it's free. We want the world to come in and learn about Boomi, build that skill set, the hundreds and thousands of jobs, when you just start looking for Boomi in terms of job sites, it's not about a lack of opportunity, it's about our ability to fill those jobs and I look at that as my responsibility, our team's responsibility. Because, you know, I want it to be an iconic brand, when you have a resume, I want Boomi to be front and center in terms of skill sets that you're highlighting, because, you know, it truly can change peoples careers, and you saw some of the stuff we're doing with veterans, >> Lisa: That was fantastic. >> It really is, and it's because of the opportunity that we see, and forget 20 000, we need 50 000, 100 000 certifications, and we're well on our way, and I think you'll just see us accelerate that and I think Boomi verses that launching pad. >> Well you guys all look very well rested for how much innovation is going on at scale. Chris, thank you, for joining John and me on theCUBE today. It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you so much. >> For Chris Port and John Foreer, I am Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE from Boomi World '19. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)