>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by A. W s Global Partner Network. Welcome back to the cubes Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We're not in person this year. We have to do the all the Cube interviews remote. But we've got two great guests from the Amazon Web Services Partner Network A W s a p N. Craig Wicks, senior manager of AWS Satisfactory. Todd Golden, Principal Cloud Architect, Global SAS Tech Lead Gentlemen, Thanks for joining the Cube. Appreciate it. >>Thanks, John. >>Um, first of all, I want to get in Craig with you and just take them in to explain what is the satisfactory. Because this is a unique and growing team within AWS. Um, we've been saying it for years, but the moves to the cloud houses has been obvious is mainstream. But your team, your role is doing some interesting things. Explain. What is the satisfactory? What do you guys do? >>Yeah, Thanks, John. Really delighted to be here today. Yeah, the satisfactory. Maybe for those that may be somewhat disappointing. There's no factory, no sort of easy button for SAS. There's no templates. There's no machinery. We wish we had it. But we're really a global team of subject matter. Experts in SAS that really help AWS partners transform their business right both business and technical to the Saas model and help them do that faster with greater confidence and all the best practices that our team has learned over the years. >>And Todd, your solution architect. So you're the partner. You have to help your customers get their, um, you know, being a solution architect really is like the mechanic of the business. You gotta lay out the engine of innovation and this is what clients are trying to strive for. Can you take him and explain how your role is involved in this? Obviously, SAS is not. It makes sense on paper, but making it happen is not trivial. What do you What do you what? Your role. >>Yeah, so I'm very much, in fact, connected to Craig. We're all part of the same organization, and we're sort of very much deeply involved with these organizations. We get very much, um, embedded with these these partners that we work with and really helped them through sort of the nuts and bolts of what it means to transform an application thio multi tenant sort of SAS models. That means helping them figure out how to map that two different AWS services. It means helping them figure out how to realize the sort of the business objective objectives of transforming to sass. But really, our goal is to sort of just get into the weeds with them, figure out their specific domain because there's no one size fits all. Versace figure out how that really connects toe, where they're at in their trajectory, in terms of where they're trying to get to end of the journey is a business and then find that alignment with a W S services. So there's sort of that trifecta of lining all those bits up and sort of formulating, Ah, technical strategy that really brings all those pieces together for them. >>Craig, I want to get your thoughts on the trends, and Todd, you can weigh in to want to get your reaction. Over the weekend, I was picking some folks on on the Internet, linked in and whatnot from eight years ago when that we did our first cube at reinvent with second year of reinvent, and nobody was there in the industry press, wasn't there were the first I think press to be there. Um and a lot of people have either moved on to big positions or companies have gone public. I bought me. Major things have happened in 2013 clouds certainly rose there. SAS became the business model. Everyone kind of knows that. But the dynamics today are different when you think about the on premises and you got the edge. A big part of the themes this week in the next couple weeks as we unfold here reinvent. This >>is >>different, but the same Can you share? What is the trend that people are riding on? What's the What's the wind of innovation? >>Yeah, and certainly I would say, First of all, just personally, I've been in SAS for some time. It was involved early on, in sort of, ah, model. We called the application service provider model, which was sort of a predecessor assassin, you know, the gray hairs out to remember that one. But, uh, you know, I think first of all, I would say SAS is everywhere and people wanted to be everywhere And so there's just We just see insatiable demand for sass from from customers out there, right? And I think the challenge problem we see is that organizations that we work with just can't transition fast enough, right? The rial technical challenges that air in front of them in terms of how they build an architect, Assaf solution and but most importantly, the business model that sort of underpins. That is a huge transformation for companies that they're going through. And that's one of the things that we just see. You know, Justin, my time in satisfactory native us. The range of organizations we worked with has just changed. So, you know, early on we're working with companies and infrastructure around security and storage and those areas, and the last few years it's just expanded to all sorts of industries, from public sector oil and gas. Um, sort of financial services. You know, everyone really wants to build this model, and that's really, you know, born around the customer demand they're seeing for South. >>That's interesting. You mention challenge. I wanna get your thoughts. You mentioned a SP application service provided you remember those days, you know, vividly, mainly a tech thing, but it's really a consumption model around delivery of software and services. And, you know, Web services came on in 2000. The rest is history. We've got Amazon Web services, but now, as you get more vertically expanded oil and gas and go mainstream. But what >>are some >>of the challenges? Because as people get smarter, it's not just about self service or buy as you go. It's a business model you mentioned. Is it a managed services itself? Services has been embedded into the application. Can you share some of the new things that are emerging on the business model side that people should pay attention to? What, some of those challenges? Yeah, I >>think one of the first things is just a fundamentally are operating service, right? So that changes the dynamics to everything, for in terms of how you engage with customers to how you deliver. You know, the kind of simple thing E I often tell people is you know who's answering the pager now. If someone goes, if something goes wrong, it's not your customer. That's you right, and you have to manage and sustain that service and and really continue Thio provide innovation and value to customers. Right? That's one of the challenges we see is is organizations are now on a treadmill in terms of innovation where customers expect something from South model and you really have to deliver on that. And then one of the final points I would say is it really transforms how you think about going to market right sales and marketing your fundamentally transformed. And, um, you know, traditional ways of really selling software and technology. Um, largely go away and go away and some good ways. And SAS, where you can really put customers in experience right and have them evaluate your technology in a manner where they can have a trial experience, right in a way, toe really introduce them to technology very slowly. And then, um, they grow over time, right? As they see value in that software, which is very aligned, how we think about, you know, a AWS our own technology. >>Okay, Todd, I gotta ask you out. So you want to drive that car? The SAS car, What's under the hood with the right tires? What's the conditions? And it's a technical issues here. If I'm a customer, I'm in a PM, partner. Okay, I'm in there. I got a traditional business pandemic hits or just my business models forcing me. What's your advice? What have I got to do? What's the playbook on the technical side? How doe I go to the next level? >>Well, uh, you know, we're obviously gonna ask a lot of questions and probably the answer to that, sadly, like most technical people will say to you is it depends which is never the answer anybody wants to hear. But so we're definitely gonna ask a lot of questions you about, like where you're at. What are the immediate sort of pressures in your business? This is where the technical team people on our team tended wearing a little bit of a business hat here where we want to know before we sort of guide you down any one particular technical path, like water. Sort of the key sort of dimensions of getting you to a SAS till every model, but but probably as a theme generally were saying to people is, Let's look at how we can get you there incrementally. Let's get you into a SAS model as fast as we possibly can. So we have a lot of different sort of patterns and strategies will use that air about sort of incremental adoption of SAS, which are how can I sort of lift my existing environment, move it into a SAS model, present a SAS offering to the business, Let me operate and run, get the metrics and analytics, get the sort of operational efficiency and the Dev ops goodness of sass, and then sort of move after that into the insides of that sass application. And think about now, how can I begin to move that two more modern constructs? How can I move that into containers? Potentially? Or how can I begin to adopt server list technologies? How can I apply? I am another constructs to achieve Tenet isolation. Eso We're really just trying to put them in a position where they can sort of incrementally modernize their applications while still realizing the benefits of getting to market on a saas model. >>So you're saying that the the playbook is come in low hanging fruit is used existing core building blocks, you see two s three dynamo whatever and then hit the higher level services as you get more experience Or is there a certain recipe that you see working for customers? >>So it's it's probably less about that. It's probably It's not about necessarily where you're out in the service continuum and which services you're using. Um, well, we're gonna move you to a set of services that are probably a good set of services that are that way to move your monolith in most effectively into a saas model as a beginning point that could land you in to that could land you in containers. The more important thing we're going to do here is we're going to surround the that sort of experience with all the other moving parts that you have tow have billing metrics. We're gonna We're gonna build in on boarding so that you could get frictionless on boarding. Those are all gonna be net new things you have to build. We're probably gonna change your identity model and connect that up with cognito or one of our partners solutions eso for us. It's it's sort of grabbing your existing environment. Can we move it over effectively, maybe modernize it a little bit along the way, but more importantly, build all those horizontal concepts in leveraging the right AWS services for you, uh, to bring that to life. >>That's actually smart, aleck. The way you described it that way, it's almost as if it's the core tenant of what Amazon stood for. You standing up fast and you get value, right? So what you're saying is, whatever it takes is a variety of tools to stand it up. I mean, this is interesting, Craig, and talk if you can comment on this because one of the things that we've been reporting on, I've done probably a dozen interviews specifically around companies that have moved to the cloud early, proactively kind of in this way, not in a major radical way. But, you know, operationally they have been transforming, you know, piece by piece. How Todd you laid it out and then pandemic it. And they've had successfully position themselves to take advantage of the forcing function of necessity of dealing with, you know, remote work and all these things that just clobbered him so and again. They were on the wave at the right time. Kind of because they had to because they did the right work. This >>is a >>factor. This is gonna tell sign. Can you guys share your reaction? What you've seen with satisfactory because this >>is the >>benefit of moving to the club. Being positioned needs pandemic today. Tomorrow, its edge. What's after that? Right space. I mean, there's a lot of things. This is kind of the playbook. What's your reaction to that? Correct. >>Yeah. I certainly see, you know, organizations that we work with that have really delivering the SAS model, being more agile, right. The ability to sort of flex resource is and change the way they sell and work with customers and find ways to, um, sort of delivered to them. Um, that don't require, um, some of the things that we're really maybe some of the things that are holding them back from traditional software in terms of how fast they deliver new features and services and, you know, changing to sort of market and world dynamics very quickly. Right is a big part of that. And, you know, one of the things we talked about in the SAS model is really not just getting to sass, but being to deliver in that model, right? And dr Innovations to customers very quickly. Um, s O that you really getting sort of securing, you know, sort of them is the loyal customers and sort of a lifetime customer. Hopefully, um, you know, that's a big part of status. >>Yeah. And there's two types of organizations that you guys have been successful with. The startup, obviously, you know, category creators or disruptors will come in, you know, come in with a nap. Born in the cloud, kick some ass you've seen that movie happens all the time still going on. And then you got the existing organizations that have to stay in that innovation wave and not get crushed by the by the change can you guys share how the factories working? The satisfactory from a mix of of clients is Atmore establishes its startups in between. Give us a taste of What's the makeup? >>Yeah, it's range just to give you a range of some of the companies worked with from kind of legacy technology companies or companies that have been around in some time, like BMC, you know, f five alfresco we've all worked with over the past few years, and they've launched products with our team on a W s. You know, to kind of start ups like Matile. Ian. You know, Cloud zero. Cokie City, which just launched a data management service announced here at Reinvent um, two very kind of specific industry players. I think this is a trend we've seen most recently where, you know, we work with organizations like NASDAQ. I based tea in the aerospace, you know, area Emerson in oil and gas. We've seen in a number of oil and gas companies really come to us based on sort of dynamics, their industry and the constraints the customers are in in terms of how they could deliver the value they provide, >>is there. Is there a key thing that's popping out of all these deals that kind of has a is a tale sign of pattern or, um, a specific thing That's obvious on then, when you look at the data, when you zoom out, >>Yeah, I think one thing I would just say people underestimate the transformation. They have to go through continually. And we still have organizations that come to us, and maybe they come to Todd or others, and they're really they're envisioning This is a technical transformation, right? And they sort of want to talk all about the application and and sort of the new architecture er they they want to move to. But we really see theon pertinent A line business and technology around sass is a model, and that's really fundamental to getting it right. And so, you know, often we see organizations that really have unrealistic launch dates, you know, which is pretty common in software and services these days, but particularly a staff model. We just see that, you know, they underestimate the work in front of them and kind of what they need to bring with that >>Todd real quick for it against the announcements which are cool. Um, technical things that pop out of these organizations is there, Uh, the cream kind of rises to the top. When you look at the value proposition, what do they focused on? Technically, >>um, you know, it's interesting because to me, ah, lot of the focus tends to be more on the things that would surprise you. Like a lot of people are wanna sort of think about how to design the ins Thea click ation on the business logic of their application and take advantage of this scale on the sizing of AWS and those things, they're still all true. But but really an assassin organization with a really successful SAS organizations will see ah, lot more shift to the agility and the operational efficiency, right? So really good organizations will say we're going to invest in all the metrics and all the land analytics, all the tooling that lets us really have our finger on the pulse of what our customers are doing. And then they'll derive all their tech and their business strategy based on this really data driven experience. And I see that as the trend and the thing we certainly advocate a ton inside of the satisfactory is don't under invest in that data because that data is really especially in a multi 10 environment where everybody's running in this sort of shared environment. That data is essential to understanding how to morph your business, how to innovate, understand how your cost profile is really evolving. And so I see the really strong organizations building lots of the sort of foundational bits here, even ahead sometimes of building features and functions into their own products. >>It's not only moving fast and deploying tech is moving fast on the business model innovation as well. You're basically saying, Don't overplay your hand and try toe lock in the business model logic because it's gonna change with the data that what you're saying. >>Yeah, they're playing for for the innovation. They're playing for the agility they're playing for new markets, new segments that may evolve. And so they're really trying to put themselves in the position of being able to pivot and move. And they're really taking pride in the fact that their technology lets them do that. >>You know, that's not that's a business model That's not for the faint of heart. You know, when you have a market that has a lot of competitiveness to it and certainly was seeing the sea change happening over this year in the past few years, with cloud completely changing the playing field, winners and losers air emerging. And that's I think, this key it's you know, as I said in The Godfather, you know, you need a wartime conciliatory for these kind of times, and this is kind of what we're seeing, and I think that's a great point. Todd. Good stuff there. Um Okay. So announcements. You guys had some things on stage. Talked about Craig. You guys launching some new stuff? New programs? >>Yeah, absolutely mhm. Yeah, John, I guess our model is really to learn from a range of partners and experiences we have and then, you know, build tools and approaches to help everyone go faster, right? Because we certainly can't work with thousands organizations. And one of things that our team has had the opportunity over the last few years is published ton of articles, Blog's white papers, you know, very specific approaches to building SAS solutions. If you search Todd Golding out there on YouTube or anything, you'll find a bunch of things. But we wanted to bring on the altogether. And so we've created Central directory called Satisfactory Insights. Hug. And there's a right now over 70 unique pieces of content that our team is produced and curated. Whether you're starting on your staff journey right, you need socks one on one and business planning to level 400 right? 10 10 in isolation from Todd Golding, right. That's all there and available to you on the satisfactory program page. >>What? Some of the interesting things that came out of that that data from the insights you can share. >>Yeah, a couple things that we have we published most recently I would point to are really interesting. We just recently published a five case study where we go deeper in terms of their transformation. To really understand what was, you know, behind the scenes and that, um, we also published a white paper called the SAS Journey Framework, where for the first time, our team really broke down the journey. And what are the steps required? And what are some of the key questions you need to ask Onda Final piece I'd point to for people that Todd talks to is, we have, ah, white paper on SAS tended isolation strategies where we really go deep on on that particular challenge and what's there and that's also published and available on our satisfactory inside sub. Could you >>just define what is that mean tenant isolation strategies? What does that >>go to Todd with that for sure? >>Let's get that on the record. What is the definition of SAS tenant isolation? >>Sure, sure. So, you know, I think I've been in the room and with a lot of people that reinvent and basically have been in Chuck talks and said, You know what's tended isolation to you, and a lot of people will say Oh, that's authentication. Essentially, somebody got into the system. So now I know my system is isolated, but and a multi tenant environment right where we're running all this. These resource is in this data all co mingled from all of these different tenants. Um, it would be a huge blow to the business if one tenant somehow inadvertently exposed the resource or exposed to the resource is of another tenant. And so, fundamentally 10 of isolation is all of these techniques and strategies and architectural patterns that you use to ensure that one tenant can inadvertently get access to the resource is of another tenant s. So it's a sort of a layer of protection and security that goes beyond just the authentication and authorization schemes that you'll typically see in a cess architectures. >>So that's basically like having your own room lock and key doorway not just getting in, but no one can access your your stuff. >>Yeah, so it's a whole set of measures you could imagine. Identity and access management and other policies sort of defining tenant boundaries and saying, as each tenant is trying to access a resource or trying toe, interact with the system in some way, you've put these extra walls up to ensure that you can't cross those boundaries. >>Todd, I want to get your thoughts on this. Well, architected sas lens piece. What is this all about? >>Well, um, a WS has had for a long time the sort of the well architected framework, which has been a really great set of sort of guiding principles and best practices around how to design an architect solutions on top of AWS. And certainly SAS providers have been using that all along the way to sort of ask foundational questions of their architecture. Er But there's always been this layer of additional sort of SAS considerations that have set on top of that are that air SAS specific architectural patterns. And so what we've done is we've used this mechanism called the well architected lens that lets us essentially take our SAS architectural principles and extend the well architected framework and introduce all these concepts into the SAS and to the architecture pillars that really ask the hard SAS architecture questions so security operations reliability all the sort of classic pillars that are part of the well architected framework now have a SAS specific context added to them. Thio to really go after those areas that are unique to sass providers. And this really gives developers, architects, consultants the ability to sit down and look at a SAS application and evaluate its alignment with these best practices. And so far we can really positive response. Thio the content. >>Great job, guys doing great work. Finally, there's something new that you guys are announcing today to make life easier. Preview building SAS on a bus. What's that? What's that about? >>Sure. Eso You know you can imagine. We've been working with thes SAS providers for a number of years now, and as we've worked with them, we've seen a number of different themes emerge on and and we've run into this pattern That's pretty common where we'll see these, uh, these customers that have a classic sort of installed software model. They're installing it on premises or in the cloud, but basically each customer's sort of has their own version of the product. They have one off versions. They have their potentially have customization that are different. And while this works for some time for these businesses, what they find is they sort of run into this operational efficiency and cost wall. Whereas they're trying to grow their businesses, they they just really can't. They can't sort of keep up based on the way that they're running their current systems, and this is sort of a natural draw to move them to sass. But the other pattern that we've seen here is that these organizations are sometimes not in a position where they have the luxury of sort of going away and just saying, Hey, I'll rewrite my system or modernize it and make all of these changes. There could be any number of factors competitive pressures, market realities, cost that just make that too much of, ah, difficult process for them to be able to just take the application and rewrite it. And so what we did is sort of try to acknowledge that and say, What could we do to give you, ah, more prescriptive solution of this, the sort of turn key, easy button, if you will to say, Take my existing monolithic application that I deliver in this classic way and plug it into an existing pre built framework. An environment that is essentially includes all these foundational bits of assassin Vyron mint. And let me just take my monolith, move it into that environment and begin toe offer a SAS product to to the universe. And so what we've done is we've printed something and were introduced. We've introduced this thing called a W s SAS boost So a W s ass boost. It's not on a W s service. It is an open source reference environment. So you essentially download it. You install it into your own A W s account. And then this installs all these building blocks of sass that we've talked about. And it gives you all this sort of prescriptive ability to say, How can I now take my existing monolithic environment lifted into this experience and begin toe offer that to the market as a sash products. So it has, you know, it has billing. It has metrics and analytics. All the things we've been kind of talked about here they're all baked into that from the ground up on. We've also offered this an open source model. So our hope here is that this is really just the starting point of this solution, which, which will solve one business case. But our hope is that essentially the open source community will lean in with us, help us figure out how to evolve and make this into something that addresses a broader set of needs. >>Well, I love the SAS boost. Firstly, I wanna take the energy drink business there. Right there. It sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that sass boost by that at 7. 11. Craig, I wanna get the final word with you. You've been the SAS business for over 20 years. You've seen this movie before. There are a lot of people who know the SAS business, and some people are learning it. You guys are helping people get there. It's different, though. Now what's different today? Because it's it's It's not just your grandfather's sass. As the expression goes, it's different. It's new dynamics. What is, uh, the most important thing people should pay attention to Whether they have a SAS legacy kind of mindset or they're new to the game. Take us >>home. Yeah, I >>think certainly, you know, getting disaster is not the end of the journey. You know, we see really successful fast provider. Just continue to differentiate, right? And then one of the things that I think we've seen successful SAT providers do is really take advantage of AWS services to go faster. Right? And that's really key, I think in this model is to really find a way to accelerate your business and deliver value faster. Andi just sort of keep that differentiation innovation there. Um, but I would just say now that there's more information out there available than ever, you know, and not only from from our team, but from a host of people that really are our SAS experts and follow the space. And so lots of resources available. Everyone >>All right, gentlemen, Thanks for coming on. Great insight. Great segment on getting to sass, sass boost Just the landscape. You guys are helping customers get there, and that's really the top priority. It's necessity is the mother of all invention during this pandemic. More than ever, uh, keeping business model going and establishing new ones. So thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having us, John. >>Okay, It's the cubes. Virtual coverage. We are a SAS business. Now we're virtual bringing you remote. Uh, SAS Cube and, uh, more coverage with reinvent next few weeks. Thanks for watching. Okay, yeah.

>>Welcome everyone to this cube conversation featuring unit Q. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And we are excited to be joined by Christian Vickle, the founder and CEO of unit Q Christian. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thank you so much, Lisa pleasure to be here. >>Let's talk a little bit about unit Q. You guys were founded in 2018, so pretty recent. What is it that unit Q does. And what were some of the gaps in the market that led you to founding the company? >>Yep. So me and my co-founder Nick, we're actually doing our second company now is the unit Q is number two, and our first company was called scout years ago. We were back ES wicks and it was very different from unit Q. It's a social network for meeting people. And it was really during that experience where we saw the impact that quality of the experience quality of the product can have on your growth trajectory and the challenges we faced. How do we test everything before we ship it? And in reality, a modern company will have, let's say, 20 languages supported you support Android, Iowas, web big screen, small screen, you have 20 plus integrations and you have lots of different devices out there that might run your binary a little differently. So who is the ultimate test group of all of these different permutation and that's the end user. >>And we, we saw the, the big gap in the market, sort of the dream platform for us was unit queue. So if, if this would've existed back in the day, we would've been a, a happy purchaser and customer, and it really comes down to how do we, how do we harness the power of user feedback? You know, the end user, that's testing your product every single day in all different configurations. And then they're telling you that, Hey, something didn't work for me. I got double build or the passive recent link didn't work, or I couldn't, you know, when music, when the ad is finished playing on, on my app, the music doesn't resume. So how do we capture those signals into something that the company and different teams can align on? So that's where, you know, unit Q the, the vision here is to build a quality company, to help other companies build higher quality products. >>So really empowering companies to take a data driven approach to product quality. I was looking on your website and noticed that Pandora is one of your customers, but talk to me a little bit about a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Q unit he was delivering. >>Right? So maybe we should just go back one little step and talk about what is quality. And I think quality is something that is, is a bit subjective. It's something that we live and breathe every day. It's something that can be formed in an instant first impressions. Last it's something that can be built over time that, Hey, I'm using this product and it's just not working for me. Maybe it's missing features. Maybe there are performance related bots. Maybe there is there's even fulfillment related issues. Like we work with Uber and hello, fresh and, and other types of more hybrid type companies in addition to the Pandoras and, and Pinterest and, and Spotify, and these more digital, only products, but the, the end users I'm producing this data, the reporting, what is working and not working out there in many different channels. So they will leave app produce. >>They will write into support. They might engage with a chat support bot. They will post stuff on Reddit on Twitter. They will comment on Facebook ads. So like this data is dispersed everywhere. The end user is not gonna fill out a perfect bug report in a form somewhere that gets filed into gr like they're, they're producing this content everywhere in different languages. So the first value of what we do is to just ingest all of that data. So all the entire surface area of use of feedback, we ingest into a machine and then we clean the data. We normalize it, and then we translate everything into English. And it was actually a surprise to us when we started this company, that there are quite a few companies out there that they're only looking at feedback in English. So what about my Spanish speaking users? What about my French speaking users? >>And when, when, when that is done, like when all of that data is, is need to organized, we extract signals from that around what is impacting the user experience right now. So we break these, all of this data down into something called quality monitors. So quality monitor is basically a topic which can be again, passive reset, link noting, or really anything that that's impacting the end user. And the important part here is that we need to have specific actionable data. For instance, if I tell you, Hey, Lisa music stops playing is a growing trend that our users are reporting. You will tell me, well, what can I do with that? Like what specifically is breaking? So we deploy up to 1500 unique quality monitors per customer. So we can then alert different teams inside of the organization of like, Hey, something broke and you should take a look at it. >>So it's really breaking down data silos within the company. It aligns cross-functional teams to agree on what should be fixed next. Cause there's typically a lot of confusion, you know, marketing, they might say, Hey, we want this fixed engineering. They're like, well, I can't reproduce, or that's not a high priority for us. The support teams might also have stuff that they want to get fixed. And what we've seen is that these teams, they struggle to communicate. So how do we align them around the single source of truth? And I think that's for unit two is early identification of stuff. That's not working in production and it's also aligning the teams so they can quickly triage and say, yes, we gotta fix this right before it snowballs into something. We say, you know, we wanna, we wanna cap catch issues before you go into crisis PR mode, right? So we want to get this, we wanna address it early in the cycle. >>Talk to me about when you're in customer conversations, Christian, the MarTech landscape is competitive. There's nearly 10,000 different solutions out there, and it's growing really quickly quality monitors that you just described is that one of the key things that, that you talk to customers about, that's a differentiator for unit Q. >>Yeah. So I mean, it, it, it comes down to, as you're building your product, right, you, you have, you have a few different options. One is to build new features and we need to build new features and innovate and, and, and that's all great. We also need to make sure that the foundation of the product is working and that we keep improving quality and what, what we see with, with basically every customer that we work with, that, that when quality goes up, it's supercharges the growth machine. So quality goes up, you're gonna see less support tickets. You're gonna see less one star reviews, less one star reviews is of course good for making the store front convert better. You know, I, I want install a 4.5 star app, not a 3.9 star app. We also see that sentiment. So for those who are interested in getting that NPS score up for the next time we measure it, we see that quality is of course a very important piece of that. >>And maybe even more importantly, so sort of inside of the product machine, the different conversion steps, let's say sign up to activate it to coming back in second day, 30 day, 90 day, and so forth. We see a dramatic impact on how quality sort of moves that up and down the retention function, if you will. So it, it really, if you think about a modern company, like the product is sort of the center of the existence of the company, and if the product performs really well, then you can spend more money in marketing because it converts really good. You can hire more engineers, you can hire, you can hire more support people and so forth. So it's, it's really cool to see that when quality improves its supercharges, everything else I think for marketing it's how do you know if you're spending into a broken product or not? >>And I, and I, I feel like marketing has, they have their insights, but it's, it's not deep enough where they can go to engineering and say, Hey, these 10 issues are impacting my MPS score and they're impacting my conversion and I would love for you to fix it. And when you can bring tangible impact, when you can bring real data to, to engineering and product, they move on it cause they also wanna help build the company. And, and so I think that's, that's how we stand out from the more traditional MarTech, because we need to fix the core of, of sort of this growth engine, which is the quality of the product >>Quality of the product. And obviously that's directly related to the customer experience. And we know these days, one of the things I think that's been in short supply the last couple of years is patience. We know when customers are unhappy with the product or service, and you talked about it a minute ago, they're gonna go right to, to Reddit or other sources to complain about that. So being able to, for uniq, to help companies to improve the customer experience, isn't I think table stakes for businesses it's mission critical these days. Yeah, >>It is mission critical. So if you look at the, let's say that we were gonna start a, a music app. Okay. So how do we, how do we compete as a music app? Well, if you, if you were to analyze all different music apps out there, they have more or less the same features app. Like they, the feature differentiation is minimal. And, and if you launch a new cool feature than your competitor will probably copy that pretty quickly as well. So competing with features is really hard. What about content? Well, I'm gonna get the same content on Spotify as apple SD. So competing with content is also really hard. What about price? So it turns out you'll pay 9 99 a month for music, but there's no, there's no 1 99. It's gonna be 9 99. So quality of the experience is one of the like last vectors or areas where you can actually compete. >>And we see consistently that if you' beating your competition on quality, you will do better. Like the best companies out there also have the highest quality experience. So it's, it's been, you know, for us at our last company, measuring quality was something that was very hard. How do we talk about it? And when we started this company, I went out and talked to a bunch of CEOs and product leaders and board members. And I said, how do you talk about quality in a board meeting? And they were, they said, well, we don't, we don't have any metrics. So actually the first thing we did was to define a metrics. We have, we have this thing called this unit Q score, which is on our website as well, where we can base it's like the credit score. So you can see your score between zero and a hundred. >>And if your score is 100, it means that we're finding no quality issues in the public domain. If your score is 90, it means that 10% of the data we look at refers to a quality issue. And the definition of a quality issue is quite simple. It is when the user experience doesn't match the user expectation. There is a gap in between, and we've actually indexed the 5,000 largest apps out there. So we're then looking at all the public review. So on our website, you can go in and, and look up the unit Q score for the 5,000 largest products. And we republish these every night. So it's an operational metric that changes all the time. >>Hugely impactful. Christian, thank you so much for joining me today, talking to the audience about unit Q, how you're turning qualitative feedback into pretty significant product improvements for your customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa, have a great day. >>You as well, per Christian Lin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube conversation.

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico where we are broadcasting the Blockchain Unbound event. This is a global conference where people from around the world are coming together. From Silicone Valley, from New York, Miami, all around the world. Coming to talk about Blockchain, the disruptive nature of crypto currency and the decentralized applications and how it's changing the world, creating a lot of value. My next guest is Albert Santalo, the founder and CEO of Eight Base, the number Eight Base. Albert, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John, it's good to be here. >> So before we get into it, we'll talk on camera a little bit about what you guys are doing. I want you to take a minute to explain what Eight Base is, why, what you guys are doing? What are you disrupting and what's the value proposition? >> So Eight Base is software to build software. So if you've ever, if you're familiar with Wicks or SquareSpace for websites, we essentially do the same thing for this big category called enterprise software. And if you've every been around enterprise software project, it's no fun. It's really expensive, takes a lot of time and it's froth with danger. We make that easy and we empower a group of people called citizen developers. Basically, regular business people to build their own software without having to hire developers. >> You know, cloud computing has done a lot of great things. One of them is this notion of making coding easier. But Blockchain is now a whole new growth phase onto of cloud computing and internet of things, where you have new languages, new key for Ethereum to whatever, yet there's a demand for talent. There's now creative thinking involved. As people rethink business models, re-imagine either sovereignty or a business process, the creativity's in the people, the business model. Not necessarily the technologies, although they're involved. So there's been a challenge for how do you make it easy? So you guys are trying to do that, what's the secret sauce? Is it a tech-play, is it a business-play, cloud-play? How do you guys look at that? >> You're striking at the essence of what we do. So if you think about Blockchain, a lot of work that's been done so far has been sort of protocol level stuff and the applications that most of us see on top of it are things that don't quite look like they're finished products, right. And it has to do with the fact that it's core engineers that are really trying to bring this all to the surface. So what we are is the next layer of infrastructure on top of that protocol level. And we excel at a beautiful user interface that makes it simple for normal people to build these systems quickly and inexpensively without having to have an IQ of 140 plus which is the people that do Blockchain. >> We've seen this similar movie before and I want to get your entrepreneurial background in a separate segment but this is something that's actually happening in cloud computing and in data-science, you've seen the citizen analyst. Cause data-science you have to code python and there's like only a certain population that can do that, but what happened was people were building abstraction layers to make it really easy to wrangle data, use data-science, visualizations, whether it's tableau or whatever, that really changed the nature of what data-science became. And now the benefits in the data-analytics space is multi-fold. You're seeing examples of that. Talk about some use cases that you guys are doing and be specific with some examples of how you see it playing out. How much do they need? Is it a dashboard, how would you envision the product? What's it going to look like? >> This has an enormous democratizing effect, right. So what you're talking about is that data-science was hard to access, expensive to access, only a few people in the world really could do it and then these layers of abstractions have facilitated a much wider group of people being able to do it. So that's exactly what we're doing. We're at the same time bringing the development of software closer to where the requirements live because literally, the people finding the requirements can develop their own software. So what you're going to see is a rollout of Blockchain and non-Blockchain software just accelerated and put into the hands of more people which strikes at the heart of digital transformation. We've all heard about this theme digital transformation. It's businesses that if they don't evolve and adopt Blockchain, AI, all these other things, they have a threat of being put of business. That's where the big opportunity for Eight Base is. >> Digital transformation certainly is going to reshape things, so the idea of having a Blockchain-enabled app, you're going to make it easier for someone to do that. What use cases do you envision being the low-hanging fruit, as you guys go to the market? What are some of the use cases? Because developers still can contribute to your model. Explain how the role of true developer? I get the part of easy to program, because that's natural, leggo-blocked, making it easy. How does it grow? How does it evolve? >> So the citizen developer is what we've talked about until now. There's something called the Eight Based server-less chaise which is the heart of the system. In that part of our world, developers or core engineers can work to extend the platform. And in the process of that, they can earn tokens and basically create a business model for themselves. Either one-time payment or a recurring payment. So Eight Base will evolve very, very, rapidly. Not only through Eight Bases' development work and our development team, but through the world at large contributing new capabilities. Think of a Blockchain, a new Blockchain that comes out, that's innovative, all they have to do is create an extension to the Eight Base platform and now that's accessible to all the Eight Base users in the world, right. >> So let me get this right, see if I can unpack this, see if I can un-connect the dots. You're essentially creating software to make people that want to write software really easy. So they essentially invoke some thing and it automatically writes the software for them, so they don't have to. And then you have a development eco-system that can add more to that, much like a marketplace. Is that kind of getting it right? >> Yes, so, when you talk about writing the system, it's a yes and no. >> Okay. >> So one thing we're not, is a code generator. So the software is created but runs inside of our environment because we think the environment is also more than half of the value that we add. We have a fully fault-tolerant, scalable cloud-base environment so that the same people who want to develop don't have to worry about IT. So that's really, really important. >> You've nailed the operational piece. >> That's right and it's fully self-service, so there's no human intervention. So people can try Eight Base before they buy it without having to talk to salespeople, without having to drop a credit card and without having to have implementation people involved. >> That sounds like a great cloud solution to me. And certainly, cloud has proven that a set of services, you know, push-button, kind of capability, Amazon's been very successful, Amazon's Web Service, with their marketplace. Why even provision code, just click on and use it. >> And by the way, in talking about Amazon, what we're doing, in my opinion, wasn't even possible 15 years ago. Even though many of our competitors which date back to those days tried. Things like Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud, many of the open-source things including Blockchain are what facilitates what we do because we don't have to write it all. We can leverage these incredible underlying technologies and curate them in way that makes it accessible to people. >> So you're tailwind for your business is the open-source software market, you're differentiations, you're running all the operations for them so they don't have to and so you have an extensive, and you're also providing the value of having a Blockchain-enabled capability for someone who's not trained. >> Yes and a visual interface that normal people can understand in terms of building software. A no-code, what we called a no-code. >> Define, normal. >> Well, you know, most of the population. >> Yeah, who want Blockchain, who wants the benefits of it, you guys abstract that away, great. So ICO, you guys doing a fundraising? You guys doing an ICO? What's the plans? >> We have plans for a token sale but I can't talk about it just yet. >> Okay, I respect that, okay cool. So that sounds like it's rocking and rolling. Let's talk about you. So were just joking off camera, big Hurricane's fan from Miami. They're going to get their mojo back. >> Looks that way. >> I love the chain, the turnover chain, fantastic. Love to see the action, energy there. But you also have a lot of success in the industry. Also, you have some scar tissue as us guys, growing up in that era where you have to provision your own stuff. Go to venture capital, get the funding. It was a slog, I mean, on many levels. Some got easier overtime, certainly agile programming helped a lot, but now with cloud and now with this new marketplace where you have almost a global footprint capability. How do you talk to people and say, hey you know, I've been there. I've walked to school with no shoes, back in the day and now it's so much better. How do you talk about this wave? I mean, because it's a bigger wave than anything we've seen before, certainly, a lot of things coming together at once. >> So I love this topic. I've stood up a couple of venture-back technology companies, probably the one I'm best known for is Care Cloud which is backed by Silicone Valley VCs and, you know, I've raised a fare amount of angel investments and venture capital and I appreciate the model, right. It's got its pros and cons and when you talk about scar tissue, you know, all our entreprenuers have scar tissue, whether they were funded or not. I also had a very unique experience because I was at the signing of the Jobs Act. I was standing behind the president at the White House and at the time I was beginning to sort of imagine what could become of that and I did a PBS interview sort of like this. It was actually a debate, talking about it back then. And I never would have imagined, we were talking about things like crowd-funding and stuff like that but never in a million years could I have envisioned what Blockchain could have brought to all this and what ICOs would have looked like and what crowd-funding at a global environment. Up until that time we thought of most of entrepreneurship as a U.S. phenomenon. Now it's a very much global phenomenon. So I'm very excited about what's coming. I think it creates an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs all over the world to sort of emerge and do what they do. Whether they know VCs personally or not, which is sort of part of the problem. As long as this industry doesn't get too crazy, we can sort of keep that under control and let it grow. >> My personal opinion, having a venture-back company in the past, my current business-looking angle, theCUBE is self-funded, no outside capital. It's interesting because there's three types of funding elements going on in this ICO bubble. The startup and then the other end of the spectrum is that, oh shit, we're going out of business, throw the hail Mary, okay. Pivot, that's what they call it now. We use to call it, shit, we're going out of business! Now it's called, accu-hire and pivoting. And then in the middle is really where the action is. Growth companies that actually have a business model and need growth capital at a scale and technology infrastructure has token economics built in. That's where I see most of the smart money going. On the startup side there's an argument for VCs because that's a good, a lot of my friends are VCs and they've been on theCUBE. They need nurturing, they need advice, they need to have the network effect, and they need to have that service provider. But some can go right to the value faster. So you see the startup category kind of bifurcate into, you know, I really want the VCs and to some, I just want to get to first base, get this thing done and I'll re-evaluate. And there's the holy-grail which is token economics already built in, growth companies. Okay, so that being said, from your perspective, when you look at the Jobs Act, you mentioned that, so I also find that there's new levels of startups coming on, not just the technological entrepreneurs. In Washington D.C. I've covered in great detail with Teresa Carlson, who's the head of Amazon's Web Services global public sector, this tsunami of societal entrepreneurship where NGOs because of the Jobs Act can now invest in mission-driven startups. So what's happening is a level of entrepreneurs coming in, solving stuff that would never get funded by a VC. Talking about a women's abuse app or missing, exploited children or solving world hunger, these used to be philanthropy missions that when there's no more funding, everything's dead. Now there's entrepreneurship going on, there are people doing stuff they know they want to do but need to code. This is kind of where you're targeting. Kind of a data-point to validate what you're doing, right? >> First of all, I love the fact that that's happening. Things that are good for a society obviously is good for everybody. But I would also say that beyond that, you know, people are sort of, if you're lucky enough in life to find out what you're really passionate about, sometimes that always doesn't align itself with profits. So we're giving them an opportunity for people to live a more fulling life by following their dreams and doing good by society, right. But at the end of the day, we have to be able to fund these things and we have to be able to support them. And things like the Jobs Act and crowd-funding and stuff have really given life to this stuff. >> Well the thing about NGOs in these new areas is that they don't have a lot of tech expertise. They have a lot of years of experience in the channels and their relationships and their mission but now there's like, oh damn I got to build something. So who do you turn to? This is kind of where the model of simplicity is really kind of key. >> Eight Base is designed for exactly that. So when we think about where's Eight Base used? First and foremost we think small to mid-sized businesses that are looking to digitally transform, okay. Then we think of large companies where departmentally people don't necessarily want to go to their IT department. They do what's called shadow-IT. They build their own stuff. Eight Base is a much more, it's a much better, much more compliant way to do that, and businesses to be able to cycle faster. But the last thing is entrepreneurs. So imagine, today we have all these platforms to make entrepreneurship easier. Well imagine if you could literally build your product very, very easily without having to hire developers? Think about how we're spawning companies left and right. So part of what we like to do is really be a catalyst for that type of economy overtime. >> Shadow-IT, I've said on theCUBE many times, has been legitimized with the cloud. It used to be kind of a, you know, quiet little secret. You go around, put the credit card down, spin up some servers, get a little prototype and then show the boss and they'll double down on that. Similar kind of concept going on in this world. Get something going, show some momentum. >> And get some money. >> You guys take care of that for everybody. Okay, so what's going on in Puerto Rico? Let's shift gears. We're here in Puerto Rico, what's your observation, what's the vibe? Obviously, they're trying to bid themselves out like they want to be a haven for entrepreneurship, bring the local culture together. What are you hearing here in the hallways here? What are you talking about? What's some of the observations? >> First of all I'm a big fan of Puerto Rico. I live in Miami so I've been to Puerto Rico many, many times and the place has been hard hit by the hurricane. I love the fact that the government was able to reform the tax situation five years ago and I think it's exactly that type of thing that will bring, sort of, that will spawn the type of innovation that we need here. All communities need to evolve, in my opinion, to technology communities. You've seen it obviously Silicone Valley is the exaggerated example but you've seen it in places like Detroit, New York, Austin, and even Miami is very important. A big, big part of the message I carry. When you live on a island, it's sort of has an even different dynamic, but there's no reason why that can't emerge here in Puerto Rico. I'm hopeful that these incentives, et cetera, will attract that kind of-- >> It's a short flight to the mainland. It's entrepreneurial center. >> It's the United States. >> It's the United States. With digital, there's no boundaries with digital cultural. Opportunity for them. >> That's right. >> Albert, thanks for spending the time. What's next for you, what are you going to do? Obviously, you've got your business you're building, can't talk about your token sale. >> Well we haven't literally launched the company yet but we're anticipating that next week or the following we're actually going to make our announcement and then they'll be lots of announcements after that. >> Come on, give us a little bit more, you're teasing us here. >> By the way, today is our birthday so we were incorporated in ides of March 2017. >> Let's hope that's good luck. (Albert laughs) Albert Santalo, founder and CEO of Eight Base, look for him. We'll be watching the news, trying to get some scoop here but he's not giving in. Good job, well done, seasoned pro. >> Thank you, John. >> We'll be back with more live coverage here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE's coverage of Blockchain Unbound. Thanks for watching, we'll be right back. (lively music)