from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi and welcome to the cube Studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Burris if there's one thing we know about cloud it's that it's going to drive new data and a lot of it and that places a lot of load on storage technologies who have to be able to capture persist and ultimately deliver that data to new classes of applications in support of whatever the digital business is trying to do so how is the whole storage industry and the relationship between data and storage going to evolve I can't think of a better person to have that conversation with in stanley's a phos senior vice president product marketing infinite dad Stan welcome to the cube thank you for it's my pleasure to be here and I'm flattered with that introduction well hold on look you and I have known each other for a long time we have been walking into user presentations and you've been walking out until recently though you were generally regarded as the thought leader when it came to user side concerns about storage what is that problem that users are fundamentally focused on as they think about their data data management and storage requirements fundamental problems and this afflicts all classes of users whether in a financial institution at university government small business medium-sized businesses is that they're coping with the number of primal forces that don't change and the first is that the environment is becoming ever more competitive and with the environment being ever more competitive that means that they're always under budget constraints they're usually suffering from skill shortages especially now when we see so many new technologies and the realization that we can coax value out of the information that we capture and store creating new demands elsewhere within the IT organization so what we see historically is that uses understand that there you have an insatiable demand for capacity they have finite budgets they have limited skills and they realize that recovering from a loss of data integrity is a far more painful process than recovering from an application blowing up or a networking issue and they got to do it faster and they have to do it faster so what we see in some ways is in effect the perfect storm and this is part of the reason that we've seen a number of the technical evolutions that we've witnessed over the past decade or two decades or however long we'd like to admit we've been tracking this industry occurring and growing in importance what we've also seen is that many of the technologies that are useful in helping to deliver usable availability to the application are in some ways becoming more commoditized so when we look across these industries some of the things that we're looking for is cost efficiency we're looking at increasing levels of automation we're looking of increases in data mobility with the ultimate objective being of course to allow data to reside where it naturally belongs and we're trying to deliver these new capabilities at scale in infrastructures that were built with storage arrays that would design for a terabyte world instead of a petabyte world and it won't be too long before we start talking about exabytes as we're already seeing so to be able to satisfy new scale problems with traditional and well understood issues is there are three basic types of storage companies that are targeting this problem the first of the established storage companies the incumbents the incumbents and the incumbents I really don't envy them because they have to maintain backwards compatibility which limits their ability to innovate at the same time they're competing against privately held newer companies that aren't constrained by the need for backwards compatibility and therefore able to take better advantage of the technology improvements that we're seeing to live it and when I say technology improvements not just in hardware but also in terms of software also in terms of management and government and governing philosophies so beginning with the point that all companies large small have some basic problems that are similar what we then see is there are three types of storage companies addressing them one of the in established and common vendors the other and they've gotten a lot of press or the companies that realize that flash media very media that delivers one to two orders of magnitude improvements in terms of performance in terms of bandwidth in terms of environmental x' that they could create storage solutions that address real pain points within a data center within an organization but at a very high price point and then it was the third approach and this is the approach that infinite I chose to take and that is to define the customer problem to find the customer market and then create an architecture which is underpinned by brilliant software to solve these problems in a way that is both cost-effective and extensible and of course meeting all of the critical capabilities that users are looking for so we've got the situation where we've got the incumbents who have install bases and are trying to bring their customers forward but right I have to do so within the constraints of past technology choices we've got the new folks who are basically technology first and saying jump to a new innovation curve and we've got other companies that are trying to bring the best of the technology to the best of the customer reality and marry it and you're asserting that's what infinite at ease and then it's precisely what we've done so let's talk about why did you then come to infinite at what is it about infinite act that gets you excited well one of the things that got well your number of things that got me excited about it so the first is that when I look at this and I approach these things as an engineer who's steeped in aerospace and weapon systems design so you look at the problem you superimpose capabilities there and then you blow it up and then if well we do blow it up but we blow it up using economics we blow it up using superior post-sale support effectiveness we blow it up with a fundamentally different approach to how we give our install base access to new capabilities so we're established storage companies and to some extent media based storage companies of forcing upgrades to avoid architectural obsolescence that is to gain access to new features and functions that can improve their staff productivity or deliver new capabilities to support new applications and workloads we're not forcing a cadence of infrastructure refreshes to gain access to that so if you take a look at our history our past behavior we allow today we're allowing current software to run on n minus 2 generation hardware so that now when you're doing a refresh on your hardware you're doing a refresh on the hardware because you've outgrown it because it's so old that it's moved past its useful service life which hasn't happened to us yet because that's usually on the order of about eight years and sometimes longer if it's kept in a clean data center and we have a steady cadence of product announcements and we understood some underlying economics so whether I talk to banking institutions colleges manufacturing companies telcos service providers everybody's in general agreement that roughly two-thirds of the data that they have online and accessible is stale data meaning that it hasn't been accessed in 60 to 90 days and then when I take a look at industry forecasts in terms of dollar per terabyte pricing for HD DS for disk drives and I look at dollar per terabyte forecast for flash technologies there's an order of magnitude difference in meaning 10x and even if you want to be a pessimist call it only 5x what you see is that we have a built-in advantage for storing 60% of the data that's already up and spinning and there are those questions of whether or not the availability of flash is going to come under pressure over the next few years as because we're not expanding another fabs out there they're generating flash so let me come back right it's kind of core points out there so we have quality yeah the right now you guys are trying to bring the economics of HDD to the challenges are faster more reliable more scalable data delivery right so that you can think about not only persisting your data from transactional applications but also delivering that data to the new uses new requirements new applications new business needs so you've made you know infinite out has made some choices about how to bring technology together that are some somewhat that are unique first thing is the team that did this tell us a little bit about the team and then let's talk about some of those torches so one of the draws for me personally is that we have a development team that has had the unique possibly the unique experience of having done three not one not two but three clean sheet designs of storage arrays now if you believe that practice makes perfect and you're starting off with very bright people that experience before they designed a storage array when we look at the InfiniBand when we look at in Finnegan what we see is the benefit of three clean sheet designs and what does that design look like what is it how did you guys bring these different senses of technology together to improve the notion of it all right so what we looked at we looked at trends instead of being married to a technology or married to an architecture we were we define the users problem we understood that they have an insatiable need for data we can argue whether they're growing at fifteen percent 30 percent or 100 percent per year but data growth is insatiable stale data being a constant megive n' and of course now with digital business initiatives and moving the infrastructure to the edge where we could capture ever more data if anything the amount of stale data that was storing is likely to increase so we've all seen survey after survey that 80% of all the data created is unstructured data meaning we're collecting it we know that may be a value at some point but we're not quite sure when so this is not data that you want to store in the most expensive media that we know how to manufacture or sell right not happening so we have a built-in economic advantage for this at least 60% of the data that users want to keep online we understand that if you implement an archiving solution that archive data still has to be stored somewhere and for practical purposes that's either disk or tape and we're not here to talk about the fact that I can take tape and store in a bunker for years but if I want to recover something if I have to answer a problem I want it on disk so the economic gap the price Delta between an archive storage solution per se and our approach is much narrower because we're using a common technology and when Seagate or West and digital a Toshiba cell and HDD they're not asking you where you're putting it they're saying you want this capacity this rpm this mean time between face its this is how much it's going to cost so when we take a look at a lot of the innovation and go to market models what they really are or revenue protection schemes for the existing established vendors and for the emerging companies the difference is there are in the problems that they're solving am i creating a backup restore solution the backup and restore is always a high impact pain point am i creating a backup restore solution am i building a system for primary storage a my targeting virtualized environments my targeting VDI now our install base the bulk of our install base I'm not sure we actually we should share percentages but it's well north of 50 and if you take a look at some virtualized estimates probably 80% of workloads today are virtualized we understood that to satisfy this environment and to have a built-in advantage that's memorable after the marketing presentations are done in other words treating these things as black boxes so if we take a look at my high-level description of an infinite box array installed at a customer site consistent sub-millisecond response times and we're able to do that because we service over 80% of all iOS out of DRAM which is probably about four orders of magnitude faster than NAND flash and then we have a large read cache to increase our cache hit ratio even further and when I say large we're not talking about single digits of terabytes we're talking about 20 plus terabytes and that can grow as necessary so that when we're done we're achieving cache hit ratios that are typically in excess of 90% now if I'm servicing iOS out of cache do I really care what's on the back end the answer is no but what I do care about for certain analytics applications is I want lots of bandwidth and I want and if I have workloads with high right content I don't want to be spending a lot of time paying my raid right penalty so what we've done is to take the obvious solution and coalesce rights so that instead of doing partial stripe rights we're always doing full stripe rights so we have double bit protection on data stored on HD DS which means that the world is likely to come to an end before we lose this slight exaggeration I think we're expecting the world to come to an end in 14 billion years yeah yeah let's do so so if I'm wrong get back to me in a Bay and it's a little bit less than that but it doesn't matter yeah okay high on that all so we've got a so we've got a built in economic advantage we've got a built in performance advantage because when I'm servicing most iOS out of DRAM which is for does magnitude faster than NAND flash I've got a lot of room to do a lot of very clever things in terms of metadata and still be faster so and you got a team that's done it before and we've got a team that's done it before and experimented because remember this is a team that has experience with scale-up architectures as in symmetric s-- they have experience with scale-out architectures which is XIV which was very disruptive to the market well so was it symmetric spec and now of course we've got this third bite at the Apple with infinite at where they also understood that the rate of microprocessor performance improvement was going up a lot faster than than our ability to transfer data on and off of HD DS or SSDs so what they realized is that they could change the ratio they can have a much lower microprocessor or controller to back-end storage ratio and still be able to deliver this tremendous performance and now if you have fewer parts and you're not affecting the ID MTBF by driving more iOS through I've lowered my overall cost of goods so now I've got an advantage in back-end media I have a bag I have an advantage in terms of the number of controllers I need to deliver sub sillas eken response time I have an advantage in terms of delivering usable availability so I'm now in a position to be able to unashamedly compete on price unashamedly compete on performance unashamedly compete on a better post sale support experience because remember if there's less stuff they had a break we're taking less calls and because of the way we're organized our support generally goes to what other vendors might think of it's third level support because of a guided answer answers the phone from us doesn't solve the problem he's calling development so if you take a look at gotten apear insights we're off the scale in terms of having great reviews and when you have I think it's 99% I may be off by a percent ninety eight to a hundred percent of our customers saying they'd recommend our kit to their to their peers that's a pretty positive endorsement yeah so let me let me break in and and kind of wrap up a little bit let me make this quick observation because the other thing that you guys have done is you've demonstrated that you're not bound to a single technology so smart people with a great architecture that's capable of utilizing any technology to serve a customer problem at a price point that reflects the value of the problem that's being solved right and in fact we it's very insightful observation because when you recognize that we've built a multimedia integrated architecture that makes our that makes very easy for us to include storage class memory and because of the way we've done our drivers we're also going to be nvme over if ready when that starts to gain traction as well excellent Stanley Zappos senior vice president product management Infini debt thanks very much for being in the cube we'll have you back oh it's my pleasure there's been a blast and once again I want to thank you for joining us for another cube conversation on Peterborough's see you next time [Music]

>>live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the Q covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Okay, Welcome back, everyone. To the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are kicking off day two of the cubes live coverage of dot Next Nutanix the Nutanix show dot Next I'm your host, Rebecca night sitting alongside stew. Minutemen, of course, Do. The word of the day is delight. And in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a year after your voted the most happy, the happiest country, the country that coined the term Hugh Ge, which means a sense of well being. What do you think delight It means in the context of this show in particular. >>Yeah, Rebecca. Right yesterday I thought I only knew one word. Ivan tackle. It was, Thank you, of course, but Hugh GE is actually one I I'd read about cause it's interesting. The study of happiness. They actually have an institute here in Denmark on talk about it. As you said, the people are some of the happiest. You say, Wow, it's, you know, often cold and rainy and things like that. But they do look into the study of delight, and it's it's something that I find pretty fascinating. I read a book by Tony Shea, who's the founder and CEO of Zappos talked about. You know, we all talk about where you want to go in career and what you want to do. But you know, how do we actually understand happiness and bringing it to the Tannic Show? Definitely. There is a certain joy from the community here. We've had a lot of talk with some of the practitioners as well as some of Nutanix employees, they want to say customer focused. They wantto, you know, build these experiences as the CEO Dheeraj Pandey said. And therefore, it's not about that that product, because so much in technology it's that new, shiny thing that we understand. Oh, it's never a silver bullet, and there's always the repercussions. And how do I have to reorganize? Things change so fast and technology. But if I could have experienced with the example get used all the time, is you know what would transform when we move to you know, the smartphone revolutionized by the iPhone or so many other things that just pull together, that that simplicity that gets baked in the design, something we've talked about both, You know, in Denmark as well as from the Nutanix discussion s o. So pulling those pieces together kind of a left brain right brain all pulling together. It has been interesting. And yeah, it gives kind of a highlight as to why Copenhagen was a nice place. Definitely. We've enjoyed, you know, being here at the show. >>Absolutely. And I think you're you're you're you're right on or we'll be talking a lot about designed today because delight is one of those again. It's something ineffable quality. You don't know you're being delighted because you're just being delighted. It's just nice at the ease of use. And in Monica Kumar, who we had on the show yesterday, of course, was talking about all all of the elements that go into that, taking 10 clicks and making enemies e swipe, eliminating downtime just a kn easy, intuitive use, which is which is absolutely what goes into delighting customers. We're gonna have a teacher. I'm a Chandran on the show today, talking Maura about designed to, uh, tell me about the energy of the show. We're gonna get into Nutanix a bit more today too. But just what do you think about the energy? Ah, what what you're feeling. >>So there are certain shows that we go to where we know that you have the true believers at the show. Splunk sw dot com is one where they all love the geeky T shirts that they get and people enjoy their service. Now, another one. A lot of the software companies it transformed the way they think. And then then they work. S O. You know, Dave wanted for years would tell me about that community community I know. Well, the VM world community. This reminds me of earlier days in VM World VM wear, you know, is dominant in their space. But, >>you know, >>they're shows. Not exactly. You know, a There are parties and their friends that we get together and one of the best communities in the industry. But, you know, it's a much, much bigger company. When you're 60,000 people and things like that, there's not as much of the kind of smaller, you know, touch and feel. You know, we heard from Monica yesterday. She talked about right when she joined the company. You know, somebody she knew would reached out about an issue that need to be worked out and just seamless, all swarming to solve that issue. Something, you know, I've done it. Some companies I've worked out where you know what teams pulling for. You know, the customer comes first and you get things done. So the customers here definitely are highly engaged, very excited because the experience of using the solution has made their lives easier and transfer help them transform their business. You know, that goal of I t helping toe not only support but be a driver of the business is exciting. >>So So exactly. And this is what we're gonna be talking about today to new tenants. They have this passionate customer base which they will need as they are a maturing company. So not now They're 10. They're hitting their their tween age years. So talk a little bit about what you're seeing about Nutanix trajectory and what it needs to do to to hit those next steps. >>S o. You know, the discussion for the last two years has been the move from removing hardware for something that they sold, which was always it was the software that was important and changes really passed along the hardware to this move to subscription, and along with that, it isn't just the same core a OS Nutanix software and some of the pieces that go with it. But really, they're expanding beyond infrastructure software to some of the application software. So yesterday we had Nikola, who's the CEO of Frame Frame, is desktop as a service S O. That was the type of software that sat on top of Nutanix or on top of the cloud expanding in that market. We're going have Bala on today to talk about ERA its database database absolutely an application that's that on Nutanix. But now they're building some of these applications. It's interesting. Almost 10 years ago, VM where tried to get into the application space they bought an email company they bought a social company on. Really, that didn't pan out well for them. Amazon does not sell many of their. They sell some of their own application, but most of them are an open source solution that is then delivered as opposed to the building applications. On top of a building applications is that the realm of Oracle on Microsoft and IBM have these, so it positions Nutanix in it in a little bit of different space. And how much are they going to have the customers that bought the platform that will build the service's leverage? The service is on top of them versus how many customers will come to them because of that application. Say, Oh, well, you know, database is one of those challenging things. If I could just have a nice, simple solution and maybe that's in the cloud. Or maybe it is on, you know, Nutanix environment in their data center on their server of choice. You know there are some Pastor Newtown is going forward to a much broader tam, but it's much broader competition, too, and you know their sales force and there's go to market their there's partners we're gonna spend a little time talking about, like the systems integrators today s Oh, it is a big, vast sea out there in the I T World. Nutanix has carved out a nice position where they are today, but, you know, opening up a number of areas of adjacent seas that they're going. So as they ride the software wave that they're pushing, it's an interesting one to set them up for the next 10 years. >>Absolutely. So what do you see are the biggest headwinds facing Nutanix right now. But as we've said, they have a passionate customer base. They've on the main stage. This morning we heard about their high net promoter score. We heard about there. They're amazing customer retention s o much repeat business. What do you think, though, Is is sort of the main What should be keeping dear Ege Pandey up at night. >>So one of the biggest challenges is you know, your 5000 person company. How do you keep growing at that pace? How can I hire we heard in Europe? It is a you know what it is a challenging market to hire. You are no longer that small startup that I'm going to get some AIPO bang for Buck. Now I'm a public company, you know, and you know, their stock incentives and things you can do. But Nutanix has a number of areas that they think they have exciting ways for people to be a part of some of these next waves that they're pushing. But that that is a big challenge. There is really cooperative in out there. We've spent much time talking about the ecosystem. They have a decent ecosystem, but their position in the cloud world Is there a player amongst many, many Betty, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of companies out there When if you go to Amazon, reinvent you confined the Nutanix booth. But it's not one of the big players there you go to the Microsoft show, go to the Google shows. They are a small piece of that. And when we asked peerages, How do you position yourself and how do you, you know, get awareness in this environment? So when they had to down quarters, it was definitely marketing and sales, where the areas that they said they could not hire fast enough so they are going to need to invest more and they still aren't profitable. So we're almost three years past the I po. If you look at the transition to software, their revenues have been relatively flat. Their margins have been going up. But the market will not reward them if they can't keep the growth going. And, you know, start getting closer to that full profitability. >>Exactly, exactly. Well, these are all gonna be topics that we're going to dig deeper into today. We've got a great lineup of gas. And then, of course, the final keynote speaker. One of your faves. >>Yeah, Well, Kit Harington. Rebecca, What did you think of Carolina? >>She was fantastic. And I think what was really exciting about the interviewee, er was name Is Hae a friend of yours? Uh was It was how he was really drawing these analogies to Nutanix journey. It's similar to that of a professional athlete, and that is someone who who's getting knocked down and has to get back up against someone who's hit winning a few things, winning some business here, but she still needs >>She made a great point where said right. You know, the day after she was named number one, her father was like, Well, you need to get lower. You need to do this. And she's like, Wait, I'm number one. But you have to keep working or everyone will come after you. And so Nutanix is in a strong position, but absolutely they know that they need to keep working and training and improving listening to their customers to move forward. >>Absolutely, absolutely. So so. I think she had a lot of lessons for for Newtown Road, for the Nutanix community to so stew. I'm excited. For Day two, We're gonna have a lot of great custom, bloody great customers and Nutanix people on the show today to >>looking forward to it. And they had a fun party last night. They had the DJs were bumping. They had nice international food, some art and some interesting people dressed up as >>hedges and food >>and things walking around. So it was a little bit weird, but a lot of fun. >>And they're the happiest country in the world. What can we say? I'm Rebecca Knight. First Amendment, stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix dot next.

>> Oh, from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo ALTO, California.  This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hello Everyone. Welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm Childfree, host of The Cube, cofounder of Silicon Angle Media Inc and the Cube. We're here with Andy Cunningham, who is the president and founder of Cunning in collective and also the author of the book. Get to ah ha! Bestseller on line four categories on Amazon E book. Great book. I recommend all Andy. Welcome to the Cube. Great to see you. >> Hey, it's great to be here. Good to see you. You're a thought >> leader. Just what you've been. You've seen many ways of innovation. You've done so much in your career. >> Big, minimal experience. And >> we were all old here. We've no ageism issues here. It's silken angle, but But you've done so much on DH communications and PR. PR is part of communications. You've you've seen it all. You've done it all. And now you're helping cos I've got a great book out, which I recommend everyone should get getting toe really kind of breaks down thirty five years of experience into one book. That you had a talk about the book on your firm for stuff about Connie and collected quick pleasure. >> So Cunningham  >> Collective is a small marketing consultancy that focuses on positioning, which in my opinion, is the epicenter of marketing. If you dont position yourself well for success, you're never going to achieve success. So the >> book is >> about a framework for figuring out how to position yourself. And it's a framework I developed probably around seventeen years ago. But I've been using it over the last seventy years with clients, and I find that it's super successful, especially with technology companies, and because it's an actual step by step sort of framework. So the book tells you how to do it. And then there were six case studies at the back of the book that >> show >> Positioning in action. >> I want to get a book at some specific questions on the positioning, but I want to get your take on because you've seen many waves around PR public relations, which is corporate communications and communications in general. Over the years, where are we now? Because you're seeing you know, the media business change face. What's on the front page? Of all the news these days around how they sucked all the data in and fake news. All these things are happening Cos still need to get the word out. You know, New Channel's new realities take us through how you see the evolution of what the old way is in the new way are of communications. >> So PR was >> actually invented by a guy in the nineteen twenties named Eddie Bernays. And Eddie Bernays actually figured out that if you created a stunt like situation, you could get the journalist to cover it. He was very strategic about it. It sounds, sounds kind of, you know, loopy. But he was very strategic about it, and he actually invented the concept that he actually went to the phrase public relations, and he was modeling it after propaganda. That was the that was where he came up with that phrase. So it was like that for quite a long time until we got into an era of what I would call influence her marketing, you know, now we call it influencer marketing. But back in the you know when when there was a lot of investigative journalism going on, it was really just about who's who are the influencers that you need to influence in order to get them to say what you want them to say about your company or your product. So that was what my old boss, Regis McKenna called that, he said. She said, Journalism, if you're going to launch something into the marketplace, you need to get all the he said. And the she says to say what you want them to say before you actually say it yourself, because the journalists are gonna go back to those people and they're going to corroborate your story or not. So the idea was influenced the influencers. And then you can get your story that lasted for about probably thirty years, that era. Now we're in an era, then I call it's the era of content, marketing. And really, what happens today is you almost don't even need the journalists at all, because first of all, there aren't very many of them left. And second of all, there are so many channels available to ourselves as as communicators that if you build a digital footprint that has a great story and it that is compelling and consistent, and you keep saying the same key messages over and over again, you can build yourself a digital footprint that actually becomes starts to take over the word of mouth that we talked about earlier because we're the mouth is really what it's all about. But word of mouth hap and today because from results from a giant digital footprint about your story. >> I remember back in business school back in the day in the nineties when I got my MBA advertising class would break down. You need to copy strategy because, you know, reach media, print ads and radio really was the old school media and frequency was was a certain first radio print. You have time to read it so all the specs get laid out. Reaches reach, Right? So you broadcast cable or TV? The impression >> yeah, kind of digital brings >> everything kind of weaves it all together, but you mentioned frequency. Why is frequencies so important? Because is that because of the targeting, is that because there's not a lot of reaches more specialized? >> Well, it's still it's still the same reason. >> So there's a thing called the marketing rule of seven, and that means that a person needs to hear your message seven times before it. It seeps into their brain, and they actually either decide to do something about it or not do something about it. But that's what creates awareness seven times. So that still is true today as it was before. But now it's so much easier because now you don't have to buy ads to do it. You don't even have to pay a PR person to do it. You just fill your own social channels, your own website, your own blog's your own vlogs, your own video. You just fill up your own personal channels, however many there that you have with your own story. And then once it's out there as a digital footprint, then it's time to start talking to the journalism community, which is smaller than it used to be. But those who are left are pretty good. The Washington Post is pretty good. The New York Times is pretty good. So you call up the guy at The New York Times and you pitched him on your story, and instead of trying to spend a bunch of time pitching him, you just refer him back to someone of your channels. He Googles that he gets online, and he sees, Oh, my God, there's a giant story here because you've built the story. So you have so much more controlled today. We have so much more control over our stories. >> So the way to pitch, then based on what you're saying is to have the raw materials out there so they can make their story >> exactly. Put it together. We put it >> out there, and then the journalists just find it. It's like an Easter egg hunt. Look under that tree >> there. Well, here's a clip >> of an expert that's talking about something you might be interested in. This is the new model. Have the assets. Well, actually, we we love that came in what we do. But I want to get that to the book and the years of experience you have on this. But before we do that, I got to ask you when I was watching the Steve Jobs movie. You know, you're on the stage and you're part of that. >> You must get, well, an actress actress once you get your >> role. You were very instrumental, hectic days, people who know Steve and know the apple days. What >> did you >> learn from that? That's in the book from the Apple days. And how does and what has changed from the apple days. Now is there some things that are similar to the world's changed. But what are some of the key those key Learnings that that those magical moments. >> So my biggest >> key learning was ice. We spent about six months? Was Steve working on the messaging for the launch of the Macintosh, and we got it down to a Siri's of what I would I now call means that were just very, very. The computer for the rest of us was one of them, right? Everybody remembers that one small footprint was another one nobody remembers. Any more easy to use was another one. There was a Siri's of these things to explain the Macintosh. We then went through a process of educating one hundred journalists about about that and pumping them with those key messages at every juncture. Then we go to De Anza College and we did the big launch. We said those messages again and was a bunch of TV people around and everybody you know, everybody reported on it and I'm driving home in the car. After the show was over with, I turn on the radio and there's the messages that I had written, coming back at me over and over and again and change the station. Same thing over and over again. The Macintosh was launched today, and this is what everyone is saying. The same thing is, it was it gave me chills. It was like, Wow, this really works. And that lesson that I learned with Steve is the same lesson Eddie Bernays learned a hundred years ago. Its the same lesson Regis McKenna learned with influencing the influencers. And it's the same lesson people can learn today. You just you just get too. You get, too, ah ha! With a slightly different strategy. And today it's about building a big digital footprint before you ever talk to anybody. >> And I think this is key to the book of one of the things that you mentioned earlier. That's clearly in the book, and this is a lesson for the folks. Watching on and learn from this is that positioning is critical. Before the branding, the knee jerk reaction from most people. A new person Let's re branded system New Low goes out there. You're taking it a contrarian view on >> the sea >> or race on experience and success. Position first brand later or had second thoughts on that Wise wise is so important, specific successes you had. But what other reasons are important? >> Well, I got I learned this because >> the first part of my career I would I would get called in after somebody had already hired a branding firm and they re branded everything, Got a new new logo. New tagline, new color palette, all of this stuff and a few bits of copy that were really sexy and interesting. But they were finding it wasn't sticking. It wasn't making a difference in their in their sales, because, really, at the end of the day, we're all here to sell stuff, right? So I would come in and I would realize, Oh my God, you did all this first you didn't figure out your positioning strategy. Like what? Who are you in the market? And why do you matter? Those two questions are the two most important questions anybody can ask themselves. Is a market or a CEO? Who are you and why do you matter if you can't answer those questions? Doing a branding exercise is a waste of money. >> Talk about >> the conflict involved when you work for the client or when you have to get to this moment. This Ahamo sometimes is not a parent, sometimes is pretty clear. Sometimes you might think you're one, but you're really another. There's always maybe opinions about what, what people are in terms of a company internally amongst executives or the stakeholders. >> Yeah, how do you How do you figure it out? Is heroic >> golden rule or what's your What's your Tell them how to get to that moment of that self reflection >> is sure that sort of that's actually >> the key point of the book. It's it's based positioning. Really good positioning should be based on what your DNA as a company is, and the book tells you how to determine what is your DNA. But the the end of the day. They're three kinds of companies. There are product focus cos I happen to call them mechanics. There are customer focus, cos I call them mothers, and they're our concept, Focus Cos I call them missionaries. And interestingly, each of these types of companies do things entirely differently. They talk about different things and meetings. They hire different kinds of people. They train them differently. They measure success differently. They market themselves differently. There's actually, the DNA is reflected in there actions. So when I'm sitting around a workshop with a client, we have to determine Are they a mother? Are they a missionary or are there mechanic before we can actually figure out how to create marketing around them? So that's the biggest thing is there's some people over here. So we're a product company. These peoples, they know we're trying to change the world. And these people say, No, no, no, we're all about the customer and the discussion that you have around that is actually the where the ah ha moment comes When you decide okay, we really are a customer focus company doesn't mean the other two things go away. They just take a back seat to the marketing. So everybody has to agree that that's what they're going to move forward with. And that's what makes it. It's so much fun. It's like it's like doing and Myers Briggs test for a company. You know, everybody loves that, right? Oh, I'm in I n t j M e. And whatever the >> letters it was, I'm not that I'm really something else, >> but there's always confident. But >> you >> also mentioned the book that people can change, too. So you start out as something. Maybe a missionary evolve based upon the business changed. Talk about that, >> Yeah. So let's talk about Apple >> for a second cause that's the company that definitely was a missionary, and missionaries exist to change behavior on a fundamental level. And that was what Steve Jobs was all about, right? So when >> he was >> running the company even before he was running it, but he was a big influence, or there he basically was a missionary company. He was trying to change behavior, and that's what the Macintosh was all about. But after he passed away, he left the assets of the company in the hands of Tim Cook, who, by the way, is an amazing, amazing caretaker of those assets. I mean, he's grown them. He's turned them into it, turned the company into one of the world's most valuable companies. But unfortunately, he's not a missionary, and what he has done is he has kind of tried to keep the missionary thing going. But he hasn't been successful doing that. So what's happened is the market is turning Apple into a product focus company, and the leadership is not steering the company that direction they are trailing, so it's happening to ample, in other words. So you're going to start to see Apple focus more on Warren product over the years, which they which they have been. But they're starting to have some product issues, and I think that's the result of them, not it's tearing the company directly into this, >> finding that DNA and get filling the young count or hiring people toe >> exactly. Exactly. >> Just on that same point. Amazon is a company that is doing this to the market. So Amazon started as a product company, and now they've steered their steering themselves purposefully into a customer focus company. And if you go online and check out their new mission statement, it's to be Earth's most customer centric company. And this is the reason Jeff Bezos bought Zappos a number of years ago Wasn't because Jeff couldn't figure out how to sell shoes online. Of course he could. It was because he was buying that customer centric culture, So he's purposefully steering the company into the customer direction so >> you can change your DNA, >> but it ain't easy. >> I've any Jesse. Many times become a good friend on the Cube as well. He's the word customer so many times we can see the frequency, but they've been talking customer for a long time. So you say they were product company >> with his Amazon. Amazon lands >> on Web services. The missionary and a product focus because I think product would be. I think it's safe once >> I think early, early, early >> on meaning they started this customer transition probably five, six years ago, so but they were very much early on a product company, I think in bases his head. They were actually a missionary. But he never he never would go out and say that. What did he say about Amazon? Were online bookseller and oh, by the way, books are going so well now we're going to do music, and now we're going to, you know. And then >> it's product. >> It took about its product. It was product product product until he decided that he was going to eat the universe one bite at a time. And so, in order to be successful with that, he has to have a customer he feels he has to have customer relationships that are going to stick with him over the course of a lifetime. >> So you know a little about the Cube. What's the Cube? What are we? >> I think you're a missionary. I mean, you're trying to change >> behavior on a fundamental level, and, you know it's, um it's amazing what you've done. You know, we had this great conversation beforehand, and I learned about all the new things you're working on, and it's groundbreaking, groundbreaking stuff. >> Okay, Final question on the book is the funniest. Our craziest reaction you've had to it, either someone emailing You owe our ceremonial because it's pretty inspiring. You break it down free simply. But it's really a core fundamental practice. And I've read a lot of marketing books in my day. A lot of you know, these office come out. Process improvement. This is cuts to the chase. It's >> really thank you. Thank you. What's the big waves >> you heard or crazy? >> Well, I this is This is the >> most recent thing I can think of. I I ended up becoming number number one on Amazon's e book thing and four categories, just like two weeks ago, and I got Mohr social media coverage on that than >> anything else in my entire life with the most amazing >> thing that I've ever seen in all these. Congratulations. And, you >> know, they're they're categories. >> Not like this. Not like your New York Times best seller. It's like you're the best multi marketing, you know, book here, The best small business marketing book, those kinds of things. And it just was just blew up. It went viral. >> That's how it was all online. What made you write the book was That was the moment. When was the ah ha moment for you saying, You know what? I got to put the book together. Was it something that you had in mind? That you get this data collecting of institutional knowledge of the trade? When was the ah, ha moment for you to write the book? >> Well, I this framework that I developed here has been working for me really successfully for, like, seventeen years. And I just decided that wow, other people should know how to do this. You know, because when we charge when we hired when that when we hire when someone hires us, it's like one hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of worth of work to do what we do, they could do it for twenty two ninety nine or whatever the heck >> this thing costs these days. And you could occasionally you get a book out there to get an audio book as well. So s so I really wanted >> to spread the word about this framework in this methodology, cause I really believe that my, my inside my core of myself, that the epicentre of great marketing is positioning. And if you don't get that right, you will never succeed with any of the rest of it. So do >> the great folks. You have a great track record. I've seen personal your sex success of up close perambulations on that. Let's talk about cos now I want to get backto successful companies. He's a lot of conversation. I'd build a rocket ship. So you we live in Silicon Valley. There are rocket >> ships that there are, >> you know, go big or go home. Blitz Scaling his Reid, Hoffman would say, I endorse that one hundred percent think there's use cases clearly for blitz scaling. Other people have been throwing him under the bus saying that culture is not what we want and build a still stable business. And so the debate aside, there's two types of companies there's the Okay, I'm going to build this company. I might not know when they're when the growth's gonna be there. And then there's the big venture back category changer rocket ships. Can you talk about the success criteria in your mind of both companies around positioning approaches, things that you've seen in the past that work well, >> I think companies that understand who they are and why they matter are the ones that succeed. And it's also important that they have a good leader, a good, strong leader. But if you don't know who you are and why you matter, you can't build a new category. You can't even launch a new product. So I, >> you know, take a look at some of the companies that have done that. Well, Netflix has done that extremely well, right? Airbnb has done that extreme slack has done that really well. Microsoft is doing it really well again, right? They went through a downtime, and now you know their new CEO, Satya Nadella, is doing an unbelievable job with positioning. There's so much a product company, and he's not trying to make them into a customer. Companies trying to double down on the product so and Netflix is a is a missionary company there change behaviour on a fundamental >> of Microsoft's a great example because I think that's something into anything radical. In the product side, they looked at the tailwind of Cloud computing an A I and said, Let's throw the sails up there and let's let's get around behind it >> and grand source. >> And then they branded it. So they positioned themselves as a Claude company, and then they branded it. As as you're so >>On the tail winds concept of trends, Pat Gelsinger said that if you're not out in front of that next wave, you could be driftwood. Riding the waves are certainly a big part of jumping on a successful or tail wind some call it how important that have that positioning time to something that's trendy or something. >> Oh, that's a great question, because it's because the context in which you are actually putting something into the market is critical. So you have to really understand what are the waves that you want to ride and can ride. And don't try to be riding a wave that passed five years ago. Or that hasn't shown up yet. You might think there's a wave coming. That's the biggest danger of a lot of these high tech start ups is that they see a vision of something way down the line, and there's no way for them to ride today. And they launched their technology. But too early >> and to your point. If they don't have the positioning right, they won't be able to ride it. You >> know what they want. They won't be able to ride it. So if they if if they did a proper positioning exercise before that, they would realize that they're context in which they're doing this is not right for what they're saying. So have to pivot a little bit. These is where pivots come from, right? We have to pivot a little bit to make yourself relevant for the market today, and that's an important thing. >> Andy. Final question for the folks watching saying, I love the book. I'm gonna get it might have helped might need help and saying I need to call Andy and the team or figure it out. What are some of the tell signs that they're not getting it right or what? If some things when they need to call for help and howto people moved to the next level, some people might say, Hey, you know, we need help. We can't get concensus. The leader might not be strong enough to be a leadership transition. Could be a new wave that people have identified. Yeah. What? This is a tough challenge of self awareness. What is that? Some of the tell signs And how does >> > somebody actually make the change? It is a tough, and most CEOs are not into it enough of themselves to know to know those things. So what happens is they launch it and then they don't get traction. So the biggest reason why people call me is they're not getting traction. Now, the really the really smart ones do more analysis, like what you're talking about. Oh, there's something has changed in the context. So I better shift this or, you know, a competitors come up with something that sounds awful on awful lot like ours. Maybe we better get ahead of that. But that takes a really strategic CEO. And there are some of those out there, But not everyone is >> okay. So great book here. Getting toe, huh? Everyone great. It's a good thing I read. It. Came out the day. Volante. He's reading it. Thanks for coming out. Spend the time, John communications. Final word on the communications world. What's the message to folks out there? See, M O's out there and head of communications. What's the future look like for them? What should they do? Going forward to be successful? >> Well, the future of marketing is is really figuring out how to make word of mouth, you know, explode word of mouth, because that's why people buy things. You know, you told me I should check out this product or my book. He said, You told your friends I should check out the books, So he does. So it's all about word of mouth and starts with building a big digital footprint yourself and then going to the peak to the press side. >> Andy cutting him here in Palo Alto Studios. I'm John for with Keep conversations. Thanks for watching

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin Live at Boomi World 2018 at The Encore in Las Vegas. Been here all day, had a lot of great chats. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time a couple of gents from Hathority Implementation Partner of Dell Boomi, Philip Bernick, PhD, Principal, and Human-Centered Technologist, aka Technology Wonk. >> I go by both. >> It does say on your card, I think that's fantastic. And Vishwan Annam, MBA and principal technology architect at Hathority. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thank you for having us Lisa. >> So Hathority has been an implementation partner with Dell Boomi for several years now, congratulations yesterday on winning the Innovation Partner of the Year. Philip, you had an opportunity to talk yesterday at the partner summit with CTO Michael Morton, talk to us a little bit about that and about this Innovation Partner of the Year award, that's a big title. >> It is, and we're really excited to be able to do really interesting things with Boomi. It's more than just an integration platform, it really let's us do a lot of things with devices. IOT is coming to the mainstream because now we have infrastructure that will support it. It's a lot of data, it needs a big, fat pipe. We need gigabit networks in order to move it all around, to get it to the people who need to make decisions or to get it to systems who are making decisions for us, the Dell Boomi atom let's us do that and we've got it running on little tiny devices like Raspberry Pies and we can put it on other Edge devices and routers so we've done some micro services for cities that are interested in improving their smartness. >> Excellent. >> So yeah, we're excited. >> Vishwam, tell us about, for those of our viewers who haven't heard of Hathority, tell us a little bit about what you guys do, who you are, where you're located. >> Sure, so we're a data integration company so we work with Dell Boomi in automating a lot of the data integration practices, so a lot of our customers, they're in all across the world and they're serving their different (mumbles). Just as there's airlines and the healthcare and smart cities, and some are like, you know, the gaming industry. So what we are doing is we are automating all of their work flows and connecting all of their systems in one place so that's where we are liberating. We're based in the greater Phoenix area so, and our employees are, some are here in the U.S., some are India, some are in U.K., so based on what the customers needs are like in Dell Boomi our, our consultants would work there so we are 35 in strength so far, our company. >> So about three or four years you've been in business, Dell Boomi, a number of things that came out this morning, I was up to hear numbers and statistics during the general session and Chris McNabb, CEO, talked about their adding five new customers every single day, they also were, I was reading this over the weekend, fifth year in a row strong leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPads, but they've come out today and said we are redefining the I in iPads. This is more than integration, it's more than integrating applications, you got to integrate data, news sources, existing sources, you got to integrate people and processings and trading networks with this new reimagination of the I to the intelligence. Philip, I'm curious, what does that signify to you about your partnership with Dell Boomi and what opportunities are you excited that this is going to open up for you? >> Well it says to me that they're excited about the same kinds of things that we're excited about so one of the things that we demonstrated, we have customers who are interested in lots of different technologies, yesterday they talked about three years ago IOT was the eyeroll, right, don't get a headache. This year it's Blockchain. But one of the demos we brought to Boomi World is a demo where we actually use Dell Boomi to integrate with Hyperledger, a Blockchain application, and on top of that we used Flow to produce the front end and so we can integrate across a variety of platforms and now we integrated into the Blockchain and our customers want these kinds of things. The Blockchain is interesting because it's immutable, it's auditable, and it's validated by all of the participants in a particular set of nodes in the Blockchain so, you know, it's an exciting technology. It's exciting because, not because of the tokenization, things like Bitcoin, but because it's a database that you can share, a ledger that we can share. >> Because one of the challenges that a lot of our customers run into is managing the data integrity when somebody sends the data, how reliable it is and whether there, is there any place in the middle that somebody's monitoring the data so those are the challenges that Blockchain would solve in guaranteeing the data delivery and the quality of it so those are kind of I that he was mentioning, you know, as part of integration, innovation and more of a, you know, new parts and transformation. >> We're really transforming. >> The data transformation in the digital world these days. >> So Blockchain, I often hear companies that might be integration companies that talk a lot about Blockchain and I kind of sit back and go I don't understand what your story is there. Talk to us about, cause it's a, you know, crypto Blockchain, huge buzzwords, talk to us exactly about what you guys do and what Dell Boomi is doing, I think they announced support for hyperledger fabric as well as Ethereum but-- >> Right. >> Help unpack that myth around Blockchain and what integrations role is in it. >> A lot of the confusion around Blockchain comes from things like Bitcoin so the interesting thing around Bitcoin is it was the first Blockchain and it's built around this idea of a token, the Bitcoin, right? And so what this ledger is keeping track of are these Bitcoin, but you can keep track of any sort of data on a Blockchain. You can contribute data of any sort to a, not the Bitcoin Blockchain, but Ethereum, for example, we can include software, we can include other sorts of data, you can include a healthcare record that is your healthcare record that you share only with individuals with whom you share part of your private key, right, but you own it and it's yours and it's always yours and you control it. But it's validated by all of the people who are participating in producing that Blockchain so it's decentralized but it's imutable and it's auditable so it guarantees integrity because unless all of the participants agree that a transaction took place, it didn't. So we ensure data integrity through the Blockchain. That's the interesting thing about it, for us. >> That's a major part of integration companies, because a lot of the technologies that we hear, Solaris is one of the messaging queuing systems that they presentate, so they're guaranteeing the delivery at the same time relabel messaging transmissions, streaming the data, and it's faster, reliable, and managing the full data usage. >> Here's a great use case, today is voting day. Many polling places no longer have paper ballots, so you cast your vote but you have no way to actually see the vote that you cast. If it were on a Blockchain, you could inspect your vote, but no body else could know how you voted. You could insure the fact your vote was entered into the Blockchain and count it in the way that you wanted it to be. >> That's a great example and relatable, so thanks for sharing that. So guys, Dell Boomi has, I think they said this morning, Chris McNabb, over 350 partners, you guys are one of them. They have a broad ecosystem. Embedded partners, implementation, GSIs. Talk to us about your partnership and how, as Boomi says, we want to be the transformation partner, and it is all about transformation, right? Especially in an enterprise that wasn't born in the cloud. It can't survive without, as the customer expectation drives, I want to be able to buy something from your physical store, maybe a partner store, online, Amazon, Zappos, whatnot and I expect as a customer to have a seamless experience. That's hard to do for a company that's maybe 20, 30 years old to transform. I'm thinking of omni-channel retailers as the example. How is your integration, pun intended, will Dell Boomi really helping customers transform their digital, IT, security, workforce, what goes through with that opportunity to transform? >> You know, the relationship between Dell Boomi and it's partners is really synergistic. I mean they provide a lot of support. There's really excellent training, there's excellent communication. There's marketing support, we share on projects in a variety of ways, we do jump starts. So we help teach people how to use Boomi in addition to helping Boomi folks teaching us how to use the new tools. There's a great community for providing feedback, for getting resources if there's something that we need to do that we don't know how to do. There's a huge community that shares, we all share connectors, right? We're building integration and a connector doesn't exist and we create a new connector, not the configuration of the connector itself, we share it. So that collaborative approach to doing business is really important to us and it reflects our companies ethos as we hope is also reflects Dell Boomi's ethos. >> We've been working in Boomi since 2012, so over the years like even though we were certified partners since 2015, we have been contributing to various channels, like the support or, like, the community channel, and contributing to the release planning as well, because we are the first line of defense from the customers, we know what the customers are expecting. So say they got Salesforce to implement it. So we as a system integrator, we come in and see what are the data points for the Salesforce. And say like user data, they want to build their contacts in there or any activities or sales data. So there are multiple systems that are feeding into Salesforce in this case. So we are the ones who are contributing to Dell Boomi. Okay, these are the features that we could consider. So because Salesforce a-walled in, just like Boomi, they launched a different watch list as well So as in Boomi, there is a different connector for Salesforce and Service Cloud and multiple layers in that so those are the unique cases that we are contributing to Dell, and obviously there, I mean, they take the feedback so from the partners like us where they see it as they work towards delivering with this. So one use case that we are working with some of out customers who have innovated, we have been asking Dell to build it, like, you know, and they were able to deliver it. There are, like, they want some reporting of it, so you transmit the data to one system to other, and they wanted to see okay how the data system was the source and the system was the destination and how this data was transmitted. So Boomi gave the real time visibility into those. So those are some kind of partnering opportunities like all the way from customer to the product so we are happy to be in the middle and contributing our part of it. >> That's one of the things that I've heard a lot today is that Boomi is listening, one of the great examples of that on stage this morning was Chris McNabb talking about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution. They actually did an internal survey earlier this year and found, whoa, this is really not an optimal process, and in implementing an onboarding solution to make that more streamline, to obviously, you know, you hire someone who's brilliant, you want to be able to get them up and running and innovating as fast as possible. I like they shared the feedback they got from their own employees and created a solution that they're now being able to deliver to the market. >> And there was another piece to that that was really interesting which is that they utilized their partner network in order to build solution, right? They didn't build all of it in house. >> You're right, they did talk about that. >> They reach out and partners, they work with partners in a variety of ways and we really, really appreciate that. >> Yeah, that listening, that synergy that you've both talked about was really apparent. So when we look at certain business initiatives, like onboarding or customer 360 or e-commerce, any favorite joint customer example that you've helped to integrate that has approached one of those daunting business initiatives, and worked with Hathority, and you're laughing, to really transform. >> They're all like that. >> Really interesting, yeah. Do you want to talk about it here? >> Give me one of your favorite examples. >> Share, well, share. >> Okay, so with some of our customers, and especially with some of our enterprise scale, so there are a lot of systems that are at stake for them because, you know, they want to have the digital transformation journey so the major one Dell Boomi contributes to is connecting all of the system, giving them their visibility so with, not only the point to point integrations, they also pull the real time integrations capability. So we're like, with this case, where the customer go into retail store and say they want to do something at the point of sale transaction, they want to purchase something, so there and you have the credit card transaction. I mean, those need to encrypt, I mean, we cannot wait for 10 minutes to get the data so that's where, you know, like Dell Boomi is scalable and it's robust in the sense that their response time is pretty quick. So it's on a real time basis. So a lot of these cases like, you know, with the Boomi that we are able to deliver it. You know, on the the integration side, APA side, and now with the EMB hedge, which is a master data hub, a new product from them within the last two years. We have been working with our customers implementing a master data hub as well as ManyWho, which is a Dell Boomi Flow which is amazing. Some of our customers, you know, with the APAs, like can you see the data? But with the Flow, you can visualize, these are the exact UI that you are seeing. How your data is getting in on the back end and then you can throw it out so, because these enterprise customers, especially on the business side if they're working with something, so they want to try it out, but you know, they don't want to learn, you know, programming to do that so that's when, like, Flow will, is already helping, we are already seeing the value of it with our customers. >> We've heard a little bit about that today as well, Flow and terms of the automation, but also how that will enable customers, there was a cute little video on their website that I saw recently which showed an example of Flow. Somebody bangs their car into a tree, gets out, and takes a photograph of the incident, uploads it to their insurance carrier app who then actually initiates the entire claim into process, and that's was to me a clear example of you have to go where the data is. Michael Dell says frequently there's a big boom at the edge, but if I'm in that scenario as a customer, I want to know, I don't care what's on the back end, I want to be able to get this initiated quickly and I thought that was a nice, kind of, example of how they're able to abstract that so that the customer experience can be superior than the competition. >> Absolutely, so that's where Boomi has something called run time engine, which is scalable, like you could install, like, you know, a smaller device like Raspberry Pie which is like, you know, just a mini computer. Or you you could install on the big switchboard itself, so this is a scalable so earlier, as Michael Dell was mentioning, the edge of computing. So you could install on a Gateway, which sits on the-- >> On a tree >> On a tree. (laughs) So you don't have to send all the data to cloud for processing so it's an amazing leap into the next distribution computing because, as you mentioned, the fast, the fastness of response time, you know. We don't have to wait for the cloud to respond so all the combinations and real time navigation's are happening within the Edge network itself so, we are all on the same, we have implemented the same solution so, which was one of the reason why we're the winner of Innovation Partner of the Year award. >> Well congratulations again for that gentlemen. Thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing with our viewers a little bit about Hathority and what you guys are, how you really symbiotically innovating with Dell Boomi. Philip, Vishwam, thanks so much for your time today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> My pleasure, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. Stick around, I'll be back with John Frayer and our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stu Miniman. Three days days of wall-to-wall live coverage, we have Mandy Whaley, senior director of developer experience at Cisco DevNet and Par Merat, who is the senior director of community and ecosystem for DevNet. Mandy, great to see you, CUBE alumni. Every single time we had theCUBE with DevNet team, Par, great to see you. Congratulations, first of all. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, we're happy to be here. >> Congratulations, so, really kind of a proud moment for you guys, and I want to give you some mad props on the fact that you guys have built a successful developer program, DevNet and DevNet Create for Cloud Native, over a half a million registered, engaged users, of developers using it. Not just people who come to the site. >> Correct. >> Right. >> Real developers. For an infrastructure enterprise company, that's a big deal, congratulations. >> It is, thank you, thank you. We were just chatting this morning about the really early days of DevNet at Cisco Live, and the first year of DevNet Create. And it's been great to see that community grow. And see, early on we had this vision of bringing the application developers and the infrastructure engineers together, and cross-pollinating those teams, and having them learn about each other's fields, and then build these programmable infrastructure enabled apps, and that's really, that synergy is happening within the community, and it's great to see them exchanging ideas here at events like this. >> And so we love to talk about seminal moments, and obviously DevOps drove a lot of the Cloud, and Chuck Robbins, your CEO said, "Without networking, there'd be no Cloud." True statement, absolutely, but Stu and I have always talked about the role of a network engineer, and that the power that they used to have in the enterprise is still due. It used to be the top people running the networks, mission critical, obviously security, but it's not about a retraining. It's about a path, and I think what you guys have done in success is you've shown a path where it's not about pivoting and being relevant and retraining to get a new job, it's been an extension of what they already know, >> An incentive. and I think that's very refreshing, and I think that's the real discovery. >> And we've been able to grow, because I think in our foundational years, we really spent a lot of time providing the content and the skill training, and what Mandy likes to say is, "We met them where they are." So no question was too novice. Likewise, if they were a little more advanced, we could direct them and point them in that same direction. So those early years, where, Mandy, we were just reminiscing about the first DevNet-- >> Coding 101? >> Yes, exactly, she wrote it over the weekend, and we rolled that whole event out, literally, in three months. >> And what year was that, just to kind of, this is an important seminal moment. >> 2014. >> May of 2014. >> 2014. >> 2014, the seeds of we should do something, and you guys have had certifications. We're looking at CCIEs, you go back to 1993 all the way now to 2018, so it's not like you guys are new to certification and training. It's just taking the IQ of network people, and giving them some insight. So what happened in 2014? Take us through the, obviously you bootstrapped it. >> Yes. (laughs) >> What happened, what happened next? >> We did. >> Everyone's like, whoa, >> So-- >> we can't, we're not, we're staying below the stack here. >> Well, we knew there was a lot of buzz around SDN and programmability, and we both actually, I should even back up further. We were both on the DevNet team when the DevNet program was Powerpoints, so we weren't even there yet. >> Right, when we were just planning what it even could be, like the ideas of having a developer program, and like Par was saying, we knew SDN was coming. We knew Network Controllers were coming. We didn't know what they were gonna be called, we didn't know what those APIs looked like, but we said, "The network engineers are gonna need "to know how to make REST API calls. "They're gonna need to know how to operate in Python." And so we started this program building around that vision before the portfolio is where it is today. Like today, now, we have APIs across the whole portfolio, Data Center, service provider, enterprise, and then up and down from the devices, all the way to controllers, up to the analytics level. So the portfolio's really filled out, and we've been able to bring that community along with it, which has been great. >> I want to dig into the north/south, east/west and that whole, kind of the Cloud paradigm, but I got to ask you, on a personal question, although relevant to the DevNet success. Was there a moment where, actually the seminal moments of 2014, was there a moment where you were like, "Wow, this is working." and like the, you know, (laughs) pinch me moment, or was it more of, "We got to get more resources, this is not just, "this thing's flying." >> Well it's always that. That's always the challenge. >> When was the point where >> We are, >> you said, "This is actually >> We are very-- >> "the best path, it's working, double down." When was that happening? >> I mean, I think after we started teaching those very early coding coding classes, I got this, like, flood of email from people who had attended them that said, "I took this task, I automated it, "it saved my team months of work," and getting that flow of information back from the community was early signs to me, from the technical level of, there's value, this is gonna take off, and then I think we just saw that kind of grow and grow. >> Mushroom, just kept it going. >> The other thing that I heard from a network engineer, which really resonated with me, was, you were saying, the network guy or gal likes to be there and solve the problem, and they're sort of at this deep level of control. And what I heard them say about the programmability skills was that that was another tool that they added to their sort of toolbox that let them be that person in the moment, solving that problem. And they could just solve it in a new way, so hearing the network engineers say that they have adopted programmability in that fashion, that let me know that that was gonna work, I think. >> All right, so let's get into some of the meat and potatoes, because you guys have some really good announcements. We saw you have the code ecosystem that you announced at DevNet Create, which is your emerging Cloud Native worlds coming together. That's available now. >> Yes, it's fully released. >> So take a minute to, so give us the update. >> Yes, so DevNet Code Exchange is developer.cisco.com/codeexchange so you can go there, it's live, and the idea behind this was we wanted to make it easy for the community to contribute, and also to discover code written by the community. So it's on GitHub. You can go and search on GitHub, but you get back a ton of hits if you go search Cisco on GitHub, which is great, but what we wanted to have was a curated list that you can filter by product, by language. I sometimes joke that it's like Zappos for sample code cause you can go on and say, "I want black boots, "you know the two inch heel." You can say, "I want, I want code for DNA Center, "or ACI, and I want it in Python," and then see all of the repositories submitted by the community. And then the community can also share their codes. "Hey, I've been working on this project. "I'm gonna add it to Code Exchange, so that other people "can build off of it and find it." So it's really about this community contribution, which is a strategic initiative for DevNet for this year. >> Mandy, how does that tie into other networking initiatives happening in the industry? I think of OpenDaylight, a lot of stuff happening, Docker comes this week, Kubernetes, and networking's a critical piece of all of these environments. >> Yeah, so some of the projects that you'll find in Code Exchange are things that relate. So we have some really good open-source community projects around YANG models and the tooling to help you deal with YANG models. So those might be in Code Exchange, but those are also part of the OpenDaylight community, and being worked in that. So because it is all open-source, because it is freely shared, and it's really just a way to improve discoverability, we can share easily back and forth between those communities. >> The Code Exchange is designed to really help people peer-to-peer work together and reuse code, but in the classic >> Reuse code within >> open-source ethos. >> the community. Exactly. >> Okay, so Par, you have something going on with Ecosystem Exchange. >> We do. >> Okay, so it sounds like Code Exchange, ecosystem partners, matchmaking service. What is it, take a minute to explain. >> It's kinda the next level up, and what I think we have to understand is, when we've got Code Exchange and Ecosystem Exchange under the umbrella of exchange, because within our 500, half a million community of developers, where they work, what we've found is predominately at SIs, at our VARs, at our ISVs. So these are the builders, so Code Exchange will even help that persona because they can come and see what's already been built. "Is there something that can jumpstart my development?" And if there's not, then they can work with each other, right? So if I am looking for a partner, a VAR in Australia to help me roll out my application, my navigation application, which needs to know and get data from the network, I can partner through this exchange because I can go in, see everyone, and be able to make that connection digitally versus organically. And this really started, you asked earlier what was one of the pinnacle moments? Well at these DevNet Zones, what we found is that an ISV would partner and start talking to an SI or to a VAR, and they'd start doing business planning, because what this is all about is driving those business outcomes for our customer base. And we're finding more and more they're trying to work together. >> So you're enabling people to get, do some work together, but not try and be a marketplace where you're actually charging a transaction. It's really kind of a matchmaking-- >> This is all about discovery right now. >> Community-driven discovery around business. Yeah, it's interesting, a heard a story in the hallway about DevNet, cause I love to get the examples of, we love what we're doing by the way, but want to get the examples, overheard a guy saying, "We were basically "cratering a business, jumped into the DevNet program, "and turned it around," because there was deals happening. So the organic nature of the community allowed for him to get his hands dirty and leverage it, but actually build business value. >> That's exactly right. >> That's a huge, >> That's exactly right. >> at the end of the day, people love to play with code, but they're building something for business purposes or open-source projects. >> And that's what this is about. It's really transitioning from the, "I'm gonna build," to now there's business value associated with it, and that's spectacular. >> I think so much of my career you talk, the poor network administrators, like "Help, help, "I'm gonna lock myself for a month, "and I'm gonna do all this scripting," and then three months later their business comes and asks for something that, "I need to go it again," because it's not repeatable. It's what we say is that the challenge has been that undifferentiated heavy lifting that too many companies do. >> Exactly. >> Well, that's exactly it, and the interesting thing, especially around intent-based networking is that's opening up a whole new opportunity of innovation and services. And one of the things that isn't very much different with our Ecosystem Exchange is it's the whole portfolio, so we have SIs in there as well as ISVs. And most marketplaces or catalogs really look at it in a silo version. >> I have one example of kinda the two coming together that's really interesting. So, Meraki, which is the wireless network, has really great indoor location-based services you can get from the WiFi. And then there's been ISVs who have built indoor wave finding on top of it, they're really great applications. But those software companies don't necessarily know how to go install a Meraki network or sell a Meraki network to something like this. And so it's been a great way to see how some of those wave finding companies can get together with the people who actually go sell and install and admin Meraki networks, and, but come together, cause they would have a hard time finding each other otherwise. >> And the example is actually rolled out here at Cisco Live. We've, Cisco Live partnered with an ISV to embed a Cloud-based service in their app, which is navigation. So you can go into the Cisco Live app, tap on the session that you want to see. A map will come up that will navigate you from where you are here to get there, and this is, I think this is the second largest conference center in the United States, so having that map >> So you need it. >> is really important. >> I've gotten lost twice. >> We've all got the steps to prove that that is, but, yeah, and that actually brings, one of the questions I had was, is it typically some new thing, to do wireless rollouts and SD-WAN on discovery, or is it core networking, or is it kind of across the board as to when people get involved? >> It's definitely both. It's definitely both. I mean, from the Code Exchange piece, I've talked to a lot of customers this week who are saying, "We've got our core networking teams. "We want to move towards more automation. "We're trying to figure out how to get started." And so we give them all the resources to get started, like our video series and then now Code Exchange. And then I heard from some people here, they actually coded up some things and submitted it to Code Exchange while they were here because they had an idea for just a simple, quick automation piece that they needed. And they were like, "I bet somebody else "needs it too," so it was definitely in that. >> I noticed you guys also have your Cisco team I was talking to, some of the folks here have patents are being filed. So internally at Cisco, it's kind of a wind of change happening, where, >> It is exciting times. >> IoT cameras, I just saw a solution behind us here where you plug a Rasberry Pi hardware prototype to an AP, makes the camera a video. Now it looks like facial recognition, saves the metadata, never stores video, so this is kind of the new model. >> Pretty remarkable. So final question I want to ask you is, as you guys continue to build community, you're looking for feedback, the role of integrating is critical. You mentioned this Cisco example about going to market together. It used to be, "Hey, I'm an integrator of our solution, "business planning," okay, and then you gotta go to the Cisco rep, and then there's, they're dislocated. More and more it's coming together. >> It is. >> How are you guys bridging that, those two worlds? How are you tying it together? What's the plan? >> So we're, what we're finding is a lot of those partners are also sort of morphing. So they're not just one thing anymore, and so what we're doing is we're working with them, enabling them on our platforms, providing solid APIs that they can leverage, transitioning or expanding the code, the skillsets of their workers, and then we're partnering them up with our business partners and with our ISVs, and doing a lot of that matchmaking. And with Ecosystem Exchange, again, they'll now be able to take that to a digital format, so we're seeing the whole wave of the market taking them. >> So you guys see it coming. You're on that wave. >> Yes. >> All right, real quick, I know we're short on time, but I would, Mandy, if you could just talk about what Susie Wee, you're leader talked about on stage on the keynote, she mentioned DNA Center. Can you just take a quick second, describe what that is, why it's important, and impact to the community. >> Yes, so we're really excited about DNA Center platform. DNA Center is the controller, kind of at the heart of all of our new enterprise networking software. So it sits on top of the devices, and it exposes a whole library of APIs. It'll let you do Assurance, policy, get device information. It would allow you to build a kind of self-service ops models, so you could give more power to your power users to get access to network resources, on-board new devices, things like that. >> So it sets the services. >> So it's APIs, and then you can build the services on top. And part of that is also the Assurance, which Dave Geckeler showed in his keynote, which we're really excited about. So, in DevNet we've been working to build all the resources around those APIs, and we have many code samples in Code Exchange. We actually have a community contribution sprint going on right now, and that's called Code Intent with DevNet, and it's all around DNA Center. It's asking developers to take a business intent and turn it into code, and close the loop with Assurance, and submit that back to DevNet. >> That's great. It's a real business process >> We're real excited about >> improvement with code, >> that, yeah, so you're enabling that, and slinging APIs around, having fun, are you having fun? >> Definitely having fun. >> Par? >> We always have fun >> Absolutely >> on this team. >> We always have fun, yeah. >> It's a great team. >> I can say working with you guys up close has been fun to work, and congratulations. You guys have worked really hard and built a very successful, growing ecosystem of developers and partners, congratulations. >> Thank you. You guys have helped. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for supporting >> We appreciate it. theCUBE, really appreciate, this is crew of the DevNet team talking about, back in the early days, 2014, when it started, now it's booming. One of the successful developer programs in the enterprise here. Cisco's really showing the path. It's all about the community and the ecosystems, theCUBE, of course, doing our share. Broadcasting here live in Orlando at Cisco Live 2018. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation. Today we're going to talk about a really interesting topic. At least it's interesting to me. And that is, if we go back, and the old adage that when you automate bad process or bad business, you just get more bad business at scale. And, when we think about customer service over the last number of years or customer engagement over the last number of years, in many respects we've done a great job of automating really bad practices. And all that has led to is an increased frustration amongst consumers who are trying to utilize an engagement form if they want, more digital engagement, but end up being even more frustrated because it still takes the same amount of time and it still has the same failure rates. And to discuss that today, we've got Mahesh Ram, who's the founding partner of Solvvy, to talk a bit about some of these transformations that are taking place in terms of how digital engagement's going to change the way that businesses interact with consumers. Mahesh, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, it's great to be here. I'm a fan of theCube and honored to be here. So, Mahesh, let's start. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about Solvvy. Sure, my background is in technology and I've built two successful start-ups in the past. The last one was a company that was acquired by Pearson in 2012, focused on automation for non-native English speakers. But my entire career has been spent really thinking about ways in which we can use technology to make people's lives better and improve existing workflows and processes. And so, it's why Solvvy attracted me, why it's so exciting, and I think that this is the most interesting thing I've ever done in my career, so I'm excited about that. >> Now Solvvy has a pretty decent reputation as being a thought we are in this domain of not just cutting the cost of engagement, but actually improving the quality of engagement. How does it do that? >> I think it's a great question. It starts with the mission of the company, I think. That's the easiest way to say it. Our mission is to enable every interaction between consumers and business to be effortless. Anywhere, any time, and any channel. So if you start with that mission, you really start to focus in on what's most important. What's most important is to deliver that amazing experience for that end user or that consumer, and at the same time, drive down the operational cost for the business, i.e. improve their efficiency. And so our vision for the company, is to take our intelligent AI and machine learning automation technology which is world-class and is better than anything else on the market and apply it to deliver on a vision which is we want these interactions between the consumer and the business to be successfully completed in five minutes or less. >> Five minutes? >> Yes, and today it's measure in hours, eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. That's the vision and we're well on the way to accomplishing that. >> Alright, so as a thought leader, give us an example of how business is doing that, and then we'll get into some of the technology questions. But, first off, what is the competitive advantage of being able to complete a client engagement under five minutes versus eight hours? >> Well, first of all, I think, again, if we put the end-user, the consumer, at the focal point, we're talking about a fundamental change in what they expect from business. They expect immediacy, they expect accuracy, they want you to respect their time. In fact, I think some of the latest analyst reports says that valuing consumer's time is the single biggest driver to brand loyalty. So if you've got that situation, you've got an obligation to the consumer to deliver what they want. Well, now put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, which we all are. I'm a consumer, I come to a business, I'm asking you a question about a product, a service, a defect, anything, an order that's missing. I expect to get an answer very quickly because my time is precious and I know that someone like me has asked that question in the past. Why has it not been possible in the past for me as a consumer to get that answer right away, leveraging the expertise that has already happened in an enterprise? And when I do that, when Solvvy is able to enable that for the business, there's multiple benefits. The consumer is happier, their CSAT goes up, their customer satisfaction goes way up. Their time is respected, they get their answer in a minute or less, as opposed to hours. The business is happy because there's no ticket created, there's no need for a human agent to go back and forth with you, ask you a bunch of things, and maybe come back to you six hours later and now you're upset. Maybe you switched brands in the meanwhile because you're so angry of having to wait. So, the benefit is, I sometimes say to our customers, "It's the magic X", the CSAT goes up, and the cost goes down and that's never been possible before Solvvy. >> How does it work? >> How it works is very simple. The first thing we do is we engage with the business. So, the business is our customer, right? They buy the product or they buy our SATS platform. It's a SATS platform built on AI and machine learning technology that was developed by my two co-founders during their PHD work at Carnegie Mellon. So, at it's core, is the ability to understand natural language expressions of issues, by the end user, by the consumer. So typically people give us their life story, but they're asking for a refund. The ability to parcel that in that conversation and say I think you want a refund, let me help you get that is a very powerful piece of IP. So we go to companies and we say, "Just tell us where all of your knowledge assets are." You don't have to touch it, don't create anything new, don't build a new silo because they already have the silo, and we simply go out and index it all, learn from it, and start building a knowledge graph for that business. It's specific to how that business handles resolutions, but it also learns how customers have asked questions in the past, and how agents have answered it. So again, your best expertise is captured and used in that knowledge graph. We then say, "In less than an hour, "in one line of java scripts, here's a model "you can put in front of your consumer." You can put it anywhere you want, and it says when you need help, click on it, pops up, on mobile you can speak the question, and tells the consumer, "Just tell me what your issue is." It understands the intension of that question or the issue, and then goes in the knowledge graph, and says, "Hmmm, can I find an answer "in this knowledge graph that can help you help yourself?" And if so, it matches it. And it's actually giving you a specific resolution. It's not making you wade through pages of material. It's saying, "Here's the three steps you need to do "to reset your account." Now that is instant and immediate for the consumer. They don't have to hunt, they don't have to search. And it says, "Have I helped you?" And we're putting the power in the hands in the consumer. We're saying, "We don't want it to be false fiction." We're saying, you the consumer can say, "Nope, this didin't help me," and now the company can then guide you to the right flow. They can get you on a chat, if you're a V.I.P. user, maybe they get you on a phone call, whatever it might be. But, by putting the consumer at the center, by delivering real value to them, we've accomplished both sides, right? CSATS higher, the cost goes down, because we are actually self-serving anywhere from 15 to 40% of the tickets or issues that used to cost the business money, being self-served now, and so that's a pretty miraculous transformation for the business and for the consumer. >> Well, in today's world, attention is everything. Every, as you said, every experience, every engagement has to be a source of value to the customer. And so, not only do you get a better customer, but you presumably also get a richer set of interactions because the customer now believes that the system actually is helpful, is useful. Does that data then go back into the system, so that it becomes even knowledgeable about the nature of the problems, the nature of the resolutions, anticipatory about how to improve things, and maybe product people can get visibility in this stuff? Is that kind of where all this goes? >> It's a very organic system and it learns constantly. It think that's the really powerful thing about it. So, it learns many things. So it learns when you ask me questions. It learns if I have not given you a good answer. It actually learns from the negative. I still passed you to the agent because then it follows it all the way through and says, "How did the agent answer?" And, it learns from that interaction. And so because we know we can't self-serve every question that a consumer has, but we're getting better, better, and better. In fact, our self-service rates have doubled just in the last 12 months, because of the machine learning and the ability to learn. And we actually learn across all the businesses we do business with. We learn things for example that consumer review show more than a paragraph of text, they don't engage in self-service. We show bullets, they are much more likely to interact. Those are implicit learnings that system uses to more accurately to give you responses. But there's another flip side to this which is when we see 100% of the conversations between the consumer and your business, we're now able to go to business and give them categorical views of what's actually going on once their product or service is shipped to the consumer, which they've never had before. We're now able to say to them, "We think that payment "page that people are using to renew might be broken "because there seems to be a lot "more issues associated with that." Now that's something that the engineer who built that page may not know, or if the person said, "That's broken," they'd say, "How do you know? "Show me the data." And now you can actually go with a data driven model and say, "We can tell you. "This is 14% of the issues this week, "and two weeks ago, it was two percent. "Can you tell me what's changed?" Or you can put a dollar value on it. "This product seems to be defective "and it's costing us money "because we keep having to do returns. "Here's the number of situations where that's happened "in the last week, it's costing us "two million dollars a year, fix it." That's the kind of incite that the vps of customer experience or customer support have had to spend hundreds of hours to try to massage and get, and it doesn't give them a seat at the table with the strategy with product and marketing. >> But every company has been talking about the need to build their community, where basically a community is defined by folks who have something in common and are taking common actions. But one of the challenges has been, is how do I provide value so that I get that type of interaction? Let me ask you a question. Are we ultimately suggesting, we all seem to be getting to a point where the quality of engagement is such, and while it keeps costs low, that it might actually catalyze even greater engagement with the customer base so that you learn not just initially, you not only learn something about a product, or for example, you might actually learn things about how to facilitate adoption, because customers are willing to engage more often and more deeply as a consequence of a good experience in using Solvvy related type technologies? >> It is the opportunity to use that customer engagement when they're contacting your business about an issue or problem, the opportunity is first I have to take care of your issue. You won't listen to me if I don't take care of your issue well, but if I do that, I have an enormous opportunity to educate you. How can you do better with the product or service I sold you" Perhaps you need something that's on top of that. Maybe you're a free user and by subscribing to the premium product, you'd get all the benefits that you're frustrated about. And maybe that's an time to give you an offer. So, I think that notion of personalized recommendation is something that is actually never been possible before with the old systems. The idea was that support was kind of a backwater in many ways, which it should never have been. And in fact, the leading brands like Zappos realized quickly that by winning on that basis, you could actually dominate the market. But, it was often the case that the people in support felt like goal keepers. Just keep the issues away, but in fact, now in an integrated world, it's very difficult with subscription based businesses for example, to know when you're buying and when you're asking for support. It's subscription service, I could cancel at any time. So now I'm engaging with your brand. I'm asking a question, "Hey how do I get "more of x,y,z shipped to my house?" It's an enormous opportunity to not only answer my question, but then suggest things, recommend things, play books, so if you think about that experience, how would I enhance the consumer experience, that interactive conversational flow is the perfectplace to do it. >> I would think it would also allow you to envision other types of engagement, because as long as the consumer finds it valuable, to have that conversation, then they'll be willing to enter into that conversation. Well, so let me step back, where does this all go? Because we've been talking about being able to do this for a number of years, and as I said in the preamble, in many respects, all we did was digitize bad process, but now we're talking about bringing technology to bear and dramatically improving the process. Five minute resolution, pretty good. As a consumer, I'd like that, so where does this go? What's the limit of utilizing these technologies to incorporate or enhance engagement? >> So, let me illustrate with an example that I think is very compelling of the power of how this is going to change our world. So, one of our customers is Eero, the smart wifi system. You're probably familiar with it. One of the most innovative products on the planet. Now, we've been working with Eero for well over a year, and they just published a case study of what we've accomplished with them. So, we have self-served 45% of the issues that would have come into them, that have conversations that come into them regarding issues, and that's a fantastic number. They had never seen anything close to it. And that's a great outcome for the business and the consumer. Under one minute is the average time for resolution for those 45%. Imagine again, how much time I've saved you, me, all of us as consumers of Eero. But the better story that I like is two weeks ago, we got a call from the CEO of one of the leading mid-western electronics distributors in the world, and he had said, "I'm going to have my support team, "customer experience team contact you guys, "because I was at home, I bought an Eero smart wifi system, "I went home and tried to install it, and I had trouble. "And I went on, and Solvvy gave me the exact steps "it took to solve the issue, "and I never had to contact them, "and I was able to get the wifi up and running in minutes, "and I was on my way. "And I'm delighted with my Eero system, "and it was because of this interface." And he said, "I think my company should be using it too." And, that was one of many, many catalytic events for us, that realized, wow, we're touching over 200 million consumers with our service. We're reaching all the way out, and we're extending these brand's promise into the consumers' homes, into their devices. _ Two hundred million? >> Two hundred million. >> So that's literally 10% of the population that's online. >> If you're talking about the world leading brands, so we're working with the leading brands that are reaching these people, so by extension Solvvy is as well. And so, you're talking about companies, leading gaming companies, on-demand companies, consumer electronics. These are all companies that self-service automation. And it's intelligent automation, right? It doesn't require a lot of work from the business. As I said, we implement in less than an hour. With one line of java script, we've developed very powerful, unsupervised machine learning models, that can just take all that transcript date from all the past conversations that consumers have had with your business, automatically learn the best stuff from it, and then be able to show the users the right issues. So the customer journey is where we're so focused, right? Because the customer journey is opportunity for the brand to really create a market-leading position and we're enhancing that conversation. >> Fantastic. >> Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Solvvy, thank you very much for coming on theCube. It's been a great a great conversation about the evolution of customer service, and where it goes. >> It's my pleasure, an honor to be on theCUBE. >> So once again, this is Peter Burris, this has been a CUBE conversation, until next time.

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm here with Lauren Cooney, the analyst, for the Wikibon team and our next guest is I'm proud to have Guy Kawasaki here on theCUBE. Guy is, goes without mentioning, a legend in the industry. Currently, the chief evangelist for Canva author of Art of the Start, a real pioneer in entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, tech evangelism. Guy, great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Among other things, you've done a lot of amazing things. Thanks for joining us. >> What better place to be. >> The tech culture now is so mainstream. You're seeing Facebook CEO draw in more audience than a Supreme Court justice. >> More people watched the Senate hearings yesterday-- >> He probably has more impact than a Supreme Court justice. >> He's running the world. The tech culture has really grown to be a mainstream...in the early days the computer industry when it was really the beginning of the revolution, the PC revolution, Macintosh and the PC, you were there. So much has happened. I mean, as you look back, I mean looked out at the young guns coming up, what's your view, what's your reaction to all this? You have these (mumbles) moments. >> What's your take on all this? >> I suppose many people would say, we never thought it would get to this point. It's turned destructive and negative and all that. But it's a short snapshot of time and, first of all, can we put the genie back in the bottle? No, so it doesn't really matter. But, all things considered, the democratization of computing, everybody has a computer, whether it's a phone or a computer. The democratization of the transfer of information, obviously some information may be faint, may be not what you like. But would we go back to a time where we send things by fax machines? Not at all, I mean all things considered, >> it's a great time to be alive. >> Democratization goes through these waves, democratization with the PC, democratization with the internet, democratization of web 2.0 and social media. The beginning of social media, about 15 years, maybe 10, whatever way you might want to mark it. And now democratization with data and AI is interesting. So you're having these waves of democratization. It's going to take some time to sort out. I mean, as you look at the tech trends, how do you make sense of it, or what do you get excited about? How do you surf that wave? (chuckling) If you're going to surf the wave, the big wave coming, which some say is block chain and cryptocurrency and decentralization. What's the wave that you're on, that's the question? >> To use a surfing analogy, if we're going to go down that rat hole, a good, experienced surfer knows where to sit, can look out and say, I'll take the fourth wave. And I'll sit in the right place, turn around at the right time, paddle at the right time, you know, all that. And then there's people like me. We sit in the same place, and every 15 minutes, the right wave comes along and catches us. Those are the two theories. >> I think if only predicting tech trends were as easy as predicting surfing. >> Interviewer: Timing's everything. >> Timing is everything, luck is a lot to do with it. We only learn about the Apples and the Googles and the Ciscos and the Facebooks and the Pinterests and the Instagrams. I think you think, well, there are these really smart people and they can predict the trend or cause a trend. I think it's more the game of big numbers where if you have enough surfers in the water, somebody's going to catch a wave. (chuckling) And then you can say, yeah, I knew he was the best surfer. >> But really, right place, right time. >> And you got to know what a wave looks like. >> Guy: Well, yeah. >> You got to be, like, okay, am I in a tide pool >> or am I on a boogie board. >> And to your point, you've got to be in the water. [John] Yeah, yeah. >> You can't be standing on the shore, saying I'm going to catch a wave. You have to be in the water, and if you're in the water, >> nine times out of ten you're going to get crushed. (chuckling) >> If you're not out in front of that next wave, you're driftwood. In surfing, people will jump and try to take your wave, this sounds like the tactic of the whole industry. >> Guy: Exactly, right, right. >> What waves do you see that are coming, in your mind. You've seen a lot of waves in your day. I mean, right now, what wave is exciting you right now. >> If you look at the waves, what's out there? >> What I learn about that is, you can only declare your intelligence and victory after the fact, right. I can tell you the internet of things is big. I can tell you that social media is big. I can tell you that computing is big. Problem is I could tell you that because I know it's big now. Can I tell you what's in the future, no. If I could...first of all I wouldn't tell you. (chuckling) So I think in a rare moment of humility it's the law of big numbers. Infinite monkeys typing at keyboards, somebody's going to come up with Beethoven. >> I want to ask you a question because I get asked this question a lot, Hey, John, you've been around a while. I want to catch that next big wave, I want to be in the next Google, I want to be rich on stock options. (Guy chuckling) I said, a lot of times the best companies where you take the most advantage of is when no one else wants to work there or no one yet knows it. We really can't say, Oh, I'm going to get rich on that company because by that time it's either too late and people are chasing the wrong thing. >> Guy: Absolutely. >> How do you give that same advice to someone? >> Listen, you're talking to a guy who quit Apple twice and turned down Steve once. So how smart could I be? (John chuckling) Now we can say Apple is the most valuable company in the world, you should have stayed there. Well, thank you very much, thanks for tell me now. I think it's really... I don't want to be too dramatic, but I could almost build a case that you should invest in or work for the most dumb-ass idea you heard of. Because at any given point-- >> Airbnb, we're going to rent out mattresses >> and give out cereal. >> Very good example, Airbnb. Let's face it, if somebody told you Airbnb, before there was Airbnb, you would say, So you're telling me that I'm going to rent a room from somebody I met on the internet, and I'm going to sleep in that person's house, hoping he's not a murderer or pedophile. On the flip side, you're saying, I'm going to rent out my room to someone who I hope is not a pedophile or an ax murderer. Or ebay...I'm going to buy this printer from 3000 miles away and I'm going to assume it works. Or I'm going to sell my good printer to someone 3000 miles away and assume that he's not going to say he never got it or that it didn't work and he wants a refund. So if you go down the line of all these ideas, you'd have to say at the time, nobody. Even take an extreme: Zappos. If you told me that women would buy shoes without trying them on, seeing them, smelling them, and touching them, I would tell you you're crazy. You'd buy a book that way. You'd buy a CD that way, you'd buy a DVD. Would you buy shoes, would you buy shoes without trying them on. >> I totally would. (laughing) Now I can say that. >> To Zappos's credit, some of the way it made that work is it offered shipping back for free. So there was really no risk. But I would have been a skeptic about Zappos. >> Well, it was one of those things for me, Zappos, where they shipped in one day so I could get them immediately, try them on and if they didn't work, I could ship them back and get a different size. It was no big deal, it was very low overhead. So that's one of the reasons that that worked. But I think when you mention all of these great things like Ebay and Airbnb, it's really part of the sharing economy with people really wanting to share the goodness of their goods with other people that need them. >> It's just really connecting those folks. >> Places like Oakland and San Francisco, where there are certain streets where you line up and you just get in the next car with a stranger, and you go to San Francisco with them. >> Lauren: Yeah. >> And it's not computerized or anything. It's just trust. >> I did that once and it was frightening. (laughs) You never know who the driver is going to be or how they're going to drive. >> But you did it. >> I did it. >> People do it every day. >> I know. >> I'm amazed. >> I did it once, but... (laughing) >> Let's ask you a question. What's the craziest idea that you've seen that worked and the craziest idea that didn't work. >> Let's start with the easy one. I had a company called garage.com, and we were a venture capitalist investment bank, so we got pitched all the time. One day, a guy comes in and says, I'm going to build... A dirigible hotel over San Francisco. So you stay in the dirigible. Another person said, We're going to build a geodesic dome over Los Angeles. And I can't remember if it was to keep the air pollution in or out. I'll just tell you one really great one. These people were from Seagate so they had Cray, they worked for Seagate. And they say, We have this patent-pending, curb-jumping, patent-pending whatever technology so that if you drop your laptop with your hard disk, the head won't crash into the hard disk and ruin the hard disk. And at the time, this was 15 years ago, that was a great idea, right. It wasn't solid state. Heads crashing into hard disks. >> Moving parts. >> Seagate, so this is a great idea. Every hard disk in every laptop should be like it. So we get in the car, we go to their office, and the receptionist says, Oh, they're running late because they're on the phone with IBM. IBM is really interested in using this technology for the IBM PC laptop. Keep us waiting, keep us waiting. And they get out, and, Yeah, IBM was really, they're so excited, they're ready to move. And I, like, we're really excited. And finally I said, Give me the jist, what is your technology, is it like some special chip that detects gravitational fall, it's too fast, it's got to be hitting the ground so it parks the head because it recognizes motion or whatever. And I swear to God, I swear to God, he brings out this piece of foam and he says this is military spec foam. So we take your hard disk, we put this foam thing around it, and we put it in the laptop. And I swear to God, I was having an out of body experience. >> You're telling me-- >> I drove all the way here-- >> That your proprietary technology is putting foam around the hard disk, and IBM is excited by this foam. So welcome to my life. >> So what are you up to now. Talk about your evangelism. I know you're a (mumbles) Mercedes. You have a bunch of things going on. You've been very prolific in social media. You were on the suggested user list from day one on Twitter. >> No, I wasn't. >> Oh, no, you weren't, that's right. But you have a zillion followers. >> That's why I have never forgiven Twitter for that. >> I thought they put you on. >> Guy: No. >> Okay, I stand corrected. >> You had to be an actress. >> Some tech people got on there, I know. >> Guy: Yeah. >> But I was not on. >> There you go. >> Measly 20,000 or so. But you got a million and a half followers active. You've really been prolific in a good way. (laughing) Engaging with communities. >> Yeah. >> What have you learned and how do you view this next generation of social because you're seeing the Facebooks, you're seeing LinkedIn. There's siloed platforms. Is there hope? What's your take on it, is it going to grow? >> I've come to the point where I always believe things are never as good or as bad as they seem. So I don't think it's as bad as people say. If these social media sites are selling my data, they're going to go broke selling my data. (laughs) I don't know how you could look at my data. First of all, I never look at ads, so go ahead, sell my data. I'm not going to look at the ad anyway. It doesn't matter. I think the ability to spread ideas, arguably good or bad, the ability to spread ideas with social media, all things considered, is better. It's going to be abused and all that. My father was a state senator in Honolulu, and we were into banner ads way before anybody else. Banner was literally a piece of cloth with his name on it that you staple to the side of a building, saying Vote for Duke Kawasaki. That was the nature of banner advertisement back then. Do I think that social media targeting and all that for sales is a good thing? Yes, I do. If you're a real estate broker, and you wanted to reach people who live in Silicon Valley, age 50 to 70, female or male or whatever, in such-and-such an income bracket, how else can you do it but Facebook? >> It's good and bad. >> That's why Facebook is so successful. >> The metadata is all about the clan and the culture, and I think putting ideas out there is a way to send your ideas into the ether, make it happen. So, that's key. Now, we're here at a developer conference, so one of the things that's also a big part of this community is the notion of how open source has become a tier one citizen, and it's really running the world. Which is also grounded in community as well. You have this ethos of community, ethos of software open. >> I believe in open source. I believe that the more intelligent people pounding on your stuff, the better it is. I'm an author, and what I do is, speaking in the sense of open source. So right now I'm about 80% done with my book. I put out a post on social media saying anybody that wants to review my book, test my book, send me your information. So I do this, I cut it off at about 280 people. I send them the Word document, the entire Word document of my book. Does that mean they can take it and publish it in China tomorrow, yes. But, from that, I get hundreds and hundreds of comments. >> John: Wisdom of the crowds, self-editing. >> Yeah, and they point out stuff that I never would have noticed because I'm too close to at this point. So is there a downside, yes. Is there piracy, yes. Arguably, would those pirates have bought the book anyway? No. >> Our content's all free. We're really big in China because they actually take it and translate it in the native language. >> Guy: Which you would never have done. >> With all the jargon, you can't hire a-- >> Guy: You would never have done that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Guy, great to catch up with you. Thanks for coming on. What are you working on now, you mentioned the book, what's the book about? >> The book is called Wise Guy, and it's a compilation of the stories that have influenced my life. So it's not an auto-biography. It is not a memoir. Have you ever heard of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> You know, it's inspirational stories. This is miso soup for the soul. (laughing) So I'm working on that, TV evangelism with Canva is just going gangbusters. Brand ambassadors for Mercedes Benz. I'm on the board of directors of a company called Cheeze with a zee. It's an anti-social photo-sharing and vidoo-sharing app. And that's it. >> You've been an inspiration to many, great job of the year has been a big fan of your work. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Guy Kawasaki here inside theCUBE. We're at Devnet Create. This is Cisco's cloud developer conference. Different from their core Devnet Cisco Networking developer, and this is all about dev ops open source. And this is theCUBE bringing you all the action here in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with more after this short break.

(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I am John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and also the co-host of theCUBE. We are here with Blake Morgan, who is the futurist, author, speaker, around the concept of customer experience, and has a great new book out called, More is More. Blake, Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks for coming in. So I love that it is a hard cover book, the book is great, it feels good, the pages, it's a really good read, but it's got a lot of meaty topics in there. So let's just jump in, what's the motivation for the book? Why the book? Why More is More? >> So I have been in the contact center space for over 10 years and basically everyone under the sun is a customer and we all know what it feels like to have a bad customer experience. Have you had a bad customer experience ever? >> John: Oh yes. >> Yeah, right. >> So there is no shortage of work to be done in this space. I think now it's a great time to be in customer experience because there is more awareness about what it actually means. So, I wrote the book to basically provide some kind of definition and to really help people understand, What is customer experience?. Is it customer service? No, it's not. So what does it mean? How can businesses improve customer experience and what do they need to know to get started? >> How about the evolution? Because you know digital has really changed the game. You are seeing cloud computing, machine learning, AI techniques, bots certainly. I mean Twitter came out over ten years ago. I remember when Comcast Cares came out, you know that was a revolution. It was this one guy who decided to be on Twitter. We saw that beginning of that, that trend, where you can now serve and touch folks with customer service and experience, but then again, the blinds between customer experience and customer experience is blurring. Now those multiple channels, do you send them a Snapchat? Do you Instagram? All kinds of new things are emerging, so how do you define, as a frame, the customer experience in this new context? >> Yeah, you're right, there are so many channels. It's really overwhelming for a lot of businesses. So I think it is important to really cut out the noise to think about, Who are you as a business?, and Who is your customer?. What does your customer need? And I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer, because in so many situations, companies make it easier on themselves and make it harder on their customers. For example, say you do tweet a company, they might tell you, Hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself or Now you need to send us an email. Well that's not easy for me as the customer. So it's really all about making customers' lives easier and better. That's the name of the game. >> So what was the findings in the book, when you did the research for the book, what was the core problem that companies are facing? Was it understanding customer experience? Was it the re imagining of customer experience? Was it just a strategic imperative? What was the problem that you uncovered that was the core to this new customer experience equation? >> So a lot of people equate customer experience with customer service and that's a big problem because for most companies, customer service is a cost center. It's not a revenue generating arm of the business. It's not exciting, it's not a money maker, it's not marketing or sales, and so that is really what people think of, when they think of customer experience. But the book is based on this DO MORE framework and DO MORE is basically represents as an acronym. Each piece of the six piece framework represents a different piece of where customer experience lives. So the first D is design something special. The second, I'm not going to read you every, I'm not going to bore you every single word, but the second is about loving your employees, so that is a part of it too. So culture, modernizing with technology, obsessing over your customers, having a culture of customer centricity and embracing innovation and disruption. So these are all varying pieces of DO MORE, which really helps companies understand, it's not simply something that sits in the contact center. For example, let's say you've got your laptop here, and you love your laptop, but your experience of the laptop is not only shaped by, say you have to contact the call center, it is also shaped by how that laptop was built and how about those people who built the laptop. Were they fighting at work with each other? Did they like their jobs? Did they like their boss? Honestly, that's going to impact your experience. >> Yeah, was it a sweat shop. >> Was it a sweat shop? There you go. >> I mean there's all kind of issues about social good too kind of comes into it with that. >> It actually does, I write a lot about social good in my book and some really great CEOs today get that social good is important, like the CEO of Patagonia or Marc Benioff. I mean you can just rattle off so many examples of stuff that he's doing, whether it is equal pay for woman, or his huge house in Hawaii where he's housed monks, to help them when one of the monks had cancer actually. Salesforce is constantly doing good for it's employees and for the community at large. >> Take me through your view on how executives should think about customer experience with all the digital transformation, because a lot of business models are shifting, you are seeing mobile apps, changing the financial services market, because now the app is the teller. So you have three kinds of companies out there, you've got the customer service oriented company, like a Zappos, or you've got a tech company like Google, but they are all about product innovation. Then you've got companies like Apple and others, that are like the big brand and culture personalities, so you've got these three different kind of companies as an example, each one might have a different view on customer experience. How do you tie, how does an executive figure out how to match the more into their DNA? >> That's a fantastic question. I think it's important to have somebody accountable to it, whether it's a Chief Customer Officer or your CMO, because the CEO is ultimately responsible, however, the CEO has their hand in so many things, it's not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level, on customer centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization. So I would encourage a company to actually hire somebody who is accountable, who creates even tiger teams across the organization with these customer centric metrics in mind, so everybody is working together and they know their job, no matter if they are HR or finance or marketing or customer service, that their metrics, their performance metrics, are tied back to the customer satisfaction. >> I know you do a lot of talks and you do a lot of speeches out there and events, what's the common question that you get? I mean what are people really struggling with or what are they interested in, what are some of the things that you are hearing when you are out on the road giving talks? >> I think it's hard to actually put some of these practices, I think it's actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice. For example, I recently gave a talk at a large technology company down here in San Jose and I presented some pretty wild ideas about actually the energy for influencing change. So how do we keep that high level of stamina with our employees when it's just quite hard to sometimes even keep up. I remember I gave this speech, I talked about a lot of very eccentric ideas about self-management, like when you are a worker you need to take care of yourself because the corporation is never going to give you a pass to let's say, rest, or do what you need to do to feel good, to be good at work. I noticed some of the people in the audience were all texting each other and afterwards someone came up to me and said, you know we are all texting each other because you say these things and the speech was purchased by the leader of the company, however, when it comes to actually working here, that is not really the vibe here, that's not the culture. So I think that a lot of, even the best companies today, still struggle every single day with some of these ideas, because when you DO MORE, when you work harder than others, it's tiring, it can take it's toll on employees. So how do you keep people fresh? >> So fatigue is a huge issue. >> Fatigue, yes. It is an issue. >> So how do they solve that? Because again, that is an experience and the employees itself represent brands. >> Yeah. >> So what are some of the solutions for that? >> Yeah so it's normal that people in these big companies feel fatigued when they are working harder for the customer, but it is really important for people to just manage themselves because no one is going to give you permission to take ten minutes to go for a walk, take ten minutes to go meditate, so it's really about management providing the room for employees to breathe and also modeling it as an example, if leaders just worked 24/7, it's all about the grind, the grind, the grind, that's not a healthy culture, so they need to push their people, but also give them some kind of safety that they can take care of themselves as well. >> So talk about the book target. Who is the ideal candidate for the book? Who are you writing the book for? What do you hope to accomplish for the reader and the outcome? >> So I write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine, I have a lot of different types of readers because customer experience really affects everybody in business. So it could be the CMO, it could be the Chief Customer Officer, it could be the CEO, in fact the CEO of 1-800-Flowers wrote the foreword for my book, Chris McCann. So this book is really relevant for a wide variety of people who are interested in making their company more competitive. >> That's a great point, so let's trill down on that, customer experience just doesn't end in a department, we've seen this in IT, information technology, it's a department that becomes now pervasive with cloud computing, you see social media out there, so customer experience has multiple touch points, hence the broad appeal, how should someone think about being the customer experience champion? Because you always have the champions that kind of drives the change, so you've got change agents and you have kind of to me, the pre-existing management in place, what's the human role in this? Because remember, you have machines out there, you have bots, and all those machine learning technology out there, it's important that the human piece is integral to this, right? I mean what's your view on the role of the person? >> Yeah I'm not anti-technology, I'm not anti-bot, I am excited about the Amazon Go cashier-less stores, Amazon Go stores, but I do feel that technology can help us without totally replacing us. I think that we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us, to make smart decisions, but you can't just let the technology go. I think that can be really scary. We've definitely seen so many TV shows about this, you can't blink without seeing another TV show about robots taking over the world. >> So it's a concern. What's the biggest thing you've learned from the book? What was the key learnings for you, personally, when you wrote this book? >> Well, writing a book, there is a lot of learning. I actually had my daughter, I was pregnant while I wrote this book and so I think for me to be totally candid, it was a lesson in patience and working through that period for me being pregnant. So I was like giving birth to the book and an actual baby. To be totally truthful, that was my learning. >> You got a lot more than the book. >> Blake: Laughing >> Well, congratulations, how old is the baby? >> She's sixteen months. >> Congratulations, awesome. >> Thank you. >> Well thanks for coming in and sharing about More is More, Blake Morgan, futurist author on the customer experience, More is More, it's theCUBE Conversation and really an impactful thought because customer experience transcends not just a department, it really is a mindset, it's about culture, it's about a lot of things, and it's certainly in the digital revolution, it's really going to be fundamental. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. >> Blake: Thanks so much. >> Appreciate it. I am John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (lively music)

[Music] [Music] okay we're back after that nice break here from knowledge we're here in Las Vegas at the Aria hotel this is service now's big customer conference about 4,000 folks here mostly customers most of the content at this event comes from customers its practitioners talking to practitioners which is quite rare actually at these conferences I'm Dave Volante everybody thanks for watching with wiki Bond org I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this is Silicon angles the cube we go to these events we extract the signal from the noise we love to bring you tech athletes and Fred ludie is here he is a tech athlete he's the founder of ServiceNow he started this platform around 2003 Fred welcome to the cube thank you very much so we really want to hear the story you know but we've been asked to sort of hold that off because we got another segment with you tomorrow but I just I have to ask you I mean seeing how this conference and ServiceNow as an organization has grown you just must be so thrilled in particular with the customer enthusiasm <Fred>  you know fundamentally I've got a personality flaw and I call it a kindergarten mentality I want to see my art on their refrigerator and the only way you can do that is by making somebody happy and so to see these people here with the excitement the enthusiasm and the smiles on their faces really is satisfying that kindergarten mentality cakes oh good stuff we were talking about that earlier Jeff had not seen the cakes before and was was quite amazed today no I think that's an industry-first actually good well be yeah announcements today you know that's if so you guys had some you're gonna transform an organization you got to have mobile I mean the whole world to go on mobile five billion devices and and growing what you guys announced today <Fred> well we announced the ability to run all of our applications on the iPad and you know I think people's reasonable expectations these days are that they should be able to manage anything anywhere anytime using the device that they currently have now I I like to think of an iPad as something that you use when you're pretending to be attending a meeting or when you're pretending to be watching TV with your family and when you are pretending to do that it'd be nice if very efficiently and very effectively you could manage whatever you needed to manage to get your job done and so today what we've announced is the ability to run everything that ServiceNow has on that iPad  <Dave> yeah I mean it seems to mobile is basically a fundamental delivery model and maybe even the main delivery model going forward wouldn't it be I <Fred> I think it will be a main delivery model and it's a it's a user interface that that requires complete rethinking about how you're going to do things you know for the longest time we we looked at screens with 24 by 80s you know these character screens and then we got big pixel monitors and then we got bigger pixeled monitors and we got very accurate Mouse's and everything got small and got hovers you've got you know this massive amount of data and now the form factor is completely shrunk and you're looking at this as my major input device so how am I going to get you know everything I used to do with a mouse where I'm hovering over things to see what they do or I'm touching you know 16 by 16 pixels which you by the way you can't hit with your fingernail how am I going to get all of that stuff how am I gonna be able to work with all that stuff using only my thumb or thumbs so how are you specifically taking advantage of that smaller form factor and you know the feature sets that you see in things like iPad <Fred> well I think it's a matter of rethinking so we're trying to get the user to be to be able to accomplish their task by doing considerably less work and one of the things that our system is actually very comprehensive it's very big and we create in the browser and our first user interface it was really created in 2005 we treat all the elements of the system equally so now what we've done in the in the mobile which I think is very unique it does MySpace I mean Facebook doesn't have this Lincoln doesn't have this we know exactly what you do as a user and we remember those things that you do edit of Li and so we're able to create shortcuts or we're able to remember the system is able to remember what you do and then very quickly present you back with those tasks which are repetitive so we're trying to simultaneously compress the information and reduce the interactions yeah so that doesn't sound trivial it sounds like there's some secret sauce behind that talk about that a little bit <Fred> well it's not trivial and it's a there there is secret sauce but it does it just requires you to rethink and for me you know if you if you read the jobs biography there were a couple of interesting things in their number one when he met dr. land they had both agreed that everything that had been invented was going to be invented had already been invented right the other thing that they that they pretty much agreed on are what job said and a quote that I've used for years is that great artists copy good artists copy and great artists steal and I've been a thief all my life I just I'm gonna admit it right here it's not on camera live and so what we do is we go ahead and take a look at who's doing this great Amazon is doing it great Zappos is doing it great asan is doing it great you know we and we capture those ideas and then what they meant by great artists steal is that you take them and you reformulate them for the task that you're trying to solve for the problem that you're trying to solve and the rich the artist won't they probably the original artist probably won't even recognize that as their work but yet they're they're deeply inspirational to us an artist so do you fancy yourself as a bit of  <Fred> well I think it's interesting  down down the road and you know to I was watching the Bellagio fountains create something like that if you think about the physics and the art that had to go into that to create that beautiful masterpiece you know it's not just a painting right think about the physics that goes on to shoot something seven its water seven hundred feet in the air and then cut it off instantly and have that all choreographed I mean it's phenomenal amount of engineering but it took also a phenomenal amount of art just to make that interesting so that we were we actually stood there in rapt amazement of you know look how all this is choreographed so yes I do in fact I don't think I take exception to the term engineering software engineering I don't think we haven't progressed to the point where this is an engineering this is this is an art this is a craft you know it's something that people practice and we try to get better at it and better at it and better at it but I don't think it's anywhere near an engineering discipline <Jeff> yeah the other interesting from the jobs book that I never really got until I read the book was like the iPod shuffle because when I first saw the iPod shuffle and you can't do anything you can't manage your playlists on it you all you can do is change songs I don't get it and then in reading the book as you just said you know what is what is it you're trying to accomplish with that form factor right and don't just automatically try to replicate what you can do a one form factor to another form factor but really rethink what's that application and it sounds like you're kind of taking advantage of that opportunity as you take the app to the mobile space into the iPad specifically to rethink what is the best use case for that platform you'll see tomorrow the iPad was really  <Fred> that's right and as as the inspirational first step that we're taking toward a totally mobile app and just like the Apple evolution of building all of this note wonderful new capabilities into iOS and then bringing them back into OS X we're going to be doing the same thing so you'll see tomorrow on stage not only in an iPad app but you will see a native iOS app running and you'll see that it does even more things than the iPad app does and much faster it's a wonderful user experience and those those notions will be also coming back into the browser etc the same way that apples been bringing a lot of the capabilities of iOS back onto OS X <Dave> I was talking to an IT practitioner last month at a large grocer and I asked him what's your what's your biggest challenge what excites you the most and he said the same thing he said both of X what's my biggest challenge is embracing all this pressure from my users for mobile and that's what excites me the most because I have a mobile addict I got in it pulls out all those devices so how do you see this announcement within your user base changing you know the lives of IT  prose.    <Fred> well it'll you know technology since the dawn of time has been used really for two things it's been it's been used to streamline make make tasks more efficient and more streamlined and it's been used to create business differentiators and so our our product really is about process and moving process through an organization and so we want to streamline that as much as possible so if I can we do things like change management change management has multiple levels of approval if I can get it to the point where a manager can pull his phone out of his pocket and do five approvals between meetings he's become significantly more efficient right the changes are going to be done in a more timely fashion and the bottom line improves it's as simple as that <Dave> yeah it's interesting we were those of you watching no we were earlier the today broadcasting from sa P sapphire event and if you go to sapphire are you here to to get huge doses of two things one is Hana of course which is there in memory database but the other is mobile he's all you hear and it's interesting to hear you guys talk about the ERP of IT and your si PE they know the poster child for ERP and all their customers are going to mobile whether it's retail manufacturing you know across the supply chain and so it sounds like you've got sort of similar mentality but more focused obviously with it within IT but of course now you're also reaching beyond IT do you see you're a mobile app a push going beyond the IT community <Fred> yeah absolutely you know our underlying all of our applications we have a platform that say it's a forms based workflow platform that's really purpose-built for something that we would characterize as a service service relationship management so pretty much any request response fulfillment type workflow can be handled by our platform and what our customers have done over the years is create different applications that help them streamline that workflow typically that workflow is handled by by people creating a spreadsheet emailing it to somebody else having a TA back perhaps they built a Lotus Notes app but yes everything that that that or I will say that our platform usage has been expanded by our customers sometimes beyond our wildest dreams and and we love it so you talked about you know some of the greatest artists we stole rights of and so now you guys put up this platform I've said a number of times today it's not trivial to it to actually get a CMDB working in the way that you wanted to get it to work so now you've had this platform out for quite some time your successes started to you know you get a lot of press people are starting to see it do you worry sometimes that people gonna say okay I can do that too I'm gonna I'm gonna you know rip it off what gives you confidence that you can stay ahead of those those thieves out there <Fred> well I have great confidence in that you know we have a very broad base of applications that are very deep in functionality but if that's really something that you want to happen yeah because you want some young people with fresh new ideas to try to unseat you because they will come at the come at this from a completely different perspective and a completely different angle and they will do things that you never thought of and so the race is then on are they going to become more relevant than me or am I going to be inspired by their ideas incorporate them into our platform and stay ahead of them see welcome that all right absolutely welcome back yeah we we wouldn't be where we are today if Edison and Bell weren't weren't the jobs and gates of their time I mean they had just and I think jobs and gates as well right they had this great rivalry that really caused technology to move ahead a lot faster than when it was just I be am selling mainframes and so you need those rivalries you need that you need that competition you know I'm I'm watching these young guys from asana it's a great little platform for for tasking and you know they came out of Facebook they have a very Facebook mentality and they have phenomenal ideas and believe me guys from asana I'm watching you those are just that's where great ideas come from >> <Dave> Wow we always like to say we love sports analogies here in the cube and Jeff your kids are into sports well as our mind you always want to see and play that more competitive you know environment it sounds like Fred you have the same philosophy yes very much so yeah excellent all right Fred well listen we really appreciate you coming by now you come back Fred's gonna be back again tomorrow we're gonna go through the story of service now that's why we really didn't touch up on it and in any kind of detail today but to it but but but Fred actually started the company we give him a little preview Fred so you started the company really not to go solve an IT service management problem right you came up with this sort of idea this platform and and then you you that was really the first application that you developed right up a step in for that oh great you see give us a little tidbit we're gonna back >> every day I wake up that's all I really >><Fred> I've been a programmer now for 40 years want to do why do I program because I want somebody to take a look at the technology that I build and say hey that's pretty helpful I like that I can use they're gonna put that in my fridge fridge so the real strategy behind the company was to build some software that somebody wanted that hopefully they would pay me so I could build more software that was the entire strategy and so you know on one hand I love technology and on the other hand it really irritates me when it makes me feel stupid or it makes other people feel stupid so what I wanted to do was to create an enterprise platform that people could use and they would feel empowered they could walk up and use it like they'd walk up and use an ATM like they'd walk up and buy something from Amazon etc so a completely you know consumer eyes thought process and then that was the thought process really in O 3 and no 4 and then what we do really figured out was that a platform is a very hard sale you know it's tough to convince somebody that they should take this it'd be like selling you an Intel processor and telling you can do anything you want right I want to solve a business problem and so we decided to go after the ITSM space first it was a space that was very underserved very lucrative and and growing significantly <Dave> amazing so so join us tomorrow we're gonna Fred back on and we're going to here this story the founding story of ServiceNow and how we got to where we are today so Fred thanks very much for coming on and sharing the news and I'm gonna change it all by tomorrow good all right so so keep it right there I will be up next we've got Douglas Leone coming on which is a partner at Sequoia Capital and and and one of the better-known DC's out in the valley so so keep it right there will be back with Doug just in a minute this is ServiceNow this is the cube this is 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