(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raj Gossain, who's the Chief Product Officer at Alation. We have some news. Hello, Raj. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, it's great to be with you on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, good to see you. So, okay, we're going to talk about Alation Connected Sheets. You know, what is that? Talk to us about what it is, what it does, what it brings to customers. >> So we recognize, spreadsheets are really the dark matter of the data universe. And they're used by, over 78 million people use spreadsheets on a regular basis to drive critical business analysis. But there's a lot of challenges with spreadsheet usage. It brings risk to the organization. There's no visibility into where data comes from. And so we wanted to bring the power of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to business users where they spend most of their time. And that's in a tool that they love, and that's spreadsheets. And so we're launching a brand new product next week called Alation Connected Sheets. >> So talk more about that. So yes, I get the lineage issue, like where did-- who did this, where's this data come from? I got different data. But talk more about the problems that Alation Connected Sheets solves, specifically for customers. >> Yeah, so the big challenges that we see when we talk to data organizations is how do they understand where the data came from? Is it trusted? Is it reusable? Should it be used in this format? And if you look at where most users that use spreadsheets get the data to power their spreadsheets, maybe it's a CSV download from a database, and then you have no idea where the data came from and where it's going. Or even worse, it's copying and pasting data from other spreadsheets. And so if you take those problems, how can we bring trusted data from governed sources like Snowflake and Redshift and put it in the hands of spreadsheet users, and give them the power and flexibility of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, but use trusted, reliable, well-governed data so that the data office feels great about them using spreadsheets and the end users, the business users, can take advantage of the tool that they know and love and do the work that they need to do quickly. >> So, okay. So I'm inferring from your comments there that you've got the ability to take data from you mentioned a couple, Snowflake and Redshift, other popular data warehouses. >> Yep. >> So talk about the key capabilities that you have, any specific features that we should know about. >> Sure. So, we built the leading data intelligence platform and the leading data catalog. And one of the benefits of that catalog is where you have visibility into all of the trusted, governed data sources that a data organization cares about, whether it's enterprise warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift, databases like SQL Server, Google BigQuery, what have you. So what we've done is we've brought the power of that data catalog directly into both Google Sheets as well as Excel. And the idea there is a user can log into their application, authenticate to Alation using the Alation Connected Sheets plugin into their spreadsheet tool, and browse those trusted data sets that are surfaced in the Alation catalog. They get trust signals, they get visibility into where this data came from. So lineage, insights, descriptive information. And then with one or two clicks, they can choose a data set from their warehouse, basically apply filtering conditions. So let's say I'm looking for customer data in Snowflake. I can find the right customer table. If I only want it for say, 2022, I can apply some filter conditions, I can reorder columns, push one button, authenticate to that data source. We want to maintain and ensure security is being applied, so only those users that have access to the warehouse can actually download that data set. But once they've authenticated, that data gets downloaded into their spreadsheet and there's a live connection that's maintained to that spreadsheet. So anytime you need to refresh the data, one push of a button and that data set gets updated. I can schedule the updates. So, you know, if I have to produce a report every Monday morning, I could have that data set refreshed at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, or whatever schedule the user wants. And so it gives the user the data set they need, but the data organization, they can see where that data came from and they understand the lineage of the data as it is used in analysis in those spreadsheets themselves. >> So Raj, I know you're at the Super Bowl this week, a.k.a. re:Invent. >> Yes. >> And I know you got very close relationships with Snowflake, you've mentioned them a couple times with the data summit last spring. And I know you've done some integration work with those platforms and I'm sure others. So should we think of this as you're extending that sort of trust and governance out to spreadsheets, is that right? And stretching that out? >> That's exactly right. The way we talk about it is how do we bring data intelligence to business users in the tool that they know and love, which is the spreadsheet. And so, the data catalog and data intelligence platforms in general have really primarily been focused on servicing the needs of data users: data analysts, data scientists, data engineers. But you know, our vision, our aspiration at Alation is to really bring data intelligence to any business user. And so it's a big part of our strategy to make sure that the insights from the Alation catalog and platform can find their way into tools like Excel and Google Sheets. And so that's, what you highlighted, Dave, is exactly correct. We want to maximize the likelihood that a business user can have self-service access to trusted, governed data, do the work that they need to do, and ensure that the organization has a set of data assets in spreadsheets, frankly as opposed to liabilities, which is the way most data organizations look at spreadsheets is it's almost like a risk factor. We want to convert that risk, that liability, into an asset so that people can reuse data sets and they understand where this analysis is actually coming from. >> It's something that we've talked about for well over a decade on theCUBE. Is data an asset or is it a liability? >> Yeah, yeah. >> You obviously want to get value out of it, but if you can't share it, it's not trusted. So what people do is they lock it down and then that constricts value creation. >> Exactly. >> My understanding is this tech came out of an acquisition from a company, Kloudio. >> That's correct. >> Tell us about Kloudio. Why Kloudio? What's the fit there? >> Yeah, so Kloudio is a company, it's about five years old. We closed the acquisition of the company in March of this past year. And they had about 20 customers, 10 engineers. And we saw an opportunity with the spreadsheet tool that they'd created to really compliment our data intelligence strategy. And as you said, Dave, extend the value of data intelligence to business users. And so, we brought the Kloudio team into the fold. The thing I'm most excited about as a product guy, is within seven months of them joining Alation, we're actually shipping a brand new product that's going to drive revenue and meet the needs of tens of millions of users, ultimately. Like that's really our aspiration. And so, the tech they had was extremely modern. It reinforces the platform position that we have. You know, this microservices architecture that we've built Alation around, made it easy for that new team to come in and leverage existing APIs and capabilities from our platform and the tech that they brought into Alation to essentially connect the dots and deliver a brand new set of capabilities to an entirely new audience, to help our customers achieve their business objectives, which is really creating a data culture across their entire organization, inclusive of business users, not just, like I said, the data X users that are already taking advantage of solutions like Alation and cloud warehouses, et cetera. >> So I have two questions, follow up questions by me, and I think you might have answered the second one. The first one is what's the secret sauce behind Kloudio? How does the tech work? The second question is how does it fit into the Alation portfolio? How were you able to integrate it so quickly? Maybe that's the microservices architecture. But start with the secret sauce. What is it, what can you share with me? >> I think the thing that we saw with Kloudio that got us excited, and the fact that they, even though it was a small company, they had 20 customers, they were generating revenue, and they were delivering real value to business users, by really enabling business users to tap into the value of trusted, governed data, and frankly, get IT out of the way. You know, we almost refer to it as like smart self-service, which is, they could find a data asset and connect to that source, and just with a couple quick clicks, almost a low-code, no-code type of an experience, bring that sort of data into their spreadsheet so they could do the work that they needed to do. That opportunity, that tech that the Kloudio team had built out, the big gap that they had is, my goodness, what does it take to actually be aware of all the data sources that exist across an organization and connect to them? And that's what Alation does, right? That's why we built the platform that we built, so that we can basically understand all of a customer's data assets, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And so it was a little bit of, you know, that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup analogy. The chocolate and the peanut butter coming together. The Alation platform, the Alation catalog, coupled with the technology that Kloudio brought to us really was sort of a match made in heaven. And it's allowed us to bring this new capability to market that really is value-add on top of the platform and catalog investments that our customers have already made. >> Yeah, so they had this magic pixie dust, but it was sort of isolated, and then you've integrated it into your catalog. And that's the second part of my question. How were you able to do that so quickly? >> So, we've been on this evolution, enhancing the the Alation data intelligence platform. We've moved to a microservices architecture, we're fully multi-tenant in the cloud. And the fact that we'd made those investments over the past few years gave us the opportunity to make it easy for an acquired business like Kloudio, or you know, perhaps a future acquisition, or third party developers leveraging APIs that we expose to make it easy for them to integrate into the Alation platform. And so, I think it's a bit of foresight. We recognize that in starting with the catalog, the opportunity was much bigger than just providing a data catalog. We've added data governance, we've built out this platform and we recognize that more and more users can and should be benefiting from data intelligence. And so I think those platform investments have paid significant dividends and accelerated our ability to deliver Alation Connected Sheets as quickly as we have. >> Sounds like a great acquisition, like a diamond in the rough. I mean, I love big these big mega acquisitions 'cause the media company can write about 'em, but I really love the high, high return. You know, low denominator, high value. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Where can people learn more about this? Maybe play around a little bit with it? >> Yeah, so we're going to be demoing Alation Connected Sheets at AWS re:Invent next week. And it's going to be available starting next week, so the 28th of November. And obviously you'll see it online, on social media, on our website as well. But folks that are going to be in Las Vegas next week, come to the Alation booth and you'll get a chance to see it directly. >> Awesome. Okay, Raj. Hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. Really appreciate it. >> Great, thanks so much, Dave. Great to see you. >> Hey, you're very welcome. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>We're back the cube's coverage of UI path forward. Five. And we're live. Dave Velante with Dave Nicholson. AJ Gupta is here. He's the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Motor Vehicles of California dmv. Welcome Jay. Good to see you. >>Thank you. >>Good to see you. Wow, you, you have an interesting job. I would just say, you know, I've been to going to conferences for a long time. I remember early last decade, Frank Sluman put up a slide. People ho hanging out, waiting outside the California dmv. You were the butt of many jokes, but we have a happy customer here, so we're gonna get it to your taste >>Of it. Yeah, very happy >>Customer, obviously transform the organization. I think it's pretty clear from our conversations that that automation has played a role in that. But first of all, tell us about yourself, your role and what's going on at the dmv. >>Sure. Myself, a j Gupta, I am the Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the dmv. Somewhat of i, one would say a made up title, but Governor's office asked me, Okay, we need help. And that's what >>Your title though? >>Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, well we are doing business and technology transformation. So that's, that's what I've been doing for the last three years at the dmv. Before that I was in private sector for 25 years, decided first time to give back cuz I was mostly doing public sector consulting. So here I am. >>Okay. So you knew the industry and that's cool that you wanted to give back because I mean obviously you just, in talking off camera, you're smart, you're very cogent and you know, a lot of times people in the private sector, they don't want to go work in the, in the public sector unless they're, unless they're power crazy, you know? Anyway, so speaking with David Nicholson, the experience has gone from really crappy to really great. I mean, take >>It from here. Yeah. Well, am I gonna be, I'm, because I'm from California, I was just, I was just, you know, we >>Got a dual case study >>Eloquently about, about the, the, the change that's happened just in, just in terms of simple things like a registration renewal. It used to be go online and pray and weed through things and now it's very simple, very, very fast. Tell us more about, about some of the things that you've done in the area of automation that have increased the percentage of things that could be done online without visiting a field office. Just as an >>Example. Yeah, what's the story? >>Yeah, so first of all, thank you for saying nice things about dmv, you as a customer. It means a lot because we have been very deliberately working towards solving all customer po pain points, whether it's in person experiences, online call centers, kiosks, so all across the channels. So we started our journey, myself and director Steve Gordon about three years ago, almost at the same time with the goal of making Department of Mo no motor vehicles in California as the best retail experience in the nation across industries. So that's our goal, right? Not there yet, but we are working towards it. So for, for our in person channels, which is what you may be familiar with, first of all, we wanna make sure brick and click and call all the customer journeys can be done across the channels. You can decide to start journey at one place, finish at another place. >>All that is very deliberate. We are also trying to make sure you don't have to come to field office at all. We would welcome you to come, we love you, but we don't want you to be there. You have better things to do for the economy. We want you to do that instead of showing up in the field office, being in the weight line. So that's number one. Creating more digital channels has been the key. We have created virtual field office. That's something that you would become familiar with if you are not as a DMV customer. During Covid, the goal was we provide almost all the services. We connect our technicians to the customer who are in need of a live conversation or a email or a text or a, or a SMS conversation or chat conversation in multiple languages or a video call, right? >>So we were able to accomplish that while Covid was going on, while the riots were going on. Those of your, you know about that, we, our offices were shut down. We created this channel, which we are continuing because it's a great disaster recovery business continuity channel, but also it can help keep people away from field office during peak hours. So that's been very deliberate. We have also added additional online services using bots. So we have created these web and process bots that actually let you do the intake, right? You, we could set up a new service in less than four weeks, a brand new service online. We have set up a brand new IVR service on call centers in less than a month for our seniors who didn't want to come to the field office and they were required certain pieces of information and we were able to provide that for our customers by creating this channel in less than less than four. >>And the pandemic was an accelerant to this was, was it the catalyst really? And then you guys compressed it? Or were, had you already started on the >>Well, we were >>Ready. I mean you, but you came on right? Just about just before the pandemic. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I came on in 2019, pandemic started in 2020 early. So we got lucky a little bit because we had a head start at, I was already working with u UI paths and we had come up with design patterns that we gonna take this journey for all DMV channels with using UiPath. So it was about timing that when it happened, it accelerated the need and it accelerated the actual work. I was thinking, I'll have a one year plan. I executed all of the one year plan items in less than two months out of necessity. So it accelerated definitely the execution of my plan. >>So when you talk about the chat channel, is that bots, is that humans or a combination? Yeah, >>It's a, it's a combination of it. I would say more AI than bots. Bots to the service fulfillment. So there is the user interaction where you have, you're saying something, the, the chat answers those questions, but then if you want something, hey, I want my, my registration renewed, right? It would take you to the right channel. And this is something we do today on our IVR channel. If you call in the DMV number in California, you'll see that your registration renewal is all automatic. You also have a AI listening to it. But also when you are saying, Yep, I wanna do it, then bot triggers certain aspects of the service fulfillment because our legacy is still sitting about 60 years old and we are able to still provide this modern facade for our customers with no gap and as quickly as possible within a month's time. How >>Many DMVs are in the state? >>Okay, so we have 230 different field locations out of which 180 are available for general public services. >>Okay. So and then you're, you're creating a digital overlay that's right >>To all of >>That, right? >>Yeah, it's digital and virtual overlay, right? Digital is fully self-service. Bots can do all your processing automation, can do all the processing. AI can do all the processing, but then you have virtual channels where you have customer interacting with the technicians or technicians virtually. But once a technician is done solving the problem, they click a button and bot does rest of the work for the technician. So that's where we are able to get some back office efficiency and transaction reduction. >>When was the last time you walked into a bank? >>Oh man. >>I mean, is that where we're going here where you just don't have to >>Go into the branch and that is the goal. In fact, we already have a starting point. I mean, just like you have ATM machines, we have kiosks already that do some of this automation work for us today. The goal is to not have to have to, unless you really want to, We actually set up these personas. One of them was high touch Henry. He likes to go to the field office and talk to people. We are there for them. But for the millennials, for the people who are like, I don't have time. I wanna like quickly finish this work off hours 24 by seven, which is where bots come in. They do not have weekends, HR complaint, they don't have overtime. They're able to solve these problems for me, 24 >>By seven. And what's the scope of your, like how many automations, how many bots? Can you give us a sense? >>Sure. So right now we are sitting at 36 different use cases. We have collected six point of eight point, well, we have saved 8.8 million just using the bots overall savings. If you were to look at virtual field office, which bots are part of, we have collected 388 million so far in that particular channel bots. I've also saved paper. I've saved a million sheets of paper through the bot, which I'm trying to remember how many trees it equates to, but it's a whole lot of trees that I've saved. And >>How many bots are we talking about? >>So it's 36 different use cases. So 36 >>Bots? >>Well, no, there's more bots I wanna say. So we are running at 85% efficiency, 50 bots. Oh wow. Yeah. >>Wow. Okay. So you, you asked the question about, you know, when was the last time someone was in a bank? The last time I was in a bank it was to deposit, you know, more than $10,000 in cash because of a cash transaction. Someone bought a car from me. It was more of a nuisance. I felt like I was being treated like a criminal. I was very clear what I was doing. I had just paid off a loan with that bank and I was giving them the cash for that transaction as opposed to the DMV transaction transferring title. That was easy. The DMV part was easier than the bank. And you're trying to make it even easier and it shouldn't, it shouldn't be that way. Yes. Right. But, but I, I have a, I have a question for you on, on that bot implementation. Can you give us, you've sort of give it us examples of how they interact. Yeah. But as your kind of prototypical California driver's license holder, how has that improved a specific transaction that I would be involved with? Can >>You, so well you as a Californian and you as a taxpayer, you as a Californian getting services and you as a taxpayer getting the most out of the money Okay. That the DMV spending on providing services, Right. Both are benefits to you. Sure. So bots have benefited in both of those areas. If you were used to the DMV three years ago, there was a whole lot of paper involved. You gotta fill this form out, you gotta fill this other form out and you gotta go to dmv. Oh by the way, your form, you didn't bring this thing with you. Your form has issues. We are calculated that about 30% of paper workloads are wasted because they just have bad data, right? There is no control. There's nobody telling you, hey, do this. Right. Even dates could be wrong, names could be wrong fields, maybe incomplete and such. >>So we were able to automate a whole lot of that by creating self-service channels, which are accelerated by bot. So we have these web acceleration platforms that collect the data, bots do the validation, they also verify the information, give you real time feedback or near real time feedback that hey, this is what you need to change. This is when you need to verify. So all the business rules are in the bot. And then once you're done, it'll commit the information to our legacy systems, which wouldn't have been possible unless a technician was punching it in manually. So there is a third cohort of Californians, which is our employees. We have 10,000 of those. They, I don't want them to get carpal tunnel. I want them to make sure they're spending more time thinking and helping our customers, looking at the customers rather than typing things. And that's what we are able to accomplish with the bots where you press that one button, which will have required maybe 50 more keystrokes and that's gone. And now you're saving time, you're also saving the effort and the attention loss of serving the best. >>Jay, what does it take to get a new process on board? So I'm thinking about real id, I just went through that in Massachusetts. I took, it was gonna be months to get to the dmv. So I ended up going through a aaa, had to get all these documents, I uploaded all the documents. Of course when I showed up, none were there. Thankfully I had backup copies. But it was really a pleasant experience. Are you, describe what you're doing with real ID and what role bots play? >>Yeah, sure. So with real id, what we are doing today and what I, what we'll be doing in the future, so I can talk about both. What we are doing today is that we are aligning most of the work to be done upfront by the customer. Because real ID is a complex transaction. You've gotta have four different pieces of documentation. You need to provide your information, it needs to match our records. And then you show up to the field office. And by the way, oh man, I did not upload this information. We are getting about 15 to 17% returns customers. And that's a whole lot of time. Every single mile our customer travels to the DMV office, which averages to about 13 miles. In my calculation for average customer, it's a dollar spent in carbon footprint in the time lost in the technician time trying to triage out some other things. So you're talking $26 per visit to the economy. >>Yeah. An amazing frustration, Yes. >>That has to come back and, and our customer satisfaction scores, which we really like to track, goes down right away. So in general, for real, id, what we have been, what we have done is created bunch of self-service channels, which are accelerated by workflow engines, by AI and by bots to collect the documentation, verify the documentation against external systems because we actually connect with Department of Homeland Security verify, you know, what's your passport about? We look at your picture and we verify that yep, it is truly a passport and yours and not your wives. Right? Or not a picture of a dog. And it's actually truly you, right? I mean, people do all kind of fun stuff by mistake or intentionally. So we wanna make sure we save time for our customer, we save time for our, for our employees, and we have zero returns required when employees, where customer shows up, which by the way is requirement right now. But the Department of Homeland Security is in a rule making process. And we are hopeful, very hopeful at this point in time that we'll be able to take the entire experience and get it done from home. And that'll give us a whole lot more efficiency, as you can imagine. And bots are at the tail end of it, committing all the data and transactions into our systems faster and with more accuracy. >>That's a great story. I mean, really congratulations and, and I guess I'll leave it. Last question is, where do you want to take this? What's the, what's your roadmap look like? What's your runway look like? Is it, is there endless opportunities to automate at the state or do you see a sort of light at the end of the tunnel? >>Sure. So there is a thing I shared in the previous session that I was in, which is be modern while we modernize. So that's been the goal with the bot. They are integral part of my transition architecture as I modernize the entire dmv, bring them from 90 60, bringing us from 1960 to 2022 or even 2025 and do it now, right? So bots are able to get me to a place where customers expectations are managed. They are getting their online, they're getting their mobile experience, they are avoiding making field off his trips and avoiding any kind of paper based processing right? For our employees and customers as well. So bots are serving that need today as part of the transition strategy going from 1960 to 2022 in the future. They're continue gonna continue to service. I think it's one thing that was talked about by the previous sessions today that we, they, they're looking at empowering the employees to do their own work back office work also in a full automation way and self-power them to automate their own processes. So that's one of the strategies we're gonna look for. But also we'll continue to have a strategy where we need to remain nimble with upcoming needs and have a faster go to market market plan using the bot. >>Outstanding. Well thanks so much for sharing your, your story and, and thanks for helping Dave. >>Real life testimony. I never, never thought I'd be coming on to praise the California dmv. Here I am and it's legit. Yeah, >>Well done. Can I, can I make an introduction to our Massachusetts colleagues? >>Good to, well actually we have, we have been working with state of New York, Massachusetts, Nevara, Arizona. So goal is to share but also learn from >>That. Help us out, help us out. >>But nice to be here, >>Great >>To have you and looking for feedback next time you was at dmv. >>All right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Get that, fill out that NPS score. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Valante for Dave Nicholson. Forward five UI customer conference from the Venetian in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Kristin Komassa. She is the VP Process Improvement at Colliers International Wisconsin. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here. >> So you're here direct from Milwaukee. Tell our viewers a little bit about Colliers International Wisconsin. >> Yeah, so Colliers International Wisconsin, we are recognized as the largest full-service commercial real estate company in the state of Wisconsin. And when I say full-service it means we have everything from brokerage to property management to facilities, architecture, development. We cover the gamut on both the commercial and we've actually started a residential program, as well. So, we've got you covered. >> Excellent, so tell us now about your Smartsheet story. There was a movie that played during the keynote address where we heard a lot about your Smartsheet experience. But you tell our viewers now. >> Yeah, so I started using Smartsheet in 2012 when I came to Colliers and really it was a one specific project that we needed to really wrap our arms around and other methods weren't doing it at all. So I discovered Smartsheet. And ironically if you took Smartsheet from 2012 and put it next to Smartsheet 2019, you wouldn't think they're the same product at all. But it solved our issues at that time. We were able to really elevate what we were doing with that client. We were recognized, and the company ownership saw that if you can do this with one client, what could you do with the whole company? And over the past years we have really rolled it out both internally through the operational side, from how we just manage our day-to-day business to also how do we get in with those clients and how do we manage their real estate with this software program? So that's kind of been my journey and it's been fun and it's been amazing and I'm looking forward to the next phase. >> So what was the killer app in 2012 that you couldn't do with any other tool that was so breakthrough? >> We were starting with Excel and it was just an extremely large portfolio. We tried to do Google Sheets, that didn't work. And Smartsheet was the app of choice, that we could collaboratively work on this entire portfolio but manage it with a security level, because it was a banking institution, that they were concerned. And Smartsheet, even at that time, they knew that security was a big issue with their clients. >> So was it the ability to cross-company collaborate with the banking client as well as your own team? That was-- >> It was. It was a large team, we had 15 people, so you can imagine version control was huge. >> Nightmare. >> Yeah, a nightmare. Nobody wants to see an Excel document sent to 15 people asking for revisions. And, again, we had to be able to report to this banking customer in their own format and we had again really aggregate that data in a consistent and repeatable way, but yet still maintain that control. And Smartsheet allowed us to do that in a very flexible and customizable way. So we didn't buy something off the shelf that we'll maybe use 50% of it, we used 100% of what we purchased. >> So 2012, that's a while ago. >> A little bit. >> Can you talk about the cultural change from your company now that you use Smartsheet on a regular basis and how that has helped you collaborate and helped you be more creative with each other, helped you understand the big picture? >> Yeah, so really in 2012 we were a slightly smaller company. It was coming right out of the recession and when there was a lot of REO properties and just there was some issues in real estate in general. And we were able to really ride that wave and come back a lot stronger than we were because we were able to cross-collaborate between all of our different company divisions, and really show our clients, one of our taglines is Better Together, and that's what we were. And it's easy to be better together when you have a platform that helps you build that up. And our company has since kind of shed some of those maybe less desirable properties or product type and really moved into the class-A downtown markets because we're able to now work with some of those more sophisticated owners of real estate and those sophisticated clients that are, they're really looking for not just a real estate expert, but an advisor for them. How do you help me take my real estate and make it work for my business? And Smartsheet was a big part of that. >> It really has evolved your role. As you said, it's much more of a, you're much more of an advisor now. >> Yes, we are definitely much more of an advisor, of a consultant, of a trusted partner, is what we are. And it's not always just about real estate anymore, it's about building those relationships. But showing them as well as to, how can we put all those pieces together and then still have full transparency with you? And with our other vendors and our clients and bringing everybody together. >> So I love that you, looking at the big picture and big changes in the big picture, but you've also talked about it's a combination of lots of little things that add up to the big thing. I think one of your videos you talked about a push notice for an accept/decline was a game changer. And then today we heard in the keynote, a copy/paste from one to the other got a standing ovation. So what was your favorite feature for today? And I'm just curious, is that approach something that you've adopted also in the way that you use the tool to engage with your clients? >> Every ENGAGE that I've been to I leave and I'm just so excited to get back and start implementing everything because, again, Smartsheet really listens to their clients. But really from what the things that were announced today, it seems like a simple thing but I'm really excited about Move Row. Because when you're done with a project, it doesn't take a lot of time to actually grab it and move it down, but if somebody forgot to do it and it's rolling up to your aggregate data and all that, it's just such a little thing but it makes such a big difference. Show me only my active in-flight projects. I don't want to see my completed ones or my closed, or my on-hold, if I change the status. Give me what I care about, front and center. So Move Row wass my big thing. >> Love it. >> But that is what we've been talking about, frankly, all day, is how these little things can add up to be the big aggravations of work. And so when you are slowly chipping away at all of the annoyances, that leads to a much more pleasant work day. >> Kristin: It definitely does. >> And a much more satisfying work life. >> Yep, I'll take any second I can gain back in a day. >> Right, so we talked about how Colliers International Wisconsin has really evolved from sort of, not a small-time real estate, but now you are this trusted partner of so many wealthier clients. Talk about the internal culture, though, in terms of how you all work together. >> Yeah, so some of our key features are like we like Warrior-Spirit, and this Better Together, and being innovators. And that's really what Smartsheet has encouraged us to be, is more of these innovators and working together and really being a champion internally. You'd be amazed, a lot of real estate companies, they have a lot of brokers and then employees and maybe not everybody, there are different personality types and all that, but our company has been able to figure out a way to pull everybody together and aggregate that data for a real big picture from both sides. Instead of looking at employees versus consultants, but just everybody. What is Colliers? And it's been amazing because Smartsheet has been that platform that we've utilized to do that and to bring everybody up. The collaboration that it has encouraged between different departments. Everybody knowing what is going on with a project or knowing that if you're talking to the same client that I'm talking to and how do we now work together, versus you make a phone call and you just called my client. I don't want that happening and it makes you sound kind of silly. How do we work together for a common purpose, basically, is what's happened. >> So is it the primary work tool that's open on people's desks? >> Yes, it is. It's open on my desk 100% of the time and we have actually created individualized dashboards for every single one of our brokers and it is their ground zero where they go to for all of their information. For if they have a new listing, if they have to submit commission information, if they want to submit a referral to another one of our lines. That is where they go. Our property managers, we're working right now to create their individual dashboards where, again, they're going to be living in there, and how they're communicating with their landlords and their owners and, how do you aggregate that tenant data in there so that everybody on your team is all on the same page? But again, it's living in Smartsheet is what the entire company is doing these days. >> So you talked about how this was 2012 when you first adopted it. The real estate business particularly, and commercial real estate not in a great position, in a much better, more solid position today. What are you thinking about for the future in terms of how your industry evolves and how you're going to need tools to help you evolve? >> Yeah, our clients, it's a tech world, everything. Your fridge can order milk for you these days. If you have a real estate and they're not an advisor, they're just a real estate broker and they're not accessing the technology that is out there to help you get market intel at the touch of your fingertips. They almost want you to anticipate what their question is going to be before they ask it. And they want that data available at night, on the weekends, in the morning, at their own schedule. If you're not able to provide that but you have to send them an email and they have to wait on it, I think that you're going to fall behind. You have to be able to keep up with the world of technology and becoming less of a one, I'm just going to help you on this single transaction to I'm helping you on this one, but what's the next one? And how does it affect your business? And how do I become your partner and your advisor and just that trusted partner? And that's where it's going, I think. >> And have you been able to, are you able to do those things because it has freed up your time? Because that's another thing we hear about this technology, is that because it is automating so many of the manual, repetitive tasks, you do have more time to be creative, to think more holistically and more about the future. >> Yeah and that's really what we're pushing is, if it's an administrative task, if it's something that you can automate it, do it. Don't take another day sending a repetitive email or you checking your calendar, did somebody finish something? Have the system do it for you. Did somebody, if you assigned a task, did they do it? You shouldn't have to babysit them for it. And yes, it should free you up to, how do I look strategically? How do I look forward into something? Instead of constantly trying to look backwards as to what did we do? Has it been completed? It should be done and we should be on to the next step at this point. >> So you said that you always come away from ENGAGEs so excited, so happy to come back to your office and talk about what you've learned. What do you think it's going to be from this one? Besides Move Row? Which I know is going to change your life, Kristin. >> Move Row will change my life, but there's a lot of things. You know what, so many things. Again, Smartsheet, I can't reiterate enough, they listen to their customers. And going back and figuring out how do I optimize something that I already thought was the apex thing that I was going to create, how do I now make it better? How do I make it so that it frees up somebody else's time? So that maybe them moving a row down, they no longer have to do that. How do I now make the next one even better? So I'm just, I'm excited, again, about that continuous process improvement. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, I'm excited to be here. >> And now you're a CUBE veteran. >> Now I'm a CUBE veteran, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, and we're here at theCUBE coverage in San Francisco for Google Next 2019, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, our next guest is Menaka Shroff global marketing head for emerging business at Google. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> So define emerging business, what is it within the Google Cloud? Just take a minute to explain what the business is. >> Yeah. Emerging business team is a group of marketers basically focused on products that help build a better Google story, so products like Chrome Browser, Chromebooks, Drive and especially Cloud Identity. All of these form the team of portfolio products that my team manages. >> And so they go to market, is it product development, both, or just? >> It's predominately marketing and go to market, yeah. >> What are some of the things that you're talking about here at the event? What's some news that you have, you guys got some news? >> Yeah, so one of the patterns we're seeing is this trend of cloud workers, where these are employees that spend almost four hours a day using SaaS applications using the browser as you just mentioned, that you do as well. And we're seeing-- >> Eight hours a day, 15 hours a day, yeah! >> Yes, excellent. And so, we're seeing this pattern actually, not only with digital natives but also with frontline, you know, back of the office front of the office where they're sort of skipping the traditional PC era and moving straight to a clouds based model. And so today we're actually announcing our Chrome Browser Cloud Management. So it's one central place to manage your browser deployments across, you know, a segmented workforce that's using Windows or Mac or Linux, and Chromebooks. and what you can do is have them obviously manage the Chrome Browser extensions and all of the deployment, but also have this IT collaborating and delegation within the same console. So of course if you're using G Suite, it's all in the same console, it's very easily available. >> And so this kind of brings back to conscious, we've been hearing the themes here, besides this is customer focused, it is end to end developer. So, life cycle from coding to deploying and running. So you run it on a Chromebook, or a Chrome Browser, you can have software at the endpoint for security, and integration, right? >> Exactly. So, what's great about being here is you see that full stack approach in how we want to make it available for our customers starting all the way from infrastructure to end user computing apps that people are using, all with that security layer and mindset. Obviously Chromebooks are known to be cloud based devices, historically popular with students, as you had just mentioned, as well. But we're seeing really good trends happening even with personal computing and in enterprise, because of the security model that runs through how cloud is architected, especially at Google. >> What're some of the conversations you're having here at the show, with customers and partners? What's the main driver? >> Yeah, it's really phenomenal because Chromebooks are actually 100% partner driven so we're already very partner-centric from that point of view, but, some of the customer conversations we're hearing, I'll mention three customers that I just talked to. SoulCycle, they have 94 locations with 500 endpoints deployed, and they're using this as their retail experience. That customer UX mindset with their Chromebooks, again, they're very cloud native. We have Starbucks that is using the Chrome Browser management capabilities across all of their stores, again thinking about extension management, but centralizing it all in one panel for all their locations. And then, very interesting, we have one medical hospital. They're using Chromebooks for their paramedics. Obviously we want paramedics to have the best technology available while they're doing their important job, saving lives. But they're doing this in a way where we want to enable them to do the right outcome which is, good patient experience. These are all things we're seeing in the variety of SMBs to IT, to, small businesses in variety of verticals, across geographies. Japan, India, all of that, in one place at Next, which is exciting. >> So very specific vertical use cases that you just mentioned, it's also this sort of general business usage, it's the old thin client story, right? Now, mobile becomes somewhat of a challenge for folks, but, I mean, I've written blog posts on my mobile. Yeah, we live, like I said, on Google Docs, and Google Sheets but, >> Absolutely. >> so, what are some of the things you're hearing, first of all, is that a tailwind for you? Is that a trend that you guys are leaning in to? And what are some of the things that your clients are asking for there? >> Yeah, so, phenomenal example. I think what we're seeing is the seamless application usage across different locations but also across different form factors. So what I do on my mobile, I want to be able to do on my tablet, on my phone, in a way that I interact in the same way, with the right context in mind. And we want to make that available. We definitely see that at Google because we are, after all, the biggest cloud native company if you think about that, and we operate in that model. But we're seeing this trend, actually with legacy companies which is, a new thing that is a good discovery for us and we obviously want to offer the best technology for our customers, we are definitely seeing a little bit of that happen as well. >> And Drive is part of your swim lane as well? >> Yes. >> I suppose, so, I mean one of the things I see a lot of people do is they'll take every document on their desktop, or their laptop, and put it up into the cloud. So they always have access to it. >> Yeah, I think Drive is phenomenal because not only does it serve the traditional ECM or the content management solution space, I mean, Drive has over a billion users now, so it's very worldwide known. But also it has the editors and the, you know, Google Docs, Google Sheets, as part of the solution mix too, so. Really when you offer that up along with the Chromebook it becomes a very powerful solution in combination for any cloud native employee. >> Well you've created, you got a tiger by the tail, 'cause it's so easy to create a Doc now, it's easier than spitting up a VM. >> Menaka: Well, I mean students are growing up with this as well, right? So we're seeing that. >> So what do you, are you getting a lot of requests to simplify the management of all those Docs, and what is Google doing in that regard? >> Yeah, I think ease of management, ease of deployment, ease of end user computing is always on our mind and we're always striving to do a great job, trying to make sure it doesn't take very long for anyone in IT to set up, whether it's their Drive instance or whether it's their Chromebooks we want to make it incredibly easy. And we are seeing this happen today, actually we have grab and go devices here, where you could take a Chromebook, log in and all your personalization kicks in within two minutes of you logging in, and then you shift a user, or give it to him and it doesn't require any reconfiguration. It sort of cleans out on its own, and has all of the other personalization set up. So we're thinking constantly about how do we do this for IT? So a five person team, actually I had a customer that has a five person team managing 4000 endpoints with just a small IT staff. And they want to be able to do interesting creative things not just manage end user devices, so we really are thinking hard about how do we do this in a way that's easy. >> Take the heavy lifting off the customer. >> Yeah exactly. We absolutely want to do that, even for end user, it should feel seamless. >> Menaka, great to to hear all the traction, love the end to end Chrome Browser, final question for you, what's new for you guys? What's going on under your business? What's your marketing plan? What are some of the exciting things that you're doing? >> Yeah we're just following the success we're seeing with our customers as you had mentioned earlier, we're seeing that with frontline, we're seeing that with healthcare, retail, those are all opportunities that we see, leaning in and supporting our customers in their journey to the cloud. And we see ours as a starting spot for that. >> Awesome, well congratulations. >> We'll have to look at getting some Chromebooks for theCUBE with a CUBE sticker. >> Yes! >> Can you make some custom Chromebooks for us? >> Custom, I don't, custom stickers. >> How about a custom browser? >> Custom stickers, browser is your personal, you can customize your browser as much as you like. >> John: We got stickers for you here. >> Oh, thank you! >> John: Love Chrome Browser, love the extensions, >> We'll take them. >> Programmability end to end, congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> Appreciate it. CUBE coverage here at San Francisco live, it's theCUBE covering Google Next 2019, stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network: Insights from Entrepreneurs and Tech Leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here for a special conversations part of Mayfield's 50th anniversary People First Network. This is a series of interviews from fault leaders around entrepreneurship, and insights. Manish Chandra, who's the CEO, Co-Founder and CEO of Poshmark, a very successful company. A serial entrepreneur that I've known for many, many years, going back to his early startups. Great to see you, thanks for spending the time today. >> Thanks for having me, John. And it's great, we were just talking about our early days when you were doing your podcast, and me, I was doing a social shopping company back then, was it, 2006? 2005 timeframe, a long time back. >> Pioneers have arrows on their back, as they always say in entrepreneurship, but if you look at the time when we were doing startups, over 14 years ago, social sharing, democratization; these were the buzzwords. This was the wave that we were all trying to ride. When 2008 hit, it kind of took the water down a little bit. But still the game didn't change, a rise comes Facebook, Twitter, social, multiple channels. The consumer's expectations changed a lot in that timeframe, and I want to get your thoughts because you've had two successful companies, Kaboodle and now PoshMark, with almost 40 million users, billion dollar valuation, hundreds and hundreds of employees, got like a hundred openings in your company. You're ramping up and you're scaling. But the expectations of users has changed. What are some of those dynamics in your business that you're seeing? >> I think the biggest sort of, uh, culmination or ignition point for social platforms came with the advent of mobile. And uh, early days of mobile were crude days, but you know, if you look back at the advent of Poshmark, sort of the idea of Poshmark reignited in my mind in 2010, and iPhone 4 had just come out. It was a couple of months after Instagram had started. And SnapChat had not even started yet. And what, I think, mobile platform did, especially with the high quality platform like iPhone 4 was, it made the process of content creation, consumption, and sharing so fast, and you finally had the device that could produce it, that uh, it just kept accelerating. And now, in the days of, you know, iPhone Excess Max and what have you, it's just so easy. At the same time, the speed expectation, the transparency expectation, and the velocity of expectation has gone up, and so what we've seen in Poshmark is, day one, our users were spending somewhere between 20-25 minutes in the app. And here today, we have billions of users, and they're still doing that same thing, so that level of deep immersion that you see is sort of unique to the mobile paradigm. >> I want to dig into the user expectation and the experiences that you're delivering. But before we start, take a minute to explain Poshmark; what you guys are doing as a core business, how it's evolved. >> So Poshmark, very simply, is a simple way to buy and sell fashion and other sort of style-based paradigm, we call it a social commerce platform because it really brings together users in a unique way. But it really allows anybody to build a business starting with their closet all the way to opening up a full-brand, wholesale engine on the platform. We provide all of the infrastructure, you know, shipping, payments, technology, and you have to bring in your inventory, so we don't touch inventory, but everything else we handle for you. >> So you're really helping people, enabling them to be successful with the ease of use; heavy lifting. >> Heavy lifting. >> It's kind of like Amazon. You don't need to provision anything, just kind of get started. E-Commerce in the era now of Google, Amazon, and Cloud technology, you see the rise of all the scale. How are you riding that trend, because that's a tailwind for you? And what is that doing for the user's expectations, I mean, I have four kids, I see them all online, they never use their laptops, except for homework, but they're on the mobile device, they're doing new things, this is the new expectation; what are some of those expectations? >> In our business, which is the business of fashion and style, what it means for people is, number one is, if they see something. Whether they see something on Instagram, or something on SnapChat, it needs to be instantly shoppable, right? And that obviously benefits a platform like us, which makes easy access to all of the different brands and things that are developing. At the same time, what social media's also doing is making the obsoleting of your products very fast, because once you've used it, you've, you know, posted a picture, you want to be able to not consume it again. >> You've been seen wearing the same outfit, I can't wear it twice! >> Exactly! And so we make that easy as well. And then the third thing is, uh, everyone is a content creator, everyone is a seller, everyone is sort of participating in this economy; people are hosting AirBnB guests in their home, people are selling on Poshmark, and the reason is because phone, and sort of this new mindset of collaboration and social makes it very easy for people to participate, so they want to be able to sell, but they don't want any hassle in that process. And so the new consumer expectation is instantaneous, deeply immersive, and constantly changing, and if you can't satisfy all of those things, then it becomes harder for you to scale. So you have to use technology, the physical world, and sort of the emotion all in the right mixture. >> One of the things I know that you're passionate about, and we've had this conversation, we feel the same way, certainly, at theCUBE is, role of community. And I see a lot of companies these days, whether they're saying we're doing an ICO using tokens to, um, getting a big bag of money from venture capitalists, oh yeah, our key strategy is to build a community. You can't buy a community. You've got to really win the hearts and minds and provide value, and you really can't, and build trust. Talk about the role of community for you guys, especially in the stylist world, where you have all this, where style's involved, a very robust community. How did you do it? How did you foster a community, and how did you nurture it? And how has that played out for you guys? >> So community is a foundation of Poshmark. And community's our value, not just our customer, but also what we are, and uh, community is what I'm more passionate about, even more passionate than fashion; and that was sort of, in my previous company, the thing that was really highlighted for me. And so we did it very slowly, actually. During the first year of our company, we only had a hundred users, but these hundred users were immersed. And then we went from a hundred to a thousand. Then thousand to five thousand. But very deliberately and slowly. So the end of the first 18 months of our company's life, we had maybe ten thousand users, right? And then we went from ten thousand to 300,000 in the next seven months, then we went from 300,000 to 12 million in the next two years. And today we went from 12 million to 40 million in the next few years, because, once you have sort of figured out how the community is created, it can scale very fast, but the early days if you compromise in how the community is being created, it's very powerful. For example, in the first, probably, eight or nine months in the company, I answered every single customer service email. And today, I probably interact with 80-100 customers directly everyday. Really keeping the pulse in sort of servicing. And service and love are sort of two of our core values, and it is very important that's built into the system. The second thing is, the community has to be authentic. You cannot fake a community. Which means, there is conversations that will happen in the community, there is, which may be antithetical to what you think is your brand, but if you don't let that authenticity happen, then what ends up happening is the community sort of withers away, because people are not going to tolerate anything inauthentic. The third thing, as you mentioned, is trust. And so from day one, we created not just trust in the way platform was built, but also in the economics. So day one we said, hey, if you're going to be part of this platform, there's two things that you're going to pay for; one, is, as a buyer, you're going to pay for shipping, and as a seller, you're going to revenue share with us, and we're not going to charge you any other money. Nothing. And so we shared, started from day one, a 20-80 partnership with our sellers, and today, here we are six or seven years later, and we have the exact same partnership. On the buyers, we started by charging them $7 for shipping, today our shipping is $6.49, at that time our shipping was 3 pounds to 5 pounds. Everything was priority, today everything is priority. So in six to seven years, if you think of any other marketplace in the world, not just in the country, how many times have they raised their fees? How many times have they changed their paradigm, changed their shipping paradigm? For us, it was very important. In the early days, it felt, people were saying, why are you charging so heavily? I said, I don't want to charge anything different tomorrow that I'm charging today, and by the way, there's no additional fees we've ever imposed on the platform, so, we don't have any marketing fees, any promotion fees, any credit card fees, and so that trust that's created ultimately leads to a lot of loyalty. And so today, you see our consumers growing, our users growing, and every single cohort we have continues to grow in revenue more like SAAS businesses, as opposed to e-commerce businesses. And that, to me, is the power of community if you do it right. >> And that's an interesting point. There's a lot of things you said in there, I think, that are worth doubling down on. One, I just want to highlight it, if you're creating value, and you're certainly scaling, passing that down in cost savings, and reducing cost and adding value, that's a secret formula. You see, we know one company that does that really well: Amazon! And that's worked. And they recognize the value of keeping people in there engaged, and so I think that's almost a take away for anyone watching is that if you're not adding value and reducing the costs while you're scaling, you're probably doing your math right. >> Absolutely. >> The second thing I want to talk about, and get your reaction to is you know about community and slowing it down at first. That's almost counter-intuitive. The, almost the answer is put the pedal to the metal, let's get some numbers; you took a different approach. You decided to take your time. Was that to get a feeling for the community, build the trust, understand the dynamics? Talk about why you went slow at first. >> The key is that the first two, three years, you're perfecting a lot of things, right? You have to make sure things are getting right. And in the first year, it was all about getting the product right, right? Then we scaled. Then we quickly realized that that scaling was breaking everything, was breaking our shipping system, was breaking our technology's office; I actually, Mayfield, which was an early investor in Poshmark, was on the board, and I went to my board, and I said you know, I'm actually going to slow down growth by 60%. And if you can imagine a venture board hearing that from their CEO, in the early days, it's challenging. >> It's a tough conversation. >> Yes. But I think one of the things that I value about Mayfield and my early investors is their focus on partnership, at a people level, a human level, with me. And uh, trust, and so we actually cut down our marketing budget by 80%, filled out the systems, got the partnership with USPS where we created the country's first fashion shipping label called Poshpost, and built up our technology and infrastructure, built out our payment partnership with BrainTree and Paypal, and by sort of, early-to-mid 2014, we started scaling and have never stopped. And in fact, I had told my investors early on, that first two or three years of building this business will be challenging, so hopefully you are prepared to go on this journey with me; but once we build it, it will accelerate. And what you see with us is, the business continues to accelerate every quarter, and we are seeing hyper growth, six, seven years into the business, which is even faster than the growth we saw in the first few years. And part of it is that, network business, which are built around true sort of networks, continue accelerating and connects later on in the process, but if you haven't created the right foundation in the early days? They fall apart. >> I think that's a lesson that entrepreneurs can learn, because you got to go slow to go fast. In Cloud based businesses where you have network effects, if there's a crack in the foundation, it can come crumbling down. >> It can come completely crumbling down, and it did, I mean, there were times in 2013 when people were literally doing things and just, the data would get lost in other things. We had to fix many of those, the broken pieces. We had USPS come to our offices and say hey, either you pay us a multi-million dollar fine or we have the right to arrest you. We had to renegotiate our contract with them. There's a bunch of things that happen in that scaling, and you hear things like blitz scaling and stuff these days, and their great terms, but at the same time, if you don't fix what's broken, you can't build that super scalable business. >> You got to be ready to blitz scale. As you know, Reid Hoffmann's famous channel, Masters of Scale, points out, which, by the way, is a great program, but, if you're not ready, you can crash and burn big time. That's a good point. You know, I have conversations a lot with a lot of senior people, one of them Theresa Carlson, who runs Amazon Web Services Public Sector Cloud business, she talks about doing the hard work upfront. And, you know, she's using public sector, so you have to get those kind of certifications, it sounds like this is a lot of things that you had to do. How did that test your entrepreneurial spirit? I know you, and you're hard-charging, but you're pragmatic and we can see that. But taking the time to do the work can sometimes test the patience of the team and the entrepreneur themselves. What's your reaction to that? >> Um, I would say that, you know, when we started Poshmark, the mission was that can we serve a hundred million people. In the country, you know, not even around the world. In our way we have 40 million people. From day one what we saw was deep engagement in the platform, because of the level of usage we had, because of the level of, sort of, activation we had, we knew we were on to something. I'll share a small episode with you, which convinced us that we've touched a deep nerve within the community is, in May of 2012, we were barely, you know, six, seven months into our app being launched in the public space, and we had maybe five or ten thousand users. At that time, we were adjusting our shipping for the first time, and uh, literally we announced the, we had launched the product with a small discount on the shipping, we were going to take it back, and we just said, you know, we're going to take it back. We got 200 plus emails which ranged from, you know, you're going to take away my entire set of clothing, and my entire business and we barely thought we were even launched, and so we knew we were servicing something very deep. That commitment to servicing the community where you are, really helping people at a deep level, allowed us to ride through these crazy ups and downs. And there was a point of time we went along the valley, even though we had the initial funding, in the mid stages of it we got over 200 rejections in the paradigm; sometimes multiple by the same investors. And so, it was definitely not a smooth ride in the middle of building this company. But that sort of passion for community and what they were experiencing kept us going. >> Let's talk about People First and venture capital. And one of the things I'm impressed on with this program we're doing with Mayfield is, and theCUBE has newer effect as well in the community, it's a people-centric culture. We lived through the social media early days when social and democratization was happening. More than ever now, you're seeing the role of people, because we're all connected. So there's rapid communications, there's frictionless, for people to yell and/or raise their hand and give accolades as well. So you have now a social dynamic with the fabric around the world. People can transact and communicate, complain, you know, applaud. This is changing everything. How is that change your outlook on life, because you have to recruit people, they want to work for a company that's people-centric, they want to work for a mission-driven company. These are the new dynamics we're starting to see in this generation; how has People First impacted your core mission? >> So for me, life is all about people. This company's all about people. We serve people, people is one of our core values. And my connection with Mayfield, which is through Navid, started back, actually, in my previous company. At the very beginning of that journey, '04/'05, uh, and we tried to partner up but the timing was never right, so when we were starting Poshmark, Navin was the first one with a term sheet, even before he'd sort of seen the business idea. And to me, that was a huge belief in me and the team I could put together. And I have the same sort of feelings about the people we bring on into the company, where uh, many of my team members here, including two of my co-founders, were involved with me in Kaboodle. One of them was a co-founder in Kaboodle. The first 20, 30, 40 people, I think, in the company, are still here seven or eight years later. They were people who are now playing very senior roles in the company, where they've gone through their ups and downs and we are always behind, two or three people left and we recruited them back into the company. So I think at the end, life, anywhere, but particularly in today's world, is so much about people and relationships. And it's the same thing we did to our community. I mean, uh, we just finished our sixth annual user conference, which was six times bigger than our first one. What was amazing was, they were so many people who were there in the first conference who had been coming to all the six conferences, and they are now like mini-celebrities in the community. And so, it's just amazing to see how a focus on people can be both rewarding at a business level, but also very gratifying at a personal level. >> It's nice to see you hit that tipping point. Congratulations on your success, it's great to see. You're a great entrepreneur. I want to ask you the question around funding, because I know, we've both been through venture capital fundings, we've been through this point building this great company you run now, and you've actually hit massive growth to a whole other level, your challenge today and going forward. This is, given it's Mayfield's 50th anniversary, you've seen a lot of changes in venture capital. A rounds used to be A rounds, now there's B and pre-C, there's all kinds of nuance, and now you have alternative funding now and global landscape you're seeing block chain and cryptocurrency, although ICO's have taken a bath because of the regulatory issue. Issues around regulation, some scams out there, actually. But venture capital's been tried and true. What's changed in venture capital the past 25 years in your view? >> I think, two things, which have happened, particularly in the last seven or eight years is there's a lot of it. And secondly, it favors the mighty more than the weak. And so, those are sort of the two big changes that have happened in the venture capital business. I think you were just mentioning is the people I used to work with, a whole range of investors, are now investing in post-growth stage funds. I mean, the same company. So everyone is sort of leveled up and leveled up and then leveled up, you know? You see venture capitalists raising two, three, four billion dollar funds; I mean, that's not venture capital, there's no way you can deploy that at the venture stage. A company is staying private much longer at different scales, which I think is probably more sort of a sign of the times. And finally, I think, it is the metrics and the scale that your business can achieve, that these are obviously very aware of, is an order of magnitude bigger than it has ever been. In fact, sort of, in some ways, unicorn, being the unicorn is uh, as sometimes as people joke, sometimes an insult. You need to be a deca-unicorn these days. So the feeling of not being enough is constant. >> And that's challenging, too, for the venture industry, because, you know, there's still the classic building blocks of entrepreneurship and venture architecture, which is, you start with an idea and you get a prototype, and certainly it's easy to get on the Cloud computing certainly, a great win for the entrepreneur; so I can see maybe some acceleration. But at the end of the day, it's still the classic blocking and tackling with building your company. >> Yes. >> Building a durable company. >> Absolutely. And you and I have both seen the '98, '99, 2000 timeframe, you know, everyone believes nothing repeats, and, you know, we certainly see, maybe not exactly the same thing, maybe it's an order of magnitude less, but there's definitely some level of exuberance we see today. But if you're building a fundamentally good business, that has robust economics, that can scale, and is based on foundational principles, with a large sort of market, I don't think that we are wrong in terms of deploying massive amounts of capital up against it. But at the same time, um, I think it also creates certain socioeconomic, as well as responsibility challenges, that I don't think we are fully facing up to, as an economy, and as a Valley. >> You've raised over a hundred million plus, so you have done some funding. A lot of funding, you have a lot of cash you've raised. When you had to go through those exercises of looking at the fundraising, 'cos, you don't want it to die on the mind, you're building a durable business, you have to go through multiple rounds of fundings. What were the key decision points for you as you started to look at this fundraising process to build your business? >> See, in the early days it was literally just about survival, I mean, there were times where I ran the business on negative balance sheets, right? So it isn't that it's been easy. I was only, I would say, the last funding round was the one that was easy, where we got multiple term sheets proactively, and the first couple of them. In between--. >> When things are scaling things are great, you know? >> In the middle of it, every single round was effectively zero to one term sheets. Every single time. We were lucky to have Mayfield as a partner, and some of our early investors like Inventus and Menlo who sort of supported us through each of these pieces of the journey. Mayfield as an anchor point. But it was really, really hard. And part of it is that, what we were doing was challenging, so many things still are, that even to process our cohort data is hard. Do you think of it as used, do you think of it as buying, do you think of it as selling, what is it? It looks like a bird, but it moves like a plane, you know? What is it? It's Superman or Superwoman, right? So that being a challenge, uh, only in the last round did we have the freedom, we could raise no money, some money, all of the money, and um, most of the focus for us, for that capital, was really to have the deep pockets that would be required for global expansion. We had actually scaled the business, at that point in time, that we didn't need too much money for domestic expansion. And in fact, not only have we not touched any money from that round, we have not touched any money from the previous round, so far; most of the money from the previous round. And so, again, part of it is you need muscle to compete in a bigger world, but at the same time, if you build a fundamentally sound business, then over time you can scale with or without money. >> And you got SAAS, sellers and service, and network effects booming and great community. That's a great tailwind for you guys, for sure. >> It is a phenomenal tailwind, and in fact, um, I was just in my management team meeting this morning, and I said, you know, we are growing, but we can grow even faster at this point, because the level of network effect we are seeing in the community is an extraordinary effect, where there's sort of second order; our community is opening up Instagram accounts to promote Poshmark to sort of go out to YouTube, so there's sort of this wild, organic movement that's happening across the country, which is just bringing out a whole different level of growth that we've ever seen. >> Yeah, there's a whole new dynamic it seems. It's interesting, I'm seeing, and not a lot of people writing stories about it are documenting it, but Masters of Scale has a whole different perspective, but no one's really talking about something that you guys are touching upon, and we're seeing it in our business. Creating an environment that has network effects, and community, and good content in this case, product for your end. Um, creates a flywheel. And what's interesting is, in this new era of people who can create value, with the ability to capture it, is really a unique formula, and I think this is the new kind of management discussion. Certainly lower prices, increased value, that's an Amazon effect. That's a, lacking the words, good example, well-documented, you do that, you're good, you're doing it, but now you have the ability for people to create value. Who can then capture it. This is almost a whole 'nother big wave. Your reaction? >> I think the power of people today is at a very unique level, right? And it can go in the negative direction, but when you harness it from a positive perspective, it's phenomenal. And to me, you know, we've started added a fifth core value recently, is that at the end, the true happiness comes from service of others, right? And if you service everyone, in our job, you're servicing our community, who's then servicing other people, and that creates an amazing sort of paradigm. And if you remove the conversation of money, because it's taken care of, it's built into the platform, then it just keeps sort of circulating. And I think that's something that people underestimate. And one of the things that you, you know, you see is that, for example, open source software, right? You start by focusing on community and then it becomes all about money, and then you forget about the community and you see many of the larger open source companies slow down, because they forget the fact that what brought them there was the community. And to me, I think--. >> If they get greedy, the project's fail. >> Exactly, exactly. And so, the hardest thing at scale to balance is how do you make sure that you're still focused on the community? >> Great stuff! Final question for you. You know, these days, with venture capital, the question always is, where's the value at? Talk about your experiences with Mayfield, and what differentiates a value add versus a value subtract investor? When should an entrepreneur feel it? What's the tell signs of someone's got a value add, and partner is not? >> I think, I think Mayfield is so aligned in so many ways with our core values, which is focus on people and focus on service, that it's just been an amazing partnership with them. You know, even in our lowest moments, I knew that we would get funded; I didn't know how it is, because I knew that Navid and Mayfield would figure out a way, so I never sort of worried about the capital after I brought in Navid and saw him in action for a year and a half. And if you're a venture capitalist, you need to provide capital! And forget about any of the services, many VCs fail that one task, which is to provide capital when you most need it, right? But beyond that, it's been a great resource. I mean, I met my co-founder through Mayfield. Tracy and I were first introduced via Mayfield. Many of our recruiting of the top executives have come from Mayfield, but they're always available as a sounding board across the pieces, so I do think that they take their service paradigm to a whole new level. >> And they support you, too, right? The support's there? >> Support and they have an HR partner who's helped, I think, with some of the recruiting issues, hiring the recruiting partnerships, et cetera. PR, other areas as we needed it. Somebody that you could call on, too, even if it was just talking about searching for a general counsel, and Mayfield has been great, even in that. Help, at this late stage of a company, so it's fantastic. >> It's a great network; people, value, paying it forward. Manish, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights, here as part of theCUBE's 50th People Network with Mayfield. Thanks for sharing your experience. >> Thanks for having me! It's been a pleasure and joy to see you after so many years as well! >> This is theCUBE here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for their 50th Anniversary as a Venture Capital Firm, sharing insights and ideas from entrepreneurs, and tech executives. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching! (electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Google Cloud here at Moscone South, in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, covering all the stop stories here, and day one of three days of coverage with siliconeangle.com, thecube.net for all the great content. Our next guest is Suzanne Frey, director of security, trust, and compliance and privacy at Google Cloud, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming in today. >> Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here today. >> Don't you love the cube that Google built out here, fits the theme, it's beautiful. >> It is mighty fly, it is awesome. It's so exciting. >> That's great. Great to see Google kind of go the next level. The energy, the people in the company I've talked to, we've been following Diane's career since VMware. I knew she was an investor in Cloud, theCUBE actually started at the Cloud Air office when they got their first round of funding, so really a savvy industry executive. Now two years in the gestation period you can kind of see it. The best of Google being exposed to the world is really kind of a great strategy, we've been commenting on that, but one of things Google has, and has had for a long time is, they've had that really open culture of openness, open source, but trust; "Do no evil's" the slogan and they have all this expertise. >> Yep. >> Is your job to harness that. Take a minute, what is your job? Are you brokering all this greatness? Are you shepherding it? Are you influencing product? What's your role? >> My role, specifically, is to ensure that we make Google Cloud the most trusted place for user data. Now, trust is a multi-faceted thing. I often say that trust starts with making sure that what you expect is what you experience. That's the foundation of it and so my job is first to start there and make sure that everything that we do is in line with the customer's expectations and it's in line with what they experience once they're in the Cloud and that's everything from making sure that we're compliant, that we handle their data responsibly in line with all the rules and regulations around the world which vary greatly. You know all the way through to making sure that we're building exceptional, simple, smart, and secure products every single day across our stack. So that's my job and it's to galvanize that, not just in product and not just in expectations, but also in the people we hire and the culture we engender. >> You know it's interesting, we live in an interesting time right now, and as they say, if you look at the global landscape; from politics, play, to technology, a transformation is happening where security trust, the data, you got GDPR happening in Europe, you got fake news on Facebook, you got users not trusting where's my data, so you have this cultural dynamic, kind of independent of the mission of the big companies where there's an opportunity to use AI for good. There's an opportunity to have a compliance model that's going to maintain that. How does that affect you guys? I'm sure it does in some way, but this is on the minds of people. Surely no one want to be hacked, they want their data to be secure. I want to control my data. I want my data to be leverageable. I want to get utility out of the system, Because it's something bigger with Google Cloud, it's not part of a system. How are you guys talk about that internally? What are some of the conversations that you guys have around this cultural shift? >> It's day one of any new product of feature we develop, those conversations occur. It's part of our process in developing any new product or feature. We have a team, in fact a large portion of my organization is entirely dedicated to reviewing and scrutinizing every single feature, every single new product we bring to bear. Even if a customer wants to build, or I should say, even if an internal developer wants to build a new model, our team is responsible for reviewing that and making sure it's in line with the commitments we have to both legal commitments as well as our customers. So it's part of, and it continues all the way through to the point where I hit the launch button and say, "This is okay to go." >> (laughs) Nice. >> So the way you measure trust is that the expectations match the experience. Now when I look at your scope, we run our business on your scope. G-mail, Inbox, I personally love Inbox, I'm like an Inbox ambassador. >> Fantastic. >> And so thank you for developing that product. Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, you count it, I mean we run our business on your products. And so I wonder sometimes are we doing it right? Some of the challenges we have I think are onboarding and off-boarding folks. When somebody leaves the company or comes on the company you want to give them access to certain sheets or certain documents and then you sort of forget to take them off. How do you handle that? What's best practice there? Are you develop tooling around that? Maybe you could take about that a little bit. >> So we do it in many, many ways. And there certainly are best practices, they are documented out there through a number of tools and papers that we produce. We also have partners that work with our customers that engender those practices, but also then we bake the technology in so that you don't have to think about these things. And a good example would be; we released Team Drives last year. Team Drives is a great example of how you manage documentation for the inbound and outbound employees. It used to be that somebody'd actually have to think, "oh wait, Joe's no longer on this, We need to move him off," And all of that. But with the Team Drive that's handled automatically. Groups is another way. Google Groups is a great way to manage access to information and the like. And then we have tools like IRM, that allow you to sort of manage copying and forwarding information. And there's some more announcements that are coming tomorrow that'll let you also handle some of these things, but I can't talk about them quite yet. So stay tuned. >> You didn't want to release it too early. >> Can you talk about how you go to market with those cause every now and then I'll get a phone call or an e-mail from somebody at Google trying to either introduce me to something, maybe sell something, but it's kind of intermittent. What's the go-to market to inform people? We're obviously a small company. We heard today, "we want to help small, large, start-ups, big companies, governments." How do you guys go to market? >> We do it in lots of different ways. We certainly leverage our communication channels online heavily and we've been ramping up, I mean our investment in marketing and Cloud and getting all of these things, I mean you can see I right here at Next. This is a huge example of how we're trying to get the word out. We're at large across all of our verticals, across all of our customer sets, because I think that is information management and so that you understand, "hey I have these great tools to bear." That's super important for us to get right and we're continuing to evolve it. >> One of the things I always admire about Google from day one, the mission has always been speed. Load the pages faster, find what you're looking for, organize the information. With security and trust now, we were talking before we came on camera, I see Cloud as an opportunity, AI's an opportunity, as Diane Green said, security is the number one worry. Dave's asked this question every year, going back to since 2012, is security a do-over with the Cloud? You guys have such great experience with Sass and Cloud; is it an opportunity for customers going Cloud-native to do security over. Your thoughts? >> Well I think about this, so ill answer this in two ways, for us at Google it's not a do-over, it's been part of our DNA from day one because we were born in the Cloud. From the moment we started to think about how we design a data center to how we design a server to how we retire discs, this was mentioned in the keynote, that's been part of our DNA from day one. So for us we don't believe it's a do-over, we actually believe we're ahead of Darwin in terms of security, well ahead of it. And we'll put our words behind it, that we do believe, bar none, that we are the most secure cloud out there. Certainly customers using G-Suite, Chromebooks, Security Keys, we mentioned that at the keynote this morning as well- zero account hijackings. No one else can make that claim and we're proud to do it. For customers, however, I think many customers are realizing Patch Tuesdays and heterogeneous operating systems and tons of different platforms with customers that are storing information on their hard drives or their thumb drives- its a nightmare for many customers who have been operating on premise for many years and I think they're waking up to realize, "wait a minute, you're going to take care of all of that. You're going to take care of it. One operating system. All managed from the Cloud. One place. My documents are going to sit there. Oh my gosh, I can sleep again if I move to the Cloud." and that's really part of the overall narrative here. >> Just to follow up on that, so that was Chromebook, G Suite, and Two-factor authentication right? >> Yes. >> You called it Titan Security, is that right? >> Yes, Titan Security Keys, correct. >> And the Two-factor authentication comes from what, is it a dongle or- >> It's actually hardware based so if you think about- two-factor's not a new term, two-factor's been around for a long time. A lot of people would have these tokens that would generate a numeric key and you'd look at that and you'd plug it in. Well that's phishable actually, that key gets transmitted when you actually authenticate and that can be picked up. >> Exposed, yeah. >> Exposed. With hardware, its all base of the hardware, there's no key that's exchanged. It's all authenticated to your device and that makes it un-phishable. >> You don't think about it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So lets talk about compliance for a second. That's part of your job. Honestly we see this year was kind of a- the earthquake, the tectonic plates of GDPR. >> Yes. (laughs) >> Certainly Google's experience, a little fine in the EU of some other areas of your business. Obviously data is a regional thing, obviously in Germany we know what's going on there, so as a customer goes global, you could be in the US, there's now policies that need to be implemented. Is that where softwares going to help? How are you guys talking to your customers and what's the solution that you guys see for compliance and making it seamless because it's a real hassle. >> Yep. >> Some sites and some companies aren't deploying their solution. Their website has been stripped down because they couldn't comply with the GDPR regulation which gives the users the ability to essentially tell you to forget me and all kinds of other things, I don't want to get into it, but the point is, that it puts the pressure on companies, like literally overnight, where it was policy. People in the database world know that data sprawls is a huge problem- people don't even know where the data is. What data base is that on. This is a huge issue. How do you guys talk about that? >> Well first I'll say that compliance is always a shared responsibility between ourselves and our customers. However, those customers who have worked with us, and have been going Cloud-native with us have found that the journey to be much much less friction-full, I will say, or I'd say its more friction-less. Because we are the team that's had to really implement the technical controls around the GDPR. And I want to emphasize, GDPR is incredibly important legislation. We believe it's very important. Two years ago we launched an initiative to be sure we were compliant on time. We're proud to say that we were among the first to announce that compliance in the Cloud. And we're really happy. Our customers have been happy. And our relationships- we take on a large responsibility for maintaining relationships with the legislators and the regulators around the world Many companies can't scale to do that and by going with Google you know you've got a tight and good relationship, a company that is focused on maintaining good relationships world-wide on that front and it's been important. >> So two years before GDPR went into effect, that's much better, most companies were two months before the fines went into effect. (laughs) >> It was roughly about two years, it wasn't quite exactly two years between the time it was announced, but it was close to that. >> But it's not just the technology problem too, which makes it so hard, it's a lot of people and a lot of process. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Shared responsibility as you said just now. >> Yes, and the fact that the data's all in one place of the Cloud, again, makes a huge huge difference with your posture, and your compliance posture for GDPR. >> Susanne, you've been at Google for over a decade, what's motivating you these days, obviously the Cloud market's pretty hot, so that's kind of a nice wave to be on. What's the culture like at Google now? What's the DNA? What's the in- cause Google Cloud's got to spring to their step, we can obviously feel it. We can see the results. But it's just the beginning of this new wave. >> Yep, yep. >> What's exciting you and what's the DNA of Google culture? Google Cloud culture? >> Well Sundar echoed this this morning and I was so happy to hear it. I'm at Google because of the mission. I'm here to manage the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful and secure. (laughs) I will add the "and secure" to my mission. I came because that was so exciting to me. As a kid I never got Encyclopedia's because my father was like, "there going to be out of date." (laughs) He know instantly. >> Data quality number one, he was smart. Data scientist- >> Yes he was, he was. And when Google started to evolve, I was so excited. I'm like, "oh my gosh, look at what's happening to information management in the world." And that's why I'm here and I'm surrounded by other fellow citizens who are so excited about that but also excited about the challenge of keeping information secure. So that's what excites me and to work around so many great data scientists and software engineers and site reliability engineers and customer engineers. Google is about engineering at it's core but we take such a human approach to working with our customers. Understanding how important their information, their productivity in the Cloud is, their security in the Cloud is, and that's what excites me every single day. >> Final question for you; talk about what you're working on. What's your guiding principles for your organization. Where are you guys hiring- obviously you mentioned earlier, which I loved, the expectation is the experience should match; that's a great quote, I think that's important but I would argue that, to add to that complexity, is that expectations that are coming are not yet known. You saying things like "block chain" for instance, that kind of hit a lot of exciting areas around security, decentralization, decentralized applications, token economics. So you're seeing the world starting to get a little bit different where those expectations are not yet seen. So you got to get out in front of that. How are you guys managing that? How are you hiring? What's the vision? >> Sure. So there's sort of three pillars that Prabhakar Raghavan talked about this morning; simple, smart, and secure. Those are kind of our guiding principles for everything we do and, for example, G Suite. How we're thinking about the future, well we're very very lucky that we are always getting low latency signals about what's happening in the world right now. We talk about spam and phishing protection and things like that and we get billions of signals every single day about malicious information or malware, ransomware, those sorts of things. So we have a very low latency view into what's happening at the next minute around the world in that respect. And that gives us a competitive edge in terms of really thinking about what's the next thing that's going to happen. We certainly know that machine learning, whether it's smart compose and smart reply, or it's actually based in security, an anomaly detection. What's an anomaly to one company, is not necessarily an anomaly to another, depends on what business you're in and the like. So investing in machine learning and understanding how to be that security guardian for our customers in an automated fashion, so the people don't have to worry about security, but we've taken care of it for them. That's the holy grail and that's what we're investing in right now. >> Suzanne thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. We were just talking before we came on, Dave and I, before we went live that if security and some of these complexities can be just services under the wire, like electricity. All cue-ade before we even turn the lights on of computing. That's kind of the goal. (laughs) So we're super early. >> Yes, absolutely. >> That's great. Director of security, trust, compliance, and privacy at Google Cloud's theCUBE. Live coverage, stay with us. This is day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. >> Thank you. (techno music)

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

(click) >> Hey, welcome everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Well, it is an excited day and we're really happy to be covering big announcements coming out of Google Next today. And we wanted to get right down here to SAP Silicon Valley Headquarters and talk to Sam Yen and get his take on what's happening up in San Francisco today. So, first off, Sam great to see ya. >> Yeah, great to see you as well. >> So, Sam you are the Managing Director of SAP Silicon Valley. Obviously, you guys have a big presence in Philly, and a big presence here in Paulo Alto. And also the Chief Design Officer. So, let's just jump into it. So, Bernd Leukert was onstage with Diane Green this morning kicking off the Google Next Conference and talking about this new relationship between SAP and Google. >> I think, first of all, it's the trend in what the industry's happening right now. If you look at companies, companies are more and more willing to go to the public cloud in terms of helping them with their infrastructure needs. The market is actually really going to double between now and 2020. So, with that we have three major announcements that we announced today. The first one was SAP's flagship products running on GCP, Google's Cloud Platform. The first one is HANA. If you know anything about SAP, HANA's been our data processing engine, memory processing engine for the last number of years. It's our flagship product that we've been talking about. And that's now certified for GCP. The second thing is really more for the, it's still part of the first announcement, but for the development community bringing HANA Express which is a downloadable version of HANA that you can put on your laptop and really get to know what HANA's all about and see how easy it is to develop on top of HANA. So, that's now available on Google Cloud Launcher. Also, SAP's cloud platform is also going to be, we're working very closely together to co-innovate together with Google. The second part of the second announcement, is taking infrastructure as a service to the next level. SAP has always had a multi-cloud strategy offering customers choice in where they want to deploy on public cloud. And Google is now available from that perspective. But beyond just infrastructure to service, we want to partner with Google to take things like data privacy and protection to the next level by offering transparency over how customers monitor and understand what's going on from the governance, risk and compliance perspective on their information. The last thing, which is really exciting as well, is bringing together productivity tools together with SAP. Google's G Suite, things like Mail and Sheets and Hangouts and things like that, and making that integrate seamlessly into the SAP backend system. >> So, so many layers to these announcements. And thank you for laying it all down. The first one, just at a high level, is clearly enterprises are comfortable with public cloud. There's now more enterprisy software firm out there than SAP. And for you guys to really get together with Google and Google Cloud, that really shows that the conversation is no longer about, "Should I go to the cloud?" or "Is the cloud safe?" or "Is it appropriate for enterprise?" But enterprises are fully all in. >> That's definitely the trend. Customers are different in their journey but more and more we're seeing that. And the numbers that I talked about in terms of the investment and spend for public cloud is growing through the roof. At the end of the day, SAP from an SAP perspective, and also from a Google perspective, we want to provide as many options for customers as we can. And we think that by doing this we're providing the best potential solutions for where a customer thinks they need to be today and tomorrow. >> Right, and it's really about workloads, right? It's not even specifically about customers. 'Cause you guys still have Google Cloud, or excuse me, SAP Cloud, recently the HANA Cloud platform recently renamed. So, you still have your own cloud if they want their own kind of enterprise cloud that you're going to run for them. Obviously, they can run SAP on their own internal cloud now you're saying they can run SAP on Google's cloud. But it's really more workload and application and use case specific as opposed to a company. >> Yeah, and I think ultimately options for the customer in terms of their particular situation. Yes, SAP will continue to have our own hosting, our own cloud as well. But you also mentioned SAP Cloud Platform. So, there's many, many different ways from a platform as a service perspective, enterprise services that we provide from a SAP perspective running on Google's infrastructure. And also leveraging the Google services that they provide on their Cloud Platform as well. >> Right, another piece that you said kind of towards the end of many, many announcements happening today, is really the developer angle. Every show, we cover a hundred shows a year, and every one is fighting for the attention of the developer, and really trying to cater to the developer. 'Cause that's where the power is. And you want a robust developer ecosystem because that's what moves things forward. So, this is a pretty interesting announcement now that developers can basically download a version of HANA onto their laptop to have an appeal to help them develop more stuff for you. >> Yeah, and I think the broader statement here is we're combining the power of the SAP development ecosystem with the millions and millions of people also in the Google development ecosystem to build solutions for customers. At the end of the day, the power of your offering is really the power of your ecosystem. And it's kind of interesting, being here in a German company actually in Silicon Valley from an SAP perspective, enterprise seems to be the new black right now. There are more consumer brands that are looking at going into the enterprise. And SAP's starting to become more and more an on-ramp into the enterprise for these companies. >> And it's interesting because public clouds, traditionally, years ago weren't really thought of as a true enterprise solution or maybe test but you'd never run your production workloads. But clearly now that's going away. That said, there's a lot of very specific issues that you have to deal with with the enterprise security, compliance, the rules around the world that are different for data sovereignty, etc. So, you guys bring a real depth of experience in those areas to this new announcement. >> Yeah, I think that's the power of the partnership if you think about Google and the public cloud, the scalability, the availability, the reach of the Google public cloud and their expertise in terms of the infrastructure and the operations. And then you combine that with SAP's experience in terms of what works from a governance, risk and compliance perspective. We have an understanding both with customers and their needs. And also working with local governments and the policies that need to be in place. So, I think it's a beautiful combination of the two companies. >> Now, the next kind of big trend that cloud is helping even accelerate more is A.I. and machine learning and you know, we're kind of going to Phase Two of what was formerly known as Big Data and Hadoop and now were moving to a much more sophisticated version of that enabled by cloud. Obviously, Google's got a ton of expertise in machine learning and A.I. You guys have been doing it on the enterprise side. Again, coming together, one plus one makes three? >> Absolutely, this is one of the exciting things that we're also, we've also talked about and announced, that we are partnering with Google to really take machine learning to the enterprise use cases. There's so much information that's going through enterprise systems. More and more information as things like Big Data, and Internet of Things, and social things are bringing information in. This is really, really fruitful area where think there's a lot of collaboration. Also, from a design perspective, once you have this information, how do you expose this stuff to the users that makes sense and really amplify human capabilities when we're talking about all this technology. >> Right, so you're sitting 6,000 miles from Waldorf, 3,000 miles from Philadelphia. How does this change things for you? You said you've been at SAP for a number of years now. You're sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley. What does this mean to you, kind of personally, and to SAP's presence in Silicon Valley to do this partnership with Google who's just right down the road and clearly one of the main powers. >> Yeah, I think it really talks about the importance of SAP's presence here in Silicon Valley. Again, as an on-ramp into the enterprise. There's lots and lots of partners that want to expand their business and figure out how they can bring their services also to the enterprise. It's almost like consumerization of IT if you will. And really, that's SAP's purpose and reason for being here. >> All right, well Sam I'll give you the last word. Great event today. Really exciting but before we know it SAP Sapphire will be upon us. I presume you guys will keep working tomorrow and have something new and special for us in Sapphire. >> Yeah, Google and SAP, we're in it for the long term. This is just the beginning. And look out for exciting announcements coming in Sapphire as well. >> All right, super. He's Sam Yen, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (energetic, techno music)

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the kue covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now welcome back to knowledge 15 everybody I'm Dave vellante and we're here this is the cube and we've been unpacking the experience that is service now knowledge knowledge 15 with this our third knowledge we did 13 14 and now 15 we're very excited to be here Nicole Tate and van Tran are here the two consultants in the IT service management space happen to be focused on health care right now but they got a lot of experience couple IT practitioners folks welcome to the cube it's great to see you so to call uh let me start with you so your first knowledge or you've been to a couple knowledge shows her so I started back in New Orleans with such okay no it's true yeah all right right so wow you've seen the transformation of knowledge along with the evolution of service now when you what do you think about this one so I'm amazed you know the first knowledge i attended I remember being overwhelmed I hadn't even implemented my first phase and so I'm sitting in these sessions and I'm just like wow these people are rockstars look at all these cool things that they're doing and I came back very energized very revived and started on my own journey after that and now I'm seeing some of these same people coming up and being their own rock stars and kind of watching the conference grow it's really impressive so if you go back van you know a few years ago so the IT and still in many organizations is of the whipping child of the organization but we've really seen a transformation in that role for particularly the clients that are the customers that are here maybe you could talk about that in your own experience yeah I started with service now back probably in 2007 and so back then it was something that was shown as something is an easy platform that you can easily configure and through the growth of service now you know it's become more complicated and clients have had more requirements so then we've seen more dedicated roles to this profession and a lot of resources are needed to be successful in the complication that we have today especially in the health care industry so it's it's it's going getting more complicated and they'll be need to be more people involved to make it successful so you both are relatively new to healthcare right it's turn over the last 12 months or so or less casing the call but you've got a lot of experience you're consulting with different organizations you know around and what's different about health care Nicole what are your first impressions so I think health care has been one of these things that's very complicated and rightfully so it's it's people's health you know it's their lives but with recent legislation and recent things that are coming down health care is being forced to be more of a product more of a service right and as the cost per patient Rises and you're getting less back from insurance right you have to get creative and there's going to have to be some disruption in this industry I'm and I see service now as a platform that will be able to streamline a lot of these complex processes put some automation behind it and really reduce some costs so you think it'll reduce our bills I hope so so van let's talk about your experiences with with service now he said started in 2007 did I hear right that's when I first he's dead okay how did that all come about it's it's still fairly new at that time so when when our our service desk was replacing a tool it was just something that you brought in and then I worked at the helpdesk at that time so I was in charge of just sort of configured to replace our old tool at that time and so and since then I've just kind of did a little fudging here and there and but as I went through my career I've had more dedicated part in service now and so now I'm a full-time developer and so I'm just doing it a lot lot more now and Nicole you were saying off-camera that your experience is you were one of the first to go beyond IT maybe you could tell us about that yeah so and when I came to the New Orleans conference I was just worried about it's an IT tool and as I was sitting there listening to some of the sessions and some of the use cases I thought you know there's there's something unique here we could we can take this really far so I came back and I did a really aggressive roadmap and I showed my boss and he says you're trying to do everything in six months and I said fine give me 12 and he says okay good luck whatever go do whatever you need to do and I met with HR facilities accounts payable engineering and then we rolled out 15 business apps in 18 months vicious very it was really nice because we had everybody using the same platform and once you get everybody using the same platform then you can automate your enterprise processes so this stuff that you know everybody has a piece of that before you have to take outside of a workflow you'd have to go door knocking and say hey it's your turn to do your part now we just you know hit the now button right it just goes everybody just got an automated task to do their keys they would do that these you go to the next piece we were able to bring a lot of products to market very fast for that house we're breaking ice new ground how did you go about succeeding there just take us through kind of the steps that he took yeah um initially HR came to me and says you know we do what you do and I send our IT you don't do what we do and he says no absolutely we have these we have incidents and she do no you don't you know you ok let's now really have a conversation and he's any starts to walk me through he says yeah you know you didn't get paid what would you think that was that was and I'm like oh it's a really big incident and he said yeah exactly so I need something that I can have as a portal for employees to come through and get services from HR and I was like that makes a lot of sense you know let's go ahead and do this so we did a proof of concept where we got everybody in the room and did an 8-hour jam session and we came out of that with actually a really good app it took three weeks to roll it out because we had to do change management and some training to the field but time to market it was literally four weeks and we had an enterprise HR you know case automation piece to it so it's really cool what was it ok but there was no app creator back then right now so how did that all work so it was me i just right clicked and created an app into the table and prayed that i did it right youryour coder by background I'm not I'm definitely from the business side of the house so I did the the proof of concept and then I had a developer come in and do some of the security and some of the more complex logic that was needed to support something like HR but there's a lot of sensitive sensitivity to data and things like that van you're a you a developer by right background or no I come the service that side so that's why what your service now developer and now my service not developer so you guys are the low coders or no coders as they say how did you get into being a developer service now well starting at the service desk you know at that time I just took calls and wrote up incidents and I moved into the application space and I still had a hand in service now and I did a little bit more coding in my application role and then in my consulting role then that's when I start to do more coding and stuff like that and so then so that's how I got in that space and I like coding yeah people wouldn't have to call me as much as when I wrecked at the service desk i was able to concentrate more and not be pulled in two different directions and as a developer i can just focus on what i'm working on in front of my screen at that time ok so I'm envisioning you know code right as code I see our developers they got code all the place and understand it maybe it's HTML maybe it's Python whatever it is so what's it like to be a service now developer it's not so much different from that it's just you have to know that there's some proprietary functions within the ServiceNow system but it's mostly javascript-based and there's some jelly and then you can do some HTML on the CMS front too but the server has a lot of tools that sort of make it a little bit easier for people who don't code very much as one of those who do code very much and then it because gives them short cousin they don't have to write everything themselves so today's developer in service now can to have the options to make it really complex if they need to or they can use the out of box tools to help them configure their application in a more efficient matter it helps with better practice or if you don't have a computer science background I have a computer science okay so that helped it does it does how hey okay so you've taken courses and you understand logic and yes yeah that definitely does have some code maybe not commercially but yeah I've been insane Nicole did you have a computer science background I don't have an MBA I'm straight up business now okay and you consider yourself now a service now developer or no you just sort of broke the ice so I'm definitely capable of putting together you know as it you know part of my role is being a champion for the organization identifying solution opportunities I can put together a POC or proof of concept within the tool and show people what they could do what life could be like if they use service now and then when you actually want to roll something out to production and have security and some automated business rules and things like that you know I'll partner with van and say help me this is the things that we want to go ahead and do here's some of the additional harder requirements that we need to solve here but yeah I'm capable of going in and doing stuff to it but the job of pieces and things like that I let the experts handle that so what makes a good developer and how does that compare to what makes a good service now developer there's got to be similarities or their differences there are slight differences what makes a good service now developers that you're aware of the best practice and you use the proprietary functions within the system some of the stuff comes with out of box and and depending on what your requirements are maybe you don't want to skirt around that you want to use that because you know you when things change on the service and Alfre you don't want your stuff to break so a good service now developer will take into account the existing out of box functionality things that you can figure and then you would code and help support that so that when you do changes and upgrades to that then your stuff wouldn't break so it's just about being conscious about what's best practice supporting the outer box functions when it's appropriate and and versus a regular developer well you wouldn't you might not have a system that you're working with you're just creating your own application so that's the general difference which you know you must be started about something else what you've seen at the very excited about your nieces and yeah so talk about what you want you've seen that's got you it's very it's very very nice and I see there has a presence that's a good idea about having a chat and the ability to do that and and I what I really like is the more support behind the mobil feature because in today it's we have the mobile feature but it but what we need may not it may not be fully supported yet but i see in geneva they're making a big push into the mobile app space and then I think that's when mobile apps going to start taking off for service now when we get to Geneva the real-time peace with angular yes that definitely supply yes okay all right a call so let's talk about n van both of you guys have one point to weigh in on this so let's take a hypothetical situation in healthcare you guys get relatively new to healthcare so you come up with a fresh perspective describe a typical healthcare situation may be using a variety of tools and a lot of stovepipes a lot of inefficiencies describe that situation and how you get from there to where you want to be and what is that state and how do you get there so one of the things that you know we're focusing on right now is standardized processes so in IT we're battling kind of the firefighting or the being a very reactive so if we can get everybody to fall into place with a standard process that allow us to have a very similar experience from the hospital with IT so if a doctor calls in they'll they'll have the very similar experience each and every time as opposed to it being somewhat varied or they have their their hook up their IT hook up if you will right the other kind of interesting piece is we do a lot of rounding so we go to the hospital and we try to find out what's better and in doing that I noticed that we have a lot of paper sheets where we file you know if a piece of equipments broken or anything you'd help with something at the hospital they're actually filling out a piece of paper it's a form for that there's a form he's a paper form you know there's an app for that will and help you there's a fourth with us it's a foreigner or stack of paper I'm in you know our field service your I'm printed if you want that's right good scan it yeah um so our field services reps then go through every morning and they collect these pieces of paper and then they dispatch out some additional people to go fix these things or replace the items I'm you know what I'd like to see is you know a mobile device there and it's just you know right there for them to be able to do that I think those are some prime opportunities that are kind of the low-hanging fruit for us from an IT perspective but I also think that there's some great things that we could do outside of IT on this platform you know supply chain managing some of the you know needle sticks you know if you take a use case like that it's a huge challenge in healthcare today and when you have a practitioner who sticks themselves with the needle they have to go and fill out a form they have to go to occupational health they have to go and do all of these different things there's a set process behind that um you know it'd be nice for them to be able to log it from their mobile device that they had this issue they would get some sort of task or some sort of notification this is hey now your next step in this process is to go do this it gets checked off that way and you can confirm that that practitioner followed the appropriate steps and then what really excites me is the opportunity to do analysis behind that so is it the the nurse who's working the 18-hour shift that always gets the needle sticks and those are higher is that the night shift is it this specific specific area that's having an issue you can start compiling some of that data and doing a lot of the reporting out of service now on how could we how could we be better I would think it's awfully challenging to do some of that analysis if it's on spreadsheets and paper and things like that now doctors aren't known for being the most aggressive users of technology at least historically uh maybe that's unfair has that changed I think I disagree with that because I think you're seeing significant significant advances in health care today and I think they're looking for technology you know I ran into a physician the other day and he's been working at the hospital for 50-plus years and he's in he says oh you're from IT and I said I am and he says when are we gonna get better technology and I thought that was really interesting because I think it shows that they're really wanting more from us he's on that's why I'm here I'm here to help so van what are some of the applications that you're working on developing or getting adopted what kind of just about everything anything like out of box like incident helping change cmdb Service Catalog discovery and then most recently I I developed and get me and my team developed a social media management app and so you know I can fix you can help control Twitter feeds and stuff like that so and then there's we also have custom apps that that might sort of support an existing medical system and so we review the process for that and then we custom-built out that request system so a request for an enhancement might come in and there'd be a workflow behind that but it's not an incident a change or a Service Catalog requests doctors tweet my corporate corporate tweets perfectly i guess it could be so what is the social media management app to that's interesting basically it would it would prevent accidental inappropriate treats or controversial treats for the organization and you would store the credentials in service now and so none of your social media team but actually need to know the credentials and so you give them the ability to post to the social media but they would have to go through service now they have to submit a suggestion for a post and it would go through a workflow and a review and there would be some of that I would have the final say and the final edit on that post and they can polish it up and make it look good and then it would say post it now and then it would go out from service now and actually post it on the twitter feed and this way you can prevent you know if their people are leaving and coming you don't have to keep changing the password you can just give a masses to service now you can just take it away so it is also much secure and it prevents people from accidentally posting stuff in sizing us that's a real concern in today's industry about accidentally posting such does that work so i have my service now credentials yeah and then i have access it's it's a access controls to this app yeah you have you would get access to service now you'd open up a record producer and you'd submit a suggestion for a post so let's say I worked in department XYZ and I say you know our company should really talk about this out there and so I would submit this post suggestion it would go through a workflow behind the scenes and it would get reviewed and if they feel that you know what we really should be talking about this then they'll review it no maybe work with a couple of people to polish it up and then they'll post it and the person who suggested it doesn't need to know the credentials but they got their post out there and so that's the power of service now you don't have to give the credential salad so is that is that how it works is pretty pretty much anybody can make a suggestion anyone can make a sort of a user-generated content I here within the organization yeah you'd get everyone to participate maybe it's just not the social media team anymore you get feedback from the entire organ asian about what they feel should be out there that's relevant to their area and maybe you didn't know that that should be something you're talking about and so you'd get that feedback you'd get to review it and maybe you don't want to post it out or maybe you do and if you do you can get some work notes and discussions on the suggestive post and when you're ready you can post it up through service now to the app now would you for instance take that app and put it in in the store in theory would you do that yeah it would be on share I mean for others too yeah yeah okay have you done that or are you planning on doing that trying to do that yeah you see the charge for it no no okay that's cool great i love free apps but I mean a lot of people want to put stuff in the store so they can you know make money right your motivation is the major Shara sharing knowledge and just help people I mean it's it's it's not a complicated program or anything like that but it's it done okay so what why recreated yeah now what's the general philosophy with sort of developing applications now that the stores here is this whole ecosystem make or buy builder by that's the what's the philosophy or I guess it depends on whether you have a big team if you have a team of 20 X developer's then you could build it yourself to exactly to your specifications and if your team is small and you're relatively small company maybe it's worth it you just buy the app there's also an advantage to making it because then you can support it you know exactly what's behind it I think you know people are going to download off of share and like put applications on the platform they need to thoroughly understand how that application was built and so that they can understand all the business rules and the logic that comes in from a management perspective I think that's really really important to vet out how those apps are been configured we could talk about services so a lot of large service organizations here systems integrators folks that are you know pretty astute on best practice within service now an IT Service Management or in your experiences past experience cars experience are you using service providers how are you using them what would you recommend in that regards a lot of people like oh wow that's a lot of money but we're talking about the family jewels here too so you have to be careful so what would you recommend there and what's your experience been so when I was at the telecommunications organization we used a lot of different partners and in what we found is that each partner kind of brings a different strengths and that really allowed us to leverage you know one partner who's really nailed asset management for example that's one that we want to partner with asset management but maybe not on HR case management another partner could be really good at you know governance risk and compliance and bring a really strong you know strong suite there that's what we want to partner with I'm kind of finding a little bit of a shift now um you know I prefer to use service now professional services you know it's the one back to Pat one throat to choke kind of thing and but they also you know are able to tap into a huge consulting you know practice so if I'm leading an implementation in healthcare I can partner with them and say I want people that have health care experience and when I was at telecommunications I said hey I need somebody that has telecommunications experience they brought their a-game to the telecommunication space so it's really important because I think while everybody does incident management there are specific use cases for these different industries and things that are the I gotchas and they've been through those things and they can bring that knowledge and I think that that's worth you know the money that they charge is bringing the blog's up this health care provider and they did it this way and this is what they found don't do that you know we've gotten a lot of help on our recent project in that area just don't do this do it this way you know specific to our our guidelines writing for our industry we're running out of time you have a van a couple couple final questions man from your perspective coming from help desk now throw them in the application development role what's the one action item you would give you know to your peers what should they be focused on to be successful as a developer I think they would need to focus more on the business and be more you know listening and gathering requirements because i think you know there might be like a developer role and that business systems analyst role and not that that's not important but it would help the developer if they had a general understanding of the business and the flow of that so I think if they could extend just beyond being a developer fully if they could understand the business in the process that would definitely help them question and think about whether what they're building even though it's based off the requirements is really the best way to do it because they have the understanding of the business process to so to call you're nodding profusely okay look van took that one what's the piece of advice you would give your your peers and be your own internal sales rep so as we're asking the development community to fill in that gap of you know the business analyst and understanding the business and coming up with creative solutions you know from a solution owner a platform owner perspective it's be the champion you know HR is not going to know the capabilities of the platform unless you're out in front of them coming up with these solutions and showing the capabilities behind it so you know be the champion because it can only benefit your organization for everybody to be using the same technology you know it's interesting IT people traditionally you wouldn't consider them the most sales oriented our marketing oriented people in the planet but you walk around this conference and and you call it use it to our champion it's a good word but internal champion internal sales people you see a lot more that it events like this generally but specifically knowledge and so that's a skill set that's new IT isn't it it's good yeah and I think you know the platform allows that right we're not spending a lot of time coding and you know being very complicated our role is really making their processes less complicated so that we can automate in the tool faster right so if I can push back on the business and say hey why are you doing it that way this is a better way to do it I'm also simplifying our lives from a development perspective and I can go to market quicker as opposed to having to build all this custom functionality to support some crazy business requirement right so I think that's why you see a lot more champions at this conference because that's the skill set that's really important to make sure you don't mess up your platform all right we'll leave it there Nicole van thanks very much thank you thanks for having us all right keep it right to everybody will be back this is knowledge 15 is the cube with the back with our next guest right after this