from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi everybody this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special digital cube presentation sponsored by IBM we're going to focus in on data op data ops in action a lot of practitioners tell us that they really have challenges operationalizing in infusing AI into the data pipeline we're going to talk to some practitioners and really understand how they're solving this problem and really pleased to bring Victoria stayshia vich who's the Global Information Systems Manager for information management at harley-davidson Vik thanks for coming to the cube great to see you wish we were face to face but really appreciate your coming on in this manner that's okay that's why technology's great right so you you are steeped in a data role at harley-davidson can you describe a little bit about what you're doing and what that role is like definitely so obviously a manager of information management >> governance at harley-davidson and what my team is charged with is building out data governance at an enterprise level as well as supporting the AI and machine learning technologies within my function right so I have a portfolio that portfolio really includes DNA I and governance and also our master data and reference data and data quality function if you're familiar with the dama wheel of course what I can tell you is that my team did an excellent job within this last year in 2019 standing up the infrastructure so those technologies right specific to governance as well as their newer more modern warehouse on cloud technologies and cloud objects tour which also included Watson Studio and Watson Explorer so many of the IBM errs of the world might hear about obviously IBM ISEE or work on it directly we stood that up in the cloud as well as db2 warehouse and cloud like I said in cloud object store we spent about the first five months of last year standing that infrastructure up working on the workflow ensuring that access security management was all set up and can within the platform and what we did the last half of the year right was really start to collect that metadata as well as the data itself and bring the metadata into our metadata repository which is rx metadata base without a tie FCE and then also bring that into our db2 warehouse on cloud environment so we were able to start with what we would consider our dealer domain for harley-davidson and bring those dimensions within to db2 warehouse on cloud which was never done before a lot of the information that we were collecting and bringing together for the analytics team lived in disparate data sources throughout the enterprise so the goal right was to stop with redundant data across the enterprise eliminate some of those disparity to source data resources right and bring it into a centralized repository for reporting okay Wow we got a lot to unpack here Victoria so but let me start with sort of the macro picture I mean years ago you see the data was this thing that had to be managed and it still does but it was a cost was largely a liability you know governance was sort of front and center sometimes you know it was the tail that wagged the value dog and then the whole Big Data movement comes in and everybody wants to be data-driven and so you saw some pretty big changes in just the way in which people looked at data they wanted to you know mine that data and make it an asset versus just a straight liability so what what are the changes that you discerned in in data and in your organization over the last let's say half a decade we to tell you the truth we started looking at access management and the ability to allow some of our users to do some rapid prototyping that they could never do before so what more and more we're seeing as far as data citizens or data scientists right or even analysts throughout most enterprises is it well they want access to the information they want it now they want speed to insight at this moment using pretty much minimal Viable Product they may not need the entire data set and they don't want to have to go through leaps and bounds right to just get access to that information or to bring that information into necessarily a centralized location so while I talk about our db2 warehouse on cloud and that's an excellent example of one we actually need to model data we know that this is data that we trust right that's going to be called upon many many times from many many analysts right there's other information out there that people are collecting because there's so much big data right there's so many ways to enrich your data within your organization for your customer reporting the people are really trying to tap into those third-party datasets so what my team has done what we're seeing right change throughout the industry is that a lot of teams and a lot of enterprises are looking at s technologists how can we enable our scientists and our analysts right the ability to access data virtually so instead of repeating right recuperating redundant data sources we're actually ambling data virtualization at harley-davidson and we've been doing that first working with our db2 warehouse on cloud and connecting to some of our other trusted versions of data warehouses that we have throughout the enterprise that being our dealer warehouse as well to enable obviously analysts to do some quick reporting without having to bring all that data together that is a big change I see the fact that we were able to tackle that that's allowed technology to get back ahead because most backup Furnish say most organizations right have given IT the bad rap wrap up it takes too long to get what we need my technologists cannot give me my data at my fingertips in a timely manner to not allow for speed to insight and answers the business questions at point of time of delivery most and we've supplied data to our analysts right they're able to calculate aggregate brief the reporting metrics to get those answers back to the business but they're a week two weeks too late the information is no longer relevant so data virtualization through data Ops is one of the ways and we've been able to speed that up and act as a catalyst for data delivery but we've also done though and I see this quite a bit is well that's excellent we still need to start classifying our information and labeling that at the system level we've seen most most enterprises right I worked at Blue Cross as well with IBM tool had the same struggle they were trying to eliminate their technology debt reduce their spend reduce the time it takes for resources working on technologies to maintain technologies they want to reduce their their IT portfolio of assets and capabilities that they license today so what do they do to do that it's time to start taking a look at what systems should be classified as essential systems versus those systems that are disparate and could be eliminated and that starts with data governance right so okay so your your main focus is on governance and you talked about real people want answers now they don't want to have to wait they don't want to go big waterfall process so what was what would you say was sort of some of the top challenges in terms of just operationalizing your data pipelining getting to the point that you are today you know I have to be quite honest um standing up the governance framework the methodology behind it right to get it data owners data stewards at a catalog established that was not necessarily the heavy lifting the heavy lifting really came with I'm setting up a brand new infrastructure in the cloud for us to be quite honest um we with IBM partnered and said you know what we're going to the cloud and these tools had never been implemented in the cloud before we were kind of the first do it so some of the struggles that we aren't they or took on and we're actually um standing up the infrastructure security and access management network pipeline access right VPN issues things of that nature I would say is some of the initial roadblocks we went through but after we overcame those challenges with the help of IBM and the patience of both the Harley and IBM team it became quite easy to roll out these technologies to other users the nice thing is right we at harley-davidson have been taking the time to educate our users today up for example we had what we call the data bytes a Lunch and Learn and so in that Lunch and Learn what we did is we took our entire GIS team our global information services team which is all of IT through these new technologies it was a form of over 250 people with our CIO and CTO on and taking them through how do we use these tools what are the purpose of schools why do we need governance to maintain these pools why is metadata management important to the organization that piece of it seems to be much easier than just our initial scanning it up so it's good enough to start letting users in well sounds like you had real sponsorship from from leadership and input from leadership and they were kind of leaning into the whole process first of all is that true and how important is that for success oh it's essential we often said when we were first standing up the tools to be quite honest is our CIO really understand what it is that were for standing up as our CIO really understand governance because we didn't have the time to really get that face-to-face interaction with our leadership so I myself made it a mandate having done this previously at Blue Cross to get in front of my CIO and my CTO and educate them on what it is we are exactly standing up and once we did that it was very easy to get at an executive steering committee as well as an executive membership Council right I'm boarded with our governance council and now they're the champions of that it's never easy that was selling governance to leadership and the ROI is never easy because it's not something that you can easily calculate it's something that has to show its return on investment over time and that means that you're bringing dashboards you're educating your CIO and CTO and how you're bringing people together how groups are now talking about solutions and technologies in a domain like environment right where you have people from at an international level we have people from Asia from Europe from China that join calls every Thursday to talk about the data quality issue specific to dealer for example what systems were using what solutions on there are on the horizon to solve them so that now instead of having people from other countries that work for Harley as well as just even within the US right creating one-off solutions that are answering the same business questions using the same data but creating multiple solutions right to solve the same problem we're now bringing them together and we're solving together and we're prioritizing those as well so that return on investment necessarily down the line you can show that is you know what instead of this printing into five projects we've now turned this into one and instead of implementing four systems we've now implemented one and guess what we have the business rules and we have the classification I to this system so that you CIO or CTO right you now go in and reference this information a glossary a user interface something that a c-level can read interpret understand quickly write dissect the information for their own need without having to take the long lengthy time to talk to a technologist about what does this information mean and how do i how do I use it you know what's interesting is take away based on what you just said is you know harley-davidson is an iconic brand cool company with fuckin motorcycles right and but you came out of an insurance background which is a regulated industry where you know governance is sort of de rigueur right I mean it's it's a table steak so how are you able that arleigh to balance the sort of tension between governance and the sort of business flexibility so there's different there's different lovers I would call them right obviously within healthcare in insurance the importance becomes compliance and risk and regulatory right they're big pushes gosh I don't want to pay millions of dollars for fines start classifying this information enabling security reducing risk all that good stuff right for Harley Davidson it was much different it was more or less we have a mission right we want to invest in our technologies yet we want to save money how do we cut down the technologies that we have today reduce our technology spend yet and able our users have access to more information in a timely manner that's not an easy that's not an easy pass right um so what we did is I took that my married governance part-time model and our time model is specific worried they're gonna tolerate an application we're going to invest in an application we're gonna migrate an application or we're gonna eliminate that so I'm talking to my CIO said you know we can use governance the classifier system help act as a catalyst when we start to implement what it is we're doing with our technologies which technologies are we going to eliminate tomorrow we as IG cannot do that unless we discuss some sort of business impact unless you look at a system and say how many users are using us what reports are essential the business teams do they need this system is this something that's critical for users today to eat is this duplicate 'iv right we have many systems that are solving the same capability that is how I sold that off my CIO and it made it important to the rest of the organization they knew we had a mandate in front of us we had to reduce technology spend and that really for me made it quite easy and talking to other technologists as well as business users on why if governance is important why it's going to help harley-davidson and their mission to save money going forward I will tell you though that the businesses of biggest value right is the fact that they now owns the data they're more likely right to use your master data management systems like I said I'm the owner of our MDM services today as well as our customer knowledge center today they're more likely to access and reference those systems if they feel that they built the rule and they own the rules in those systems so that's another big value add to write as many business users will say ok you know you think I need access to this system I don't know I'm not sure I don't know what the data looks like within it is it easily accessible is it gonna give me the reporting metrics that I need that's where governance will help them for example like our state a scientist beam using a catalog right you can browse your metadata you can look at your server your database your tables your fields understand what those mean understand the classifications the formulas within them right they're all documented in a glossary versus having to go and ask for access to six different systems throughout the enterprise hoping right that's Sally next few that told you you needed access to these systems was right just to find out that you don't need the access and hence it took you three days to get the access anyway that's why a glossary is really a catalyst a lot of that well it's really interesting what you just said about you went through essentially an application rationalization exercise which which saved your organization money that's not always easy because you know businesses even though the you know IIT may be spending money on these systems businesses don't want to give them up but you were able to use it sounds like you're able to use data to actually inform which applications you should invest in versus you know sunset as well you'd sounds like you were giving the business a real incentive to go through this exercise because they ended up as you said owning the data well then what's great right who wants pepper what's using the old power and driving a new car if they can buy the I'm sorry bull owning the old car right driving the old park if they can truly own a new car for a cheaper price nobody wants to do that I've even looked at Tesla's right I can buy a Tesla for the same prices I can buy a minivan these days I think I might buy the Tesla but what I will say is that we also use that we built out a capabilities model with our enterprise architecture team and building that capabilities model we started to bucket our technologies within those capabilities models right like AI machine learning warehouse on cloud technologies are even warehousing technologies governance technologies you know those types of classifications today integrations technologies reporting technologies by kind of grouping all those into a capabilities matrix right and was Eve it was easy for us to then start identifying alright we're the system owners for these when it comes to technologies who are the business users for these based on that right let's go talk to this team the dealer management team about access to this new profiling capability with an IBM or this new catalog with an IBM right that they can use stay versus this sharepoint excel spreadsheets they were using for their metadata management right or the profiling tools that were old you know ten years old some of our sa peoples that they were using before right let's sell them on the noodles and start migrating them that becomes pretty easy because I mean unless you're buying some really old technology when you give people a purview into those new tools and those new capabilities especially with some of the IBM's new tools we have today there the buy-in is pretty quick it's pretty easy to sell somebody on something shiny and it's much easier to use than some of the older technologies let's talk about the business impact in my understanding is you were trying to increase the improve the effectiveness of the dealers not not just go out and brute force sign up more dealers were you able to achieve that outcome and what does it meant for your business yes actually we were so right now what we did is we slipped something called a CDR and that's our consumer dealer and development repository right that's where a lot of our dealer information resides today it's actually argue ler warehouse we had some other systems that we're collecting that information Kalinin like speed for example we were able to bring all that reporting man to one location sunset some of those other technologies but then also enable for that centralized reporting layer which we've also used data virtualization to start to marry submit information to db2 warehouse on cloud for users so we're allowing basically those that want to access CDR and our db2 warehouse and called dealer information to do that within one reporting layer um in doing so we were able to create something called a dealer harmonized ID really which is our version of we have so many dealers today right and some of those dealers actually sell bytes some of those dealers sell just apparel material some of those dealers just sell parts of those dealers right can we have certain you IDs kind of a golden record mastered information if you will right bought back in reporting so that we can accurately assess the dealer performance up to two years ago right it was really hard to do that we had information spread out all over it was really hard to get a good handle on what dealers were performing and what dealers weren't because was it was tough right for our analysts to wrangle that information and bring it together it took time many times we you would get multiple answers to one business question which is never good right one one question should have one answer if it's accurate um that is what we worked on within us last year and that's where really our CEO so the value at is now we can start to act on what dealers are performing at an optimal level versus what dealers are struggling and that's allowed even our account reps or field steel fields that right to go work with those struggling dealers and start to share with them the information of you know these are what some of our stronger dealer performing dealers are doing today that is making them more affecting it inside sorry effective is selling bikes you know these are some of the best practices you can implement that's where we make right our field staff smarter and our dealers smarter we're not looking to shut down dealers we just want to educate them on how to do better well and to your point about a single version of the truth if you will the the lines of business kind of owning their own data that's critical because you're not spending all your time you know pointing at fingers trying to understand the data if the if the users own it then they own it I and so how does self-service fit in were you able to achieve you know some level of self-service how far could you and you go there we were we did use some other tools I'll be quite honest aside from just the IBM tools today that's enabled some of that self-service analytics si PSAC was one of them Alteryx is another big one that we like to that our analyst team likes to use today to wrangle and bring that data together but that really allowed for our analysts spread in our reporting teams to start to build their own derivations their transformations for reporting themselves because they're more user interface space versus going in the backend systems and having to write straight pull right sequel queries things of that nature it usually takes time then requires a deeper level of knowledge then what we'd like to allow for our analysts right to have today I can say the same thing with the data scientist scheme you know they use a lot of the R and Python coding today what we've tried to do is make sure that the tools are available so that they can do everything they need to do without us really having to touch anything and I will be quite honest we have not had to touch much of anything we have a very skilled data scientist team so I will tell you that the tools that we put in place today Watson explore some of the other tools as well they haven't that has enabled the data scientists to really quickly move do what they need to do for reporting and even in cases where maybe Watson or Explorer may not be the optimal technology right for them to use we've also allowed for them to use some of our other resources are open source resources to build some of the models that they're that they were looking to build well I'm glad you brought that up Victoria because IBM makes a big deal out of you know being open and so you're kind of confirming that you can use third-party tools and and if you like you know tool vendor ABC you can use them as part of this framework yeah it's really about TCO right so take a look at what you have today if it's giving you at least 80% of what you need for the business or for your data scientists or reporting analysts right to do what they need to do it's to me it's good enough right it's giving you what you need it's pretty hard to find anything that's exactly 100 percent it's about being open though to when you're scientists or your analysts find another reporting tool right that requires minimal maintenance or let's just say did a scientist flow that requires minimal maintenance it's free right because it's open source IBM can integrate with that and we can enable that to be a quicker way for them to do what they need to do versus telling them no right you can't use the other technologies or the other open source information out there for you today you've got to use just these spools that's pretty tough to do and I think that would shut most IT shops down pretty quick within larger enterprises because it would really act as a roadblock to allow most of our teams right to do what they need to do reporting well last question so a big part of this the data ops you know borrowing from DevOps is this continuous integration continuous improvement you know kind of ongoing MOOC raising the bar if you will what do you see going from here oh I definitely see I see a world I see a world of where we're allowing for that rapid prototyping like I was talking about earlier I see a very big change in the data industry you said it yourself right we are in the brink of big data and it's only gonna get bigger there are organizations right right now that have literally understood how much of an asset their data really is today but they're starting to sell their data ah to other of their similar people are smaller industries right similar vendors within the industry similar spaces right so they can make money off of it because data truly is an asset now the key to it that was obviously making sure that it's curated that it's cleanse that it's rusted so that when you are selling that back you can't really make money off of it but we've seen though and what I really see on the horizon is the ability to vet that data right is in the past what have you been doing the past decade or just buying big data sets we're trusting that it's you know good information we're not doing a lot of profiling at most organizations arts you're gonna pay this big top dollar you're gonna receive this third-party data set and you're not gonna be able to use it the way you need to what I see on the horizon is us being able to do that you know we're building data Lake houses if you will right we're building um really those Hadoop link environments those data lakes right where we can land information we can quickly access it we can quickly profile it with tools that it would take hours for an ALICE write a bunch of queries do to understand what the profile of that data look like we did that recently at harley-davidson we bought and some third-party data evaluated it quickly through our agile scrum team right within a week we determined that the data was not as good as it as the vendor selling it right pretty much sold it to be and so we told the vendor we want our money back the data is not what we thought it would be please take the data sets back now that's just one use case right but to me that was golden it's a way to save money and start betting the data that we're buying otherwise what I would see in the past or what I've seen in the past is many organizations are just buying up big third-party data sets and just saying okay now it's good enough we think that you know just because it comes from the motorcycle and council right for motorcycles and operation Council then it's good enough it may not be it's up to us to start vetting that and that's where technology is going to change data is going to change analytics is going to change is a great example you're really in the cutting edge of this whole data op trend really appreciate you coming on the cube and sharing your insights and there's more in the crowd chatter crowd chatter off the Thank You Victoria for coming on the cube well thank you Dave nice to meet you it was a pleasure speaking with you yeah really a pleasure was all ours and thank you for watching everybody as I say crowd chatting at flash data op or more detail more Q&A this is Dave Volante for the cube keep it right there but right back right after this short break [Music]

>> Narrator: Live, from New Orleans, It's the Cube covering Veeamon 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Bayou everybody, this the Cube, the leader in LIVE tech coverage. My name is Dave Velanted. I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is VeeamON 2017, two days of wall to wall coverage from the CUBE. Harley Carter is here as a solution architect at Scania. We're going to have a case study on transportation. Talk to the customers, we love when we get the practitioners on, we can pick your brain about what's really happening. Harley welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> How's the conference going, what do you think of VeeamON? >> It's good. I'd say for us Veeam is becoming sort of more of a strategic part of our business now. We rely on it more and more, so I'm excited to be here and learn some of the new features, what's coming. >> Great, we'll come back to that. And I want to ask you to set up your business a little bit. Tell us about your business, you know, Scania, transportation company. Huge company, actually. Many many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees. What's your business all about, what are the drivers in your business that are driving technology? >> Yeah so our business set up, so I work for Scania in the UK. And we act as the main sort of wholesaler for the UK. And we also own half of the retail network in the UK. So we have sort of two-pronged attack really. So we're responsible for bringing the vehicles into the country and shipping them out to our distributors. And then we also sell directly to the customer as well. So you know, those two main bits of focus for us. And I think like most other companies at the moment, we're finding that more and more or our services are changing to be in digital services. We sort of position ourselves in the market as the premium product. We're considerably more expensive than some of the competitors, and then in order to back that up, we have to give the full service and we have to give great service to the customers, and great backup services. So we're moving to more and more supporting services around the trucks. So for example we sell our telematics packages, driver training packages, and more a lot of those are more digital than they used to be. We're really an engineering company anymore. >> Okay so the priority really is to drive new sources of value through digital, as opposed to-- I mean, a lot of times when we ask that question we hear, do more with less, cut costs, that sort of table stakes is what I'm referring to. >> We're past that stage now and we're having to add more and more and more value to the customer to keep up our sort of proposition as the premium brand. >> So telematics as an example. You're saying you're embedding telematics into your products and providing all the telematic services? >> So it comes with sort of a full telematics package, and then depending on the customer needs, if they're a large fleet customer or you know we have some sort of small, people who own their own truck, drivers. They can subscribe to different levels of the package and it gives them a lot more information about their driving habits. And say for fleet customers, they can track vehicles. One of the biggest costs for our large fleet customers is fuel for the vehicles, and you know we sell telematics and training packages which helps them reduce their fuel consumption. And so it adds a lot of monetary value for them as well as just increased uptime for the vehicle. >> So that's cloud based service, obviously. Okay and so you've got to product the data, digital's all about data, that's one thing that's clear. Digital transformation, it gets really fuzzy, but it's data. (laughs) So you got to protect the data. So you have to architect a solution around that. So paint a picture of your environment. If we had to draw a schematic, what would it look like? Could you describe sort of the, we got the telematics piece, but what other sort of apps are you supporting? What's the infrastructure look like? And very importantly, how are you protecting the data? >> So our infrastructure, we're pretty much, I'd say 95% virtualized these days. We're all VMware, and we do have a small hype for the environment of Citrix VDI. The actual server and applications is all in VMware. And we have a main data center at our head office in Milton Keynes, which is to say a bit north of London. So pretty much everything is hosted internally within that data center. Then we have a Lacerte location facility which is about 30 miles away, we rent rack space in another data center. So historically we were purely onsite, and then more recently we started to try and move to keeping things available across the two data centers. And you know Veeam helps us with that, the actual backups and recoveries and replication between the data centers. >> What are the key apps that you're sort of managing? >> We have pretty much everything I guess. We have Sequel databases, we use Microsoft Dynamics, CRM. We have lots and lots of internal web apps and Windows applications that have been developed internally. We have small Sharepoint installation. So we're mostly Microsoft based, but within the Microsoft stack we've probably got most of the products, in one place or another. >> You mentioned the word availability. What does that mean to your business? You know how critical is it for you to be always on? >> From the retail side, the customer facing side, most of our depos do operate 27 seven. So they will have customs coming in and out, all day every day, you know all night. 365 days of the year, so. The actual retail systems have to be online all the time. As we mentioned, some of the more sort of online systems now for customers, obviously they're designed a lot like systems are. The customers can access them wherever they are, whatever they need. Those have to be online all the time. Then as we support the retail network with a lot of backend systems, we provide IT services for some of our independent dealers as well. So you know if they sign up to be this kind of dealer, they use some of our central systems. So we have to support those employees, the actual Scania employees. A lot of those aren't 27 seven, but still, from early to late in the evening, there are people working all the time. >> And what do you see from an IT standpoint? You've got your customers, some of those have other customers there. Speak a little bit kind of to the role of IT that it plays in driving the business forward. >> Yeah, I think it's becoming more and more realized that IT is a business driver rather than (laughs) the cost that we were probably seen as, historically. >> It's still bloody expensive. >> It is. There's no getting around that. Someone's got to pay for it, but at least people are seeing the benefits. But we are, as we said, trying to create new services and things for the customers. So we're having to insure that we have the infrastructure in place that we can roll out new products and services go to market quicker. The agility that's being mentioned all the time now for the digital transformations. So it's making sure that we're in a good position to be able to react to business demands and to supply the business with whatever they need, when they need it. >> You said that VM is becoming more strategic to your operations. Do you have any key metrics that you could share with you know your peers in the industry? You know what did you get by deploying it, to sleep easier, you know? (talking over each other) You know, be able to do other things. What are some of the key results? >> I guess some of the main benefits for us is that is simple to use. More and more has been added to the product all the time, but it's simple to set up and it does just work. So you know with the solutions we've had before, we were never 100% confident that, should a disaster happen, that we would really be able to rely on everything. We do test, but. >> Maybe he tested it, but didn't test it as much. Now do you run regular tests on it? >> We do run regular tests, and there's some of the built in tools within VM give us those options, sort of automated options, like shore back up and shore replica. So we get automatic verification that the backups have actually worked, and that we can restore machines and data from them. So definitely takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. Which as you say helps us sleep easier. >> How would you describe your data protection strategy? Do you offer-- So presuming data protection is a service and you've got different service levels for different workloads, different applications, right? So how do you approach architecting that generally and specifically, where does Veeam fit? >> So Veeam for us does cover pretty much the whole range of it. So we use it for backups. >> Dave: That's your primary data protection platform? >> That is basically it, yes. So we do have actual storage based replication between the data centers. So I guess we have that level, but as far as actual recovery in a disaster, then we do rely on Veeam a lot. So we use it with disk backups, tape backups. We use pretty much all the features that we can to leverage out investment as much as possible. >> Is it essentially a perpetual incremental, you know once you seed the base? >> We do use it in that mode. So we have perpetual incrementals which backup to our main site. Those copies for those backups then get copied over to the disaster recovery site, the core location center. And then the copies at that site then get taken off to tape as well. And then also the DR center, it uses like the grandfather son backup schemes. So we have shorter term retention that's duplicated across both sites, long term attention the Colo sites, and then also tape backups. >> And when you sit down-- Well do you sit down with a line of business to determine sort of the value of the data that you're protecting? Do you sort of provide that estimate? Do you speak in terms of RPO and RTO to the business, or do you talk in different terms? Like on a scale of one to 10 how important is this data? Or how much money do you have to spend? Or do you not do charge backs? Help us understand how you decide-- >> We don't do charge backs, so we probably don't go into as much detail as if we did. But there's been more of a company wide business continuity project going on recently, so we had to have those conversations with pretty much all the business areas. >> Dave: You have, you said? >> Yeah, so how important is it? How long can you live without it? What are your backup plans should the system be unavailable? Of course if you ask people how often they want it backed up, how much can they afford to lose, everyone says nothing. But then they think about it a bit more, and it comes to, exactly, it comes to more realistic estimates. >> Okay but so do you guys, you guys are responsible for providing that level of service based on the result of that survey, if I can call it that. And it's your job to make sure that you're constantly refreshing that service level. And then living up to it. And so you're able to offer, if I understand it correctly, a very high degree of granularity? >> Yeah we have a few different options. I mean, when we roll in new products and new services, we have a default, if you know what I mean. So you know by default it will back up this often. We'll keep this many copies, we'll replicate it this often. But then, as you say, we discuss with the business, is that acceptable, you know, does it need to be that often? Does it need to be more? So we can tailor quite simply, and then you know there are a lot of different options in Veeam and lots of different ways of doing basically the same thing. But it makes it simple for us. We don't have invest a huge amount of time tailoring solutions to different applications. A couple of tick boxes and change a few numbers and we're basically there. >> Does security considerations come into the discussion of backup at all? >> It does. I mean I guess with some of the more recent attacks and things we've had to start thinking about it a bit more. You know like a separate networks, and you know trying to go into the technicalities of air gapping some of the actual backups, more than we did in the past. I don't know, I don't think we're 100% there yet with that side of things, but it's definitely higher on the agenda than it used to be. >> And how 'about cloud. We've heard some announcements today, we've heard sort of a strategy, that it's sort of on prim, on prim to cloud, cloud to on prim, cloud to cloud. Where are you with cloud and how are you using-- >> At the moment we are entirely on prim. There are a couple of Sass apps that we use, but we don't actually have any VMs or anything in the cloud at all. And it's been more historical than anything. Our parent company have a very heavy R&D focus, so all the actual research on the trucks happens in Sweden. And they've been quite anti-cloud I guess, sort of IP concerns. >> So your telematics offering is your cloud? >> Harley: It is, yeah yeah. >> Oh okay, so you're a cloud service provider. Everybody's becoming a cloud service provider or a software company, it's all part of the digital transformation I guess, right? So last question is, again, we come back to the show. Things you've learned, you know what brought you here. Some of the take aways. >> Yeah so, as I said it is becoming quite a strategic part of our infrastructure solution. So one of the things for me here was to learn what's next. So you know we like to stay up to speed and try and plan as far ahead as we can. What other new features can we use, what options does it give us. So we're interested to hear some of the options this morning. The lot about CDP, that sounded quite interesting. That again gives another different option that we don't have today. So for some of the more critical services, we could look at that as well as the sort of ray based replication that we have at the moment. And again it's good to talk to different customers, you know a lot of people have the same experiences and are going through the same issues, so it's always good to talk to different people. And just you know try to soak up as much information as I can while I'm here. >> Harley thanks very much for coming on the CUBE, appreciate it. All right keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with out next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Interconnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone we're here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay, theCUBE's exclusive three day coverage of IBM Interconnect 2017, I'm John Furrier. My co-host, Dave Velliante. Our next guest is Harley Davis, who's the VP of decision management at IBM. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> Thanks for your time today, you've got a hot topic, you've got a hot area, making decisions in real-time with data being cognitive, enterprise strong, and data first is really, really hard. So, welcome to theCUBE. What's your thoughts? Because we were talking before we came on about data, we all love, we're all data geeks but the value of the data is all contextual. Give us your color on the data landscape and really the important areas we should shine a light on, that customers are actively working to extract those insights. >> So, you know, traditionally, decisions have really been transactional, all about taking decisions on systems of record, but what's happening now is, we have the availability of all this data, streaming it in real-time, coming from systems of record, data about the past, data about the present, and then data about the future as well, so when you take into account predictive analytics models, machine learning, what you get is kind of data from the future if I can put it that way and what's interesting is how you put it all together, look for situations of risk, opportunity, is there a fraud that's happening now? Is there going to be a lack of resources at a hospital when a patient checks in? How do we put all that context together, look into the future and apply business policies to know what to do about it in real-time and that's really the differentiating use cases that people are excited about now and like you say, it's a real challenge to put that together but it's happening. >> It's happening, and that's, I think that's the key thing and there's a couple megatrends going on right now that's really propelling this. One is machine learning, two is the big data ecosystem as we call it, the big data ecosystem has always been, okay, Hadoop was the first wave, then you saw Spark, and then you're seeing that evolving now to a whole nother level moving data at rest and data in motion is a big conversation, how to do that together, not just I'm a batch only, or real-time only, the integration of those two. Then you combine that with the power of cloud and how fast cloud computing, with compute power, is accelerating, those two forces with machine learning, and IOT, it's just amazing. >> It's all coming together and what's interesting is how you bridge the gap, how you bring it all together, how you create a single system that manages in real-time all this information coming in, how you store it, how you look at, you know, history of events, systems of record and then apply situation detection to it to generate events in real-time. So, you know, one of the things that we've been working on in the decision management lab is a system called decision server insights, which is a big real-time platform, you send a stream of events in, it gets information from systems of records, you insert analytics, predictive analytics, machine learning models into it and then you write a series of situation detection rules that look at all that information and can say right now this is what's happening, I link it in with what's likely to happen in the future, for example I can say my predictive analytics model says based on this data, executed right now, this customer, this transaction is likely, 90% likely to be a fraud and then I can take all the customer information, I can apply my rule and I can apply my business policy to say well what do I do about that? Do I let it go through anyway? Because it's okay, do I reject it? Do I send it to a human analyst? We got to put all that together. >> So that use case that you just described, that's happening today, that's state of the art today, so one of the challenges today, and we all know fraud detection's got much, much better in the last several years, it used to take, if you ever found it, it would take six months, right? And it's too late, but still a lot of false positives, that'll negate a transaction, now that's a business rule decision, right? But are we at the point where even that's going to get better and better and better? >> Well, absolutely. I mean the whole, there have been two main ways to do fraud detection in the past. The first one is kind of long scale predictive analytics that you train every few months and requires, you know, lots and lots of history of data but you don't get new use cases that come up in real-time, like you don't have the Ukrainian hacker who decides, you know, if I do a payment from this one website then I can grab a bunch of money right now and then you have the other alternative, which is having a bunch of human analysts who look for cases like that guy and put it in as business rules and what's interesting is to combine the two, to retrain the models in real-time, and still apply the knowledge that the human analysts can get in real-time, and that's happening every day in lots of companies now. >> And that idea of combining transactional data and analytics, you know, has become popularized over the last couple of years, one obvious use case there is ad-tech, right? Making offers to people, marketing, what's the state of that use case? >> Well, let's look at it from the positive perspective. What we are able to do now is take information about consumers from multiple sources, you can look at the interaction that you've had with them, let's say you're a financial services company, you get all sorts of information about a company, about a customer, sorry, from the CRM system, from the series of interactions you've had with them, from what they've looked at on your website, but you can also get additional information about them if you know them by their Twitter handle or other social media feeds, you can take information from their Twitter feeds, for example, apply some cognitive technology to extract information from that do sentiment analysis, do natural language processing, you get some sense of meaning about the tweets and then you can combine that in real-time in a system like the one I talked about to say ah, this is the moment, right here, where this guy's interested in a new car, we think he just got a promotion or a raise because he's now putting more money into the bank and we see tweets saying "oh I love that new Porsche 911, "can't wait to go look at it in the showroom," if we can put those things together in real-time, why not send him a proactive offer for a loan on a new car, or put him in touch with a dealer? >> No and sometimes as a consumer I want that, you know, when I'm looking for say, scarce tickets to a show or a play-off game or something and I want the best offer and I'm going to five or six different websites, and somebody were to make me an offer, "hey, here are better seats for a lower price," I would be thrilled. >> So geographic information is interesting too for that, so let's say, for example, that you're, you're traveling to Napa Valley and let's say that we can detect that you just, you know, took out some money from the bank, from your ATM in Napa, now we know you're in Napa, now we know that you're a good customer of the bank, and we have a deal with a tour operator, a wine tour operator, so let's spontaneously propose a wine tour to you, give you a discount on that to keep you a good customer. >> Yeah, so relevant offers like that, as a consumer I'd be very interested in. All too often, at least lately, I feel like we're in the first and second innings of that type of, you know, system, where many of the offers that you get are just, wow, okay, for three weeks after I buy the dishwasher, I'm getting dishwasher ads, but it's getting better, you can sort of see it and feel it. >> You can see it getting a little better. I think this is where the combination of all these technologies with machine learning and predictive analytics really comes to the fore and where the new tools that we have available to data scientists, things like, you know, the data scientist experience that IBM offers and other tools, can help you produce a lot more segmented and targeted analytics models that can be combined with all the other information so that when you see that ad, you say oh, the bank really understands me. >> Harley, one of the things that people are working on right now and most customers, your customers and potential customers that we talk to is I got the insights coming, and I'm working on that, and we're pedaling as fast as we can, but I need actionable insight, this is a decision making thing, so decisions are now what people want to do, so that's what you do, so there's some stats out there that decision making can be less than 30 minutes based on good data, the life of the data, as short as six seconds, this speaks to the data in motion, humans aside of it, I might be on my mobile phone, I might be looking at some industrial equipment, whatever, I could be a decision maker in the data center, this is a core problem, what are you guys doing in this area, because this is really a core problem. Or an opportunity. >> Well this all about leveraging, you know, event driven architectures, Kafka, Spark and all the tools that work with it so that we can grab the data in real-time as it comes in, we can associate it with the rest of the context that's relevant for making a decision, so basically with action, when we talk about actionable insights, what are we talking about? We're talking about taking data in real-time, structured, unstructured data, having a framework for managing it, Kafka, Spark, something like decision server insights in ODM, whatever, applying cognitive technology to turn some of the unstructured data into structured data, applying machine learning, predictive analytics, tools like SPSS to create a kind of prediction of what happens in the future and then applying business rules, something like operational decision management, ODM, in order to apply business policies to the insights we've garnered from the rest of the cycle so that we can do something about it, that's decision manager, that's-- >> So you were saying earlier on the use case about, I get some event data, I bring it in to systems of record, I apply some rules to it, I mean, that doesn't sound very hard, I mean, it's almost as if that's happening now-- >> It's hard. >> Well it's hard, let me get, this is my whole point, this is not possible years ago so that's one point, I want to get some color from you on that because this is ungettable, most of the systems, we even go back ten, five years ago, we siloed, so now rule based stuff seems trivial, practically, okay, by some rules, but it's now possible to put this package together and I know it's hard but conceptually those are three concepts that some would say oh, why weren't we doing this before? >> It's been possible for a long time and we have, you know, we have plenty of customers who combine, you know, who do something as simple as when you get approved for a loan, that's based on a score, which is essentially a predictive analytics model combined with business rules that say approve, not approve, ask for more documentations and that's been done for years so it's been possible, what's even more enabled now is doing it in real-time, taking into account a much greater degree of information, having-- >> John: More data sources. >> Data sources, things like social media, things like sensors from IoT, connected car applications, all sorts of things like that and then retraining the models more frequently, so getting better information about the future, faster and faster. >> Give an example of some use cases that you're working with customers on because I think that's fascinating and I think I would agree with you that it's been possible before but the concepts are known, but now it's accelerating to a whole nother level. Talk about some of the use cases end-to-end that you guys have done with customers. >> Let's think about something like an airline, that wants to manage its operations and wants to help its passengers manage operational disruptions or changes. So what we want to do now is, take a series of events coming from all sorts of sources, and that can be basic operational data like the airplanes, what's the airplane, is it running late, is it not running late, is the connection running late, combining it with things about the weather, so information that we get about upcoming weather events from weather analytics models, and then turning that into predicting what's going to happen to this passenger through his journey in the future so that we can proactively notify him that he should be either, we can rebook him automatically on a flight, we can provide him, if we know he's going to be delayed, we can automatically provide him amenities, notify the staff at the airport where he's going to be blocked, because he's our platinum customer, we want to give him lounge access, we want to give him his favorite drink, so combine all this information together and that's a use case-- >> When's this going to happen? >> That's life, that's life. >> I want to fly that airline. Okay, so we've been talking a lot about-- >> Mr. American Airlines? I'm not going to put you on the spot there, hold up, that'll get you in trouble. >> Oh yeah, it's a real life use case. >> And said oh hey, you're not going to make your connection, thanks for letting me know. Okay, so, okay we were talking a lot about the way things used to be, the way things are, and the way things are going to be or actually are today, in that last example, and you talked about event driven workloads. One of the things we've been talking about, at SiliconANGLE and on theCUBE is, is workloads, with batch, interactive, Hadoop brought back batch, and now we have what you call, this event driven workloads, we call it the continuous workloads, right? >> All about data immersion, we all call it different things but it's the same thing. >> Right, and when we look at our forecast, we're like wow, this is really going to hit, it hasn't yet, but it's going to hit the steep part of the s-curve, what do you guys expect in terms of adoption for those types of workloads, is it going to be niche, is it going to be predominant? >> I think it should be predominant and I think companies want it to be predominant. What we still need, I think, is a further iteration on the technology and the ability to bring all these different things together. We have the technologies for the different components, we have machine learning technology, predictive analytics technology, business rules technology, event driven architecture technology, but putting it all together in a single framework, right now it's still a real, it's both a technology implementation challenge, and it's an organizational challenge because you have to have data scientists work with IT architects, work with operational people, work with business policy people and just organizationally, bringing everybody-- >> There's organizational gap. That's what you're talking about. >> Yeah, but every company wants it to happen, because they all see a competitive advantage in doing it this way. >> And what's some of the things that are, barriers being removed as you see them, because that is a consistent thing we're hearing, the products are getting better, but the organizational culture. >> The easy thing is the technology barriers, that's the thing, you know? That's kind of the easy thing to work on, how do we have single frameworks that bring together everything, that let you develop both the machine learning model, the business rules model, and optimization, resource optimization model in a single platform and manage it all together, that's, we're working on that, and that's going to be-- >> I'll throw a wrinkle into the conversation, hopefully a spark, pun intended. Open source and microservices and cloud native apps are coming, that are, with open source, it's actually coming in and fueling a lot more activity. This should be a helpful thing to your point about more data sources, how do you guys talk about that? Because that's something you have to be part of, enabling the inbound migration of new stuff. >> Yeah, we have, I mean, everything's part of the environment. It's been the case for a while that open source has been kind of the driver of a lot of innovation and we assimilate that, we can either assimilate it directly, help our customers use it via services, package it up and rebrand open source technology as services that we manage and we control and integrate it for, on behalf of our customers. >> Alright, last question for you. Future prediction, what's five years out? What's going to happen in your mind's eye, I'm not going to hold you, I mean IBM to this, you personally, just as you see some of this stuff unfolding, machine learning, we're expecting that to crank things up pretty quickly, I'm seeing cognitive, and cognitive to the core, really rocking and rolling here, so what's your, how'd you see the next five years playing out for decision making? >> The first thing is, I don't see Skynet ever happening, I think we're so-- >> Mark Benioff made a nice reference in the keynote about Terminator, I'm like no one pick up on that on Twitter. >> I don't think that's really, nearly impossible, as a scenario but of course what is going to happen and what we're seeing accelerating on a daily basis, is applying machine learning, cognitive technology to more and more aspects of our daily life but I see it, it's in a passive way, so when you're doing image recognition, that's passive, you have to tell the computer tell me what's in this image but you, the human, as the developer or the programmer, still has to kick that off and has to say okay, now that you've told me there's a cat in an image, what do I do about that and that's something a human still has to do and that's, you know, that's the thing that would be scary if our systems started saying we're going to do something on behalf of you because we understand humans completely and what they need so we're going to do it on your behalf, but that's not going to happen. >> So the role of the human is critical, paramount in all this. >> It's not going to go away, we decide what our business policies are and-- >> But isn't, well, autonomous vehicles are an example of that, but it's not a business policy, it's the car making a decision for us, cos we can't react fast enough. >> But the car is not going to tell you where you want to go. If it started, if you get in the car and it said I'm taking you to the doctor because you have a fever, maybe that will happen. (all laugh) >> That's kind of Skynet like. I'd be worried about that. It may make a recommendation. (all laugh) >> Hey, you want to go to the doctor, thank you, no I'm good. >> I really don't see Skynet happening but I do think we're going to get more and more intelligent observations from our systems and that's really cool. >> That's very cool. Harley, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing the insights, really appreciate it. theCUBE, getting the insights here at IBM Interconnect 2017, I'm John Furrier, stay with us for some more great interviews on day three here, in Las Vegas, more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>everybody, this is Dave Vellante. May 27th were hosting a crowd chat going on crowdchat dot net slash data ops. Data ops is all about automating the data pipeline infusing AI and operationalize ing ai and the Data Pipeline and your organizations, which has been a real challenge for companies over the last several years in most of the decade. With me is aljaz cannoli. What's changed? That companies can now succeed at automating and operationalize in the data pipeline. >>You're so right, David. As's faras. I remember myself in this industry data challenges that the bottlenecks are the bottlenecks. So why now? I think we can answer that one from three angles. People process technology. What changing people? What changes process will change with technology. Let me start with the technology part on the technology front. Right now. The compute power is they were rare and the cloud multi cloud artificial intelligence, Social mobile all connected and giving the power to the organizations to deal with these problems, especially, I want to highlight the artificial intelligence part, and I will highlight it with how IBM is leveraging artificial intelligence to solve some of the dormant data problems. One of the major major doorman problem is on boarding data. If you're unable to onboard your data fast, however beautiful factory the all the factor lines shining, waiting for data if you cannot. Onboard data fast, all dress is waiting. But what IBM did automated made metadata generation capabilities which is on boarding data leveraging artificial intelligence models so that it is not only on boarding the data but on boarding the data in a way that everyone can understand it. When data scientist looks at the data, look at the data. They don't stare at the data but they understand what that data means because it >>is >>interpreted into business taxonomy into business language in the fast fashion that is one the technology, the second part people and process parts so important in the process part the methodology. Now we have the methodologies, the first methodology that I would just say as a change. Sometimes we we call that as a legal I don't know whether you heard about it in an agile So these legal methodologies now asking us to how alterations fail >>fast, Try fast, fail fast, Try fast >>and these agile methodologies are now being applied to data pipelines in weeks, off iterations, we can look at the most important business challenge with the KP eyes that you're trying to achieve and then map those KP eyes to data sources needed to answer those KP eyes and then streamline everything in between passed. So that renders a change like this the market that we are in. Then all those data flows are streamlined and optimize. And during the Cube interview during the Cube program that we put together, you will see some of the organizations will mention that is agile practice they put in place in every geography is now even getting them closer and closer, because now we all depend on and >>live on digital. So I'm very excited because ah, interviewing Standard Bank Associated Bank. Harley Davidson, IBM chief data officer into public. Sorry to talk about how IBM is sort of drunk, its own champagne eating. It's own dog food. Whatever you prefer. This is not the the mumbo jumbo marketing. This is practitioners who are gonna talk about how they succeeded, how they funded these initiatives, how they did the business case, some of the challenges that they face, how they dealt with classification and metadata and some of the outcomes that they have. So join us on the crowd. Chat crowdchat dot net slash data ops on May 27th. Go there at your calendar. We'll see you in the crowdchat.

>> Hi everybody, this is Dave Velante with the CUBE. And when we talk to practitioners about data and AI they have troubles infusing AI into their data pipeline and automating that data pipeline. So we're bringing together the community, brought to you by IBM to really understand how successful organizations are operationalizing the data pipeline and with me to talk about that is Aliye Ozcan. Aliye, hello, introduce yourself. Tell us about who you are. >> Hi Dave, how are you doing? Yes, my name is Aliye Ozcan I'm the Data Operations Data ops Global Marketing Leader at IBM. >> So I'm very excited about this project. Go to crowdchat.net/dataops, add it to your calendar and check it out. So we have practitioners, Aliye from Harley Davidson, Standard Bank, Associated Bank. What are we going to learn from them? >> What we are going to learn from them is the data experiences. What are the data challenges that they are going through? What are the data bottlenecks that they had? And especially in these challenging times right now. The industry is going through this challenging time. We are all going through this. How the foundation that they invested. Is now helping them to pivot quickly to market demands, the new market demands fast. That is fascinating to see, and I'm very excited having individual conversations with those experts and bringing those stories to the audience here. >> Awesome, and we also have Inderpal Bhandari from the CDO office at IBM, so go to crowdchat.net/dataops, add it to your calendar, we'll see you in the crowd chat.

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

>>Live from Miami, Florida. It's the cube covering IBM's data and AI forum brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to downtown Miami. Everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental hotel covering the IBM data AI form hashtag data AI forum. My name is Dave Volante and you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Ritika gunner is here. She's the vice president of data and AI expert labs and learning at IBM. Ritika, great to have you on. Again, always a pleasure to be here. Dave. I love interviewing you because you're a woman executive that said a lot of different roles at IBM. Um, you know, you've, we've talked about the AI ladder. You're climbing the IBM ladder and so it's, it's, it's, it's awesome to see and I love this topic. It's a topic that's near and dear to the cubes heart, not only women in tech, but women in AI. So great to have you. Thank you. So what's going on with the women in AI program? We're going to, we're going to cover that, but let me start with women in tech. It's an age old problem that we've talked about depending on, you know, what statistic you look at. 15% 17% of, uh, of, of, of the industry comprises women. We do a lot of events. You can see it. Um, let's start there. >>Well, obviously the diversity is not yet there, right? So we talk about women in technology, um, and we just don't have the representation that we need to be able to have. Now when it comes to like artificial intelligence, I think the statistic is 10 to 15% of the workforce today in AI is female. When you think about things like bias and ethicacy, having the diversity in terms of having male and female representation be equal is absolutely essential so that you're creating fair AI, unbiased AI, you're creating trust and transparency, set of capabilities that really have the diversity in backgrounds. >>Well, you work for a company that is as chairman and CEO, that's, that's a, that's a woman. I mean IBM generally, you know, we could see this stuff on the cube because IBM puts women on a, we get a lot of women customers that, that come on >>and not just because we're female, because we're capable. >>Yeah. Well of course. Right. It's just because you're in roles where you're spokespeople and it's natural for spokespeople to come on a forum like this. But, but I have to ask you, with somebody inside of IBM, a company that I could say the test to relative to most, that's pretty well. Do you feel that way or do you feel like even a company like IBM has a long way to go? >>Oh, um, I personally don't feel that way and I've never felt that to be an issue. And if you look at my peers, um, my um, lead for artificial intelligence, Beth Smith, who, you know, a female, a lot of my peers under Rob Thomas, all female. So I have not felt that way in terms of the leadership team that I have. Um, but there is a gap that exists, not necessarily within IBM, but in the community as a whole. And I think it goes back to you want to, you know, when you think about data science and artificial intelligence, you want to be able to see yourself in the community. And while there's only 10 to 15% of females in AI today, that's why IBM has created programs such as women AI that we started in June because we want strong female leaders to be able to see that there are, is great representation of very technical capable females in artificial intelligence that are doing amazing things to be able to transform their organizations and their business model. >>So tell me more about this program. I understand why you started it started in June. What does it entail and what's the evolution of this? >>So we started it in June and the idea was to be able to get some strong female leaders and multiple different organizations that are using AI to be able to change their companies and their business models and really highlight not just the journey that they took, but the types of transformations that they're doing and their organizations. We're going to have one of those events tonight as well, where we have leaders from Harley Davidson in Miami Dade County coming to really talk about not only what was their journey, but what actually brought them to artificial intelligence and what they're doing. And I think Dave, the reason that's so important is you want to be able to understand that those journeys are absolutely approachable. They're doable by any females that are out there. >>Talk about inherent bias. The humans are biased and if you're developing models that are using AI, there's going to be inherent bias in those models. So talk about how to address that and why is it important for more diversity to be injected into those models? >>Well, I think a great example is if you took the data sets that existed even a decade ago, um, for the past 50 years and you created a model that was to be able to predict whether to give loans to certain candidates or not, all things being equal, what would you find more males get these loans than females? The inherent data that exists has bias in it. Even from the history based on what we've had yet, that's not the way we want to be able to do things today. You want to be able to identify that bias and say all things being equal, it is absolutely important that regardless of whether you are a male or a female, you want to be able to give that loan to that person if they have all the other qualities that are there. And that's why being able to not only detect these things but have the diversity and the kinds of backgrounds of people who are building AI who are deploying this AI is absolutely critical. >>So for the past decade, and certainly in the past few years, there's been a light shined on this topic. I think, you know, we were at the Grace Hopper conference when Satya Nadella stuck his foot in his mouth and it said, Hey, it's bad karma for you know, if you feel like you're underpaid to go complain. And the women in the audience like, dude, no way. And he, he did the right thing. He goes, you know what, you're right. You know, any, any backtrack on that? And that was sort of another inflection point. But you talk about the women in, in AI program. I was at a CDO event one time. It was I and I, an IBM or had started the data divas breakfast and I asked, can I go? They go, yeah, you can be the day to dude. Um, which was, so you're seeing a lot of initiatives like this. My question is, are they having the impact that you would expect and that you want to have? >>I think they absolutely are. Again, I mean, I'll go back to, um, I'll give you a little bit of a story. Um, you know, people want to be able to relate and see that they can see themselves in these females leaders. And so we've seen cases now through our events, like at IBM we have a program called grow, which is really about helping our female lead female. Um, technical leaders really understand that they can grow, they can be nurtured, and they have development programs to help them accelerate where they need to be on their technical programs. We've absolutely seen a huge impact from that from a technology perspective. In terms of more females staying in technology wanting to go in the, in those career paths as another story. I'll, I'll give you kind of another kind of point of view. Um, Dave and that is like when you look at where it starts, it starts a lot earlier. >>So I have a young daughter who a year, year and a half ago when I was doing a lot of stuff with Watson, she would ask me, you know, not only what Watson's doing, but she would say, what does that mean for me mom? Like what's my job going to be? And if you think about the changes in technology and cultural shifts, technology and artificial intelligence is going to impact every job, every industry, every role that there is out there. So much so that I believe her job hasn't been invented yet. And so when you think about what's absolutely critical, not only today's youth, but every person out there needs to have a foundational understanding, not only in the three RS that you and I know from when we grew up have reading, writing and arithmetic, we need to have a foundational understanding of what it means to code. And you know, having people feel confident, having young females feel confident that they can not only do that, that they can be technical, that they can understand how artificial intelligence is really gonna impact society. And the world is absolutely critical. And so these types of programs that shed light on that, that help bridge that confidence is game changing. >>Well, you got kids, I >>got kids, I have daughters, you have daughter. Are they receptive to that? So, um, you know, I think they are, but they need to be able to see themselves. So the first time I sent my daughter to a coding camp, she came back and said, not for me mom. I said, why? Because she's like, all the boys, they're coding in their Minecraft area. Not something I can relate to. You need to be able to relate and see something, develop that passion, and then mix yourself in that diverse background where you can see the diversity of backgrounds. When you don't have that diversity and when you can't really see how to progress yourself, it becomes a blocker. So as she started going to grow star programs, which was something in Austin where young girls coded together, it became something that she's really passionate about and now she's Python programming. So that's just an example of yes, you need to be able to have these types of skills. It needs to start early and you need to have types of programs that help enhance that journey. >>Yeah, and I think you're right. I think that that is having an impact. My girls who code obviously as a some does some amazing work. My daughters aren't into it. I try to send them to coder camp too and they don't do it. But here's my theory on that is that coding is changing and, and especially with artificial intelligence and cognitive, we're a software replacing human skills. Creativity is going to become much, much more important. My daughters are way more creative than my sons. I shouldn't say that, but >>I think you just admitted that >>they, but, but in a way they are. I mean they've got amazing creativity, certainly more than I am. And so I see that as a key component of how coding gets done in the future, taking different perspectives and then actually codifying them. Your, your thoughts on that. >>Well there is an element of understanding like the outcomes that you want to generate and the outcomes really is all about technology. How can you imagine the art of the possible with technology? Because technology alone, we all know not useful enough. So understanding what you do with it, just as important. And this is why a lot of people who are really good in artificial intelligence actually come from backgrounds that are philosophy, sociology, economy. Because if you have the culture of curiosity and the ability to be able to learn, you can take the technology aspects, you can take those other aspects and blend them together. So understanding the problem to be solved and really marrying that with the technological aspects of what AI can do. That's how you get outcomes. >>And so we've, we've obviously talking in detail about women in AI and women in tech, but it's, there's data that shows that diversity drives value in so many different ways. And it's not just women, it's people of color, it's people of different economic backgrounds, >>underrepresented minorities. Absolutely. And I think the biggest thing that you can do in an organization is have teams that have that diverse background, whether it be from where they see the underrepresented, where they come from, because those differences in thought are the things that create new ideas that really innovate, that drive, those business transformations that drive the changes in the way that we do things. And so having that difference of opinion, having healthy ways to bring change and to have conflict, absolutely essential for progress to happen. >>So how did you get into the tech business? What was your background? >>So my background was actually, um, a lot in math and science. And both of my parents were engineers. And I have always had this unwavering, um, need to be able to marry business and the technology side and really figure out how you can create the art of the possible. So for me it was actually the creativity piece of it where you could create something from nothing that really drove me to computer science. >>Okay. So, so you're your math, uh, engineer and you ended up in CS, is that right? >>Science. Yeah. >>Okay. So you were coded. Did you ever work as a programmer? >>Absolutely. My, my first years at IBM were all about coding. Um, and so I've always had a career where I've coded and then I've gone to the field and done field work. I've come back and done development and development management, gone back to the field and kind of seen how that was actually working. So personally for me, being able to create and work with clients to understand how they drive value and having that back and forth has been a really delightful part. And the thing that drives me, >>you know, that's actually not an uncommon path for IBM. Ours, predominantly male IBM, or is in the 50 sixties and seventies and even eighties. Who took that path? They started out programming. Um, I just think, trying to think of some examples. I know Omar para, who was the CIO of Aetna international, he started out coding at IBM. Joe Tucci was a programmer at IBM. He became CEO of EMC. It was a very common path for people and you took the same path. That's kind of interesting. Why do you think, um, so many women who maybe maybe start in computer science and coding don't continue on that path? And what was it that sort of allowed you to break through that barrier? >>No, I'm not sure why most women don't stay with it. But for me, I think, um, you know, I, I think that every organization today is going to have to be technical in nature. I mean, just think about it for a moment. Technology impacts every part of every type of organization and the kinds of transformation that happens. So being more technical as leaders and really understanding the technology that allows the kinds of innovations and business for informations is absolutely essential to be able to see progress in a lot of what we're doing. So I think that even general CXOs that you see today have to be more technically acute to be able to do their jobs really well and marry those business outcomes with what it fundamentally means to have the right technology backbone. >>Do you think a woman in the white house would make a difference for young people? I mean, part of me says, yeah, of course it would. Then I say, okay, well some examples you can think about Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Angela Merkel, and in Germany it's still largely male dominated cultures, but I dunno, what do you think? Maybe maybe that in the United States would be sort of the, >>I'm not a political expert, so I wouldn't claim to answer that, but I do think more women in technology, leadership role, CXO leadership roles is absolutely what we need. So, you know, politics aside more women in leadership roles. Absolutely. >>Well, it's not politics is gender. I mean, I'm independent, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, right? Absolutely. Oh yeah. Well, companies, politics. I mean you certainly see women leaders in a, in Congress and, and the like. Um, okay. Uh, last question. So you've got a program going on here. You have a, you have a panel that you're running. Tell us more about. >>Well this afternoon we'll be continuing that from women leaders in AI and we're going to do a panel with a few of our clients that really have transformed their organizations using data and artificial intelligence and they'll talk about like their backgrounds in history. So what does it actually mean to come from? One of, one of the panelists actually from Miami Dade has always come from a technical background and the other panelists really etched in from a non technical background because she had a passion for data and she had a passion for the technology systems. So we're going to go through, um, how these females actually came through to the journey, where they are right now, what they're actually doing with artificial intelligence in their organizations and what the future holds for them. >>I lied. I said, last question. What is, what is success for you? Cause I, I would love to help you achieve that. That objective isn't, is it some metric? Is it awareness? How do you know it when you see it? >>Well, I think it's a journey. Success is not an endpoint. And so for me, I think the biggest thing I've been able to do at IBM is really help organizations help businesses and people progress what they do with technology. There's nothing more gratifying than like when you can see other organizations and then what they can do, not just with your technology, but what you can bring in terms of expertise to make them successful, what you can do to help shape their culture and really transform. To me, that's probably the most gratifying thing. And as long as I can continue to do that and be able to get more acknowledgement of what it means to have the right diversity ingredients to do that, that success >>well Retika congratulations on your success. I mean, you've been an inspiration to a number of people. I remember when I first saw you, you were working in group and you're up on stage and say, wow, this person really knows her stuff. And then you've had a variety of different roles and I'm sure that success is going to continue. So thanks very much for coming on the cube. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, we're here covering the IBM data in a AI form from Miami right back.

>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground at Coupa Inspire '19 from the Vegas. I'm very pleased to welcome not Bono, not Sting, it's Chandar, the CMO of Coupa. Chandar, welcome to theCUBE. >> Lisa, thank you, it's great to be here today. >> This is a really cool event. Procurement is sexy. >> It is sexy. >> It can be so incredibly transformative to any organization. I loved how the last two days, what you guys have done is a great job of articulating Coupa's value in procurement, invoicing, payments, expense, through the voices of your customers and I think there's no better brand value that you can get. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Tell us a little bit about your role as the CMO of Coupa and marketing in a fast-growing company with a product that people might go, "I haven't heard of that, what is that again?" >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I look at it, my role is at Coupa, especially, for Coupa, what's interesting about it, as you said, is that every company makes money, every company spends money. So, invariably, Coupa can be used across a set of different companies. One from the Golden State Warriors to Procter & Gamble to the Lukemia & Lymphoma Society. Across the board. And then, from our perspective, holistically, we're looking at business, but managed from different aspects of spend. You said procurement was in expenses. So, my role is to build a marketing engine to get the flywheel effect of first you drive awareness. All marketing starts with awareness and you said people haven't heard of it. And so, to first to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community we want to go after. And, two, drive acquisition, we'll drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals. And then, very importantly in today's world, is to drive the advocacy and get your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand, so that you create the flywheel effect of awareness, acquisition, and advocacy. And, that's really what my role today is. >> And, I love how I read an article where you call that the stairway to marketing heaven. So, I thought, I wonder if you're a guitar guy, but you're right. It's how to drive awareness, but in a meaningful, thoughtful way. Especially today, with all all the technology, we wake up with it, right? Our phone is our alarm clock. We are bombarded by ads. If we're on Instagram, following our favorite celebrities or whatnot and it's scary when they have the right context, but it has to be thoughtful. We need to know our audience. So, you describe this stairway to marketing heaven, as you just mentioned, it's awareness, it's acquisition, which is key. But, I feel like a lot of companies don't forget the advocacy part, but they don't invest enough in it because that's the best salesperson for your technology, is the people that are using it successfully, right? >> Totally. Yeah, so, in fact, there was a study about a couple of years which looked at how balanced the boat is in terms of spending in presale versus post-sale. And, it's interesting that 87% of B2B marketing spend was presale. In other words, only 13% of people were investing in retention marketing, adoption mastery, customer marketing, and this is what advocacy marketing. And, in today's world, that doesn't work because you got to balance the boat because, to your point, you're getting in a peer-bond world where your existing customers are your best sellers. And, prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. So, as an organization, if you balance the boat, then you're going to get the flywheel effect going for you in terms of driving the right advocacy across all channels. Just not your own channel if you earn channels to ultimately drive that acquisition going. >> Do you think that's actually more valuable? 'Cause it's one thing to have on your .com site, your social media sites, all these great things about your technologies, etc., coming from customers or from product experts, from influencers. Talk about the value. As technology advances so much and we are influenced by so many other channels, the value of the earned channel and that peer-to-peer relationship. >> Yeah, I think, as I say, that every mom says her baby is good-looking. But, in software, not every baby is really good-looking. Which means, if you take that analogy and extend it, if you're coming to your own channel, invariably, you're going to see some great customer videos about your product, you're going to see some great endorsements and testimonials, you're going to see some great quotes about your product. The reality, there's no bad news about your product on your own website, on your own channel. But, the reality is there are some, some people who might have different opinions. If you go to Glassdoor, no company gets a five on Glassdoor. And, if you take the same thing and extend it to earned channels for advocacy, folks like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and B2B, for example, are becoming more relevant today than before because two things. One is 85% of our customers' journey is self-directed. >> Lisa: That much? >> That much and Forrester has anywhere from 60 to 80, but reality is whether you're buying a car or you're buying Coupa. Today, a customer is discovering more journeys. And, in that process, they are looking to more of these earned channels as validation of which ones to go after than just your own channels. So, that's why we got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both your own channels and your earned channels. And, that's really important for you and the flywheel will pay off for you over time from that perspective. >> It will and that seems like a lot of the things that Suzy Irwin was talking about to the audience earlier. That's common sense. Why is it that you see these marketing budgets that are so heavily weighted towards just getting awareness, getting customers acquired, and then not thinking about retention marketing account based marketing. >> I'll tell you why. I think any smart CMO will conceptually agree with you. Nobody's going to say, of course, this is not important for me to get advocacy. The challenge comes in in terms of how that marketing department is measured. What gets measured gets funding at the end of the day. >> Lisa: That's a good point. >> And, reality is a lot of these B2B companies are still measuring marketing based on, what's the pipeline you're driving and what's at the top of the funnel metrics that you're driving? In reality, that's a little bit of a skewed thing because then if that's what you're being measured at the board level, at the executive level, then guess what? All your funding is going to go towards that. But, really, the true measurement of marketing, one, is about, yes, you have to get pipeline. You have to influence win rates at the bottom of the funnel and that's where product marketing comes in. But, as importantly, you have to look at the number of brand advocates you create and lifetime value of a customer. >> Yes, CLV, yes. >> And, that's really, really, customer lifetime value is so important because in a SaaS business, ultimately, the Mufasa metric, I'm a Lion King fan. The Mufasa metric is really lifetime value because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more, and is shouting from the rooftop, then, invariably, that SaaS business is doing well. And, that's why you have to balance the boat in terms of post-advocacies, post-acquisition spend into advocacy, as much as you've done in pre-acquisition. >> When you came into Coupa a couple of years ago, have you been able to shift those budgets because you're able to demonstrate the value that that advocacy piece generates with the flywheel? >> Absolutely and I have a very progressive-thinking CEO who's partners with me on this too. So, we've been absolutely able to do that. In fact, what we're trying to do at the end of the day and most software companies, the real goal should be creating a tribe. In technology, you have to create a tribe to be a titan. And, it's just not about the capability, it's about the community. And, that's really what we're trying to do at Coupa is to create the tribal community feeling. So, if the community is bigger than the brand, it is about the community itself and learning, sharing, and growing with each other and being successful. And, we're just fostering that. So, from that perspective, if you look at this conference and the investment we're making here, some of the programs we're doing in terms of advocacy, what we call spend sellers, etc., is all about that community tribal feeling and go establish that. To use some inspiration from our consumer brands, if you really think about it, people don't buy what they want. People buy what they want to be. So, let me give you what I mean by that. What I want could be a bike. It could be any motorbike, but what I want to be could be part of a very special community and that's why Harley Davidson is successful. What I want could be any stationary bike today, but what I want to be is part of some cool community like Peloton. That's why Peloton is successful. So, similarly for us, what I want could be some spend management software, but what I want to be is part of this community, this cool club, and that's the feeling we're trying to create in the post-acquisition cycle. >> I love that you said that because you talked about that this morning and I loved how you had the word community on the slide and then broke that out into communication unity. And, one of the senses that I got yesterday when-- >> Chandar: Rob was talking about it. >> Yeah, when Rob kicked off everything is this is a very collaborative community. We think about that in terms in terms even like a developer community or something like that. But, Coupa is now managing $1.2 trillion of spend through the platform that every other business that's using Coupa gets to benefit from. It's customer-centric, it's supplier-centric, but it's about applying the right technologies, AI, machine learning, to all this data, so everybody benefits. >> That's right and one of the interesting aspects of community building is one aspect of community building is that Marc Benioff had a great, evangelistic marketing was a way of community building. He would come in and really evangelize and this is where we're going and you all need to come with us. When I was at Marketo, it was interesting. Community building was through more educational marketing and doing it through this, I'm going to educate you through though leadership. Another good way of community building is through product intelligence, which is community intelligence. So, collectively, the sum of all parts are smarter than the parts themselves. And, Rob has a great line, which says, "None of us is as smart as all of us." And, the fundamental community intelligence offering is based on this first principle. So, example, if I'm the community of Coupa customers, the next customer is smarter than the previous customer because the collective intelligence grew, which means I can then go benchmark it myself. I gave an example this morning of USO, the company that provides services to the United States troops. And, when Rick Quaintance at USO benchmarked himself using community intelligence, versus the rest of the community, he realizes that his invoice cycle times are seven times lower. So, that kind of intelligence is extremely beneficial and invaluable to companies. So, that's the value of the community, is providing the collective intelligence. Waze is a great consumer example. Those of us who use Waze for traffic know that it's all community driven and each one of us is smarter because we're collectively using it. It's the same concept in applying that to B2B software. >> So, as we see, you mentioned the over 80% of the buying decision is self-directed whether we're buying a car or Coupa software. Did Coupa foresee that in the last decade to see we're going to have to go to a more community-driven collaboration because the consumer of any thing, any product or service, is going to be so empowered 'cause that's a part of the Coupa foundation. >> It is. >> Lisa: Which, we don't see a lot in companies that are 10 plus years old. >> Yeah, and credit to Rob for his vision for this. It's because I think early part of the company, he wrote into the contracts that the company can benefit. Collectively, every company can benefit by being part of this community. And, the fact is data's aggregated, abstracted, there's no information that is sensitive, etc. But, the fact is we all can collectively benefit through it. That was a great vision of Rob and early people and that's benefited us because the benefit is really over scale and time. Now, your $1.2 trillion, it is really statistically significant in each different industry to get that intelligence. And, that is one of the other reasons we launched our business spend index. It's called spendindex.com. Where we can use the billions of dollars spent in the community to provide a leading indicator of economic growth based on current business spend sentiment. You think of ADP as this payroll, it's called ADP payroll thing that comes out and the gross domestic product report comes out. Those tend to be rear-view mirror lagging indicators. But, as we're using community-based intelligence to provide a windshield, a leading indicator of where the economy is going. So, there's so many different use cases. Benefiting based on spend you're doing as well as where the economy is going and all this is based on the intelligence. >> It's so powerful because, to your point, you're not looking behind. >> Chandar: It's the windshield. >> Exactly, able to be looking forward. So, with all the announcements and the great things that have come out with the AWS expansion, what you guys are doing with Coupa Pay. I was shocked to learn the percentages of businesses that are still writing paper checks. Or, the fact that a lot of companies have 10 plus banks that they're working with. There's still so much manual processes. You must just be, the future is so bright, you got to wear shades with Coupa. But, what excites you about what you guys have announced the last coupe of days and the feedback that you're hearing from your tribe? >> I think there's two kinds of things. One is continue to set the innovation agenda for the industry. And, really, you have to look at every customer on their unique journey of maturity and maturation, so we have a very thoughtful, what we call, maturity index, The business spend management index. Whereas, you are seeing some of these customers, for example, you mentioned, may be in the first stage of this maturity, where, for them, it's just getting automation and going from paper to paperless could be the first step. But, some other customers might say, "I've gotten there, "but I want to get the next level of sophistication "to orchestrate these business spend processes." So, what's exciting for us in the feedback is we're creating product capability across this maturation journey for our customers to make them successful at each of those places. And, Coupa Pay is one example of that. Whereas, some of the other pieces we talked about, we announced about some of the community offerings that we did also is on that. So, that's one exciting piece. The other exciting piece that customers tell us at this conference is, "Foster platforms for us "to engage with each other, learn from each other, "share from each other, and grow with each other." So, even stuff that Rob talked about, which is sourced together. This concept of customers coming together to drive a sourcing process and, again, the collective intelligence in the community, that, we're getting very, very positive feedback from that perspective. And, ultimately, Rob has a really good saying that, "It is not about customer satisfaction. "It is about customer success." That's a delineation there. A customer could be very satisfied with you, but they may not be necessarily successful. And, we say, it's not about satisfaction. It's about success. And, by creating this innovation cycle and then having a post-implementation process that's getting true value, that's truly how we drive customer success. >> And, something that I've heard over and over as I've talked to a number of your customers yesterday and today is how much they're feeling Coupa is listening. Their feedback is being incorporated. They're actually influencing the development of the technology and that was loud and clear the last two days. >> Yeah, I think there is, Rob talked about the number of features that are being influenced by the community and we have these-- >> 300 plus in the last 12 months. >> Yes, 300 plus in the last 12 months. And, there's this concept of two ears, one mouth. And, listen, learn, and innovate and that's the philosophy here. But, it's a right mix of listening to customers, learning from them, and getting the right input from them for driving innovation, as well as having strategic vision on where this market is going and having the right mix of those to provide the capability to customers. >> Wow, you're on a rocket ship. Chandar, it was great to have you on theCUBE. You'll have to come back. >> Yes, Lisa, absolutely, I'll come back and it was a pleasure being here. Awesome. >> Awesome, thank you so much. For Chandar, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Welcome back to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and we are here live at Magento Imagine 2019, our second time being back here with theCUBE and we're very excited to welcome Brittany Hodak to theCUBE, entrepreneur, customer engagement speaker, writer, co-founder of the Superfan Company. Brittany it's so exciting to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. >> So, you have an incredibly impressive background and I'm like where do we start? >> Thank you. >> So, here we are talking about customer experiences and how Magento and Adobe empower a lot of customer experiences. But you've written a ton of articles, over 350, you've been published in the Huff Post, Wall Street Journal, talk to us about your experiences with customer engagement, some of the things that you as a co-founder of the Superfan have discovered working with a variety of brands from Walmart to Katy Perry? >> Well, thank you so much for saying that. I always say that the biggest problem brands and entertainers have is often one that's not even on their radar at all. I talked to a lot of small and medium sized business owners and they say, You know, my big problem is people don't know who I am. I've got an awareness problem. I'm struggling to let people know who I am. And I really think my business would change if more people knew. And I said, You know, that's not the problem. You can always fix awareness. You can always spend money to get your message out there. Your big problem is apathy. Your problem is there are people who know and don't care. And you've got to figure out how to make people care. You've got to figure out how to connect your story with their story in a way that's meaningful, and in a way that's going to mean something in their lives because that's how you really start the fan engagement process. That's how you lay the groundwork for creating a culture of super fandom amongst your customers, that's really going to help you grow not just the business but a brand. >> Is it about having a more relevant messages or is it just finding those people that have a propensity to be a fan to the services that you provide? >> Well, it's understanding your uniqueness in a way that really makes your value proposition different from anybody else is. Once you understand your uniqueness and you're able to turn it into service of others, that's when you really you position yourself to be able to make the kind of difference that makes somebody want to be a super fan. And I always say, we've had the fortune of working with tons of celebrities, some of the biggest recording artists and superstars on the planet, and a lot of times people say to me, Oh, you know, it's easy when you're talking about being a super fan of Taylor Swift or being a super fan of Katy Perry, but, you know, I'm a plumber or I'm an electrician, how can I have super fans? And I say, By providing people the kindness service that changes their lives. I have an exterminator who I am a super fan of. His name is Scott and the reason I am a super fan of him is because he makes sure there are no brown recluse spiders in my house and I am absolutely terrified about recluse spiders. They are super evil creatures if you're not familiar with them, I encourage you not to google it. They're like nastiest little bug in the world. But you know to me that's super important because he's not just killing bugs, he's helping me feel safe in my home. So that's absolutely a vital service and finding the right guy to do that and the right guy to put my mind at ease and let me know there aren't going to be brown recluse spiders in my house is invaluable and because of that, like there's no way I would ever switch exterminators because Scott's my guy. And I know you know, I can text him 50 different pictures of critters and say, Is this okay, Is this okay? And he's going to get back to me and let me know. So, it's all about points of connection and finding ways to make your audience feel really valued, and connecting your story with their story. >> So, if you look at an exterminator versus a Taylor Swift or Katy Perry or Walmart, are there similarities and what they need to do to deliver this service that's impacting lives? Or are there fundamental differences? >> There are some fundamental differences, but there's more overlap than you would think. And I always say, if you think about it like a Venn diagram, you've got your brand or your business, your service, your product, whatever it is that you're providing, and you've got your customers over here. Where the magic happens is that point of intersection, where your story overlaps with their story, that intersection, that's where super fandom happens. And I like to talk about something I call the four A's of super fandom. So, you can, I see a lot of people make the mistake of trying to talk to everybody the same way. So, whether somebody is encountering your brand for the very first time or has been your customer for a long time, using the same messaging for those people and that doesn't work. So, I talk a lot about the four A's. So, the first day is awareness. That's when somebody is first uncovering your brand, first interacting with your brand. The second a is action, that's when somebody is actually interacting with your brand for the first time. The third a is affinity. Those are the people who are fans of your brand. They've sort of bought into your why, these are the satisfied customers, I would say. And a lot of businesses stop there. They say, These are the people who are satisfied. These are the people who liked what I'm doing, they're buying from me. And that's a mistake that a lot of especially small and medium sized businesses make they sort of feel like, I've got these customers, I don't have to do anything else. They're not over delivering or over serving them which is a huge missed opportunity because if you do, you're able to convert people from that third A to the fourth a which is advocacy. And advocacy is where you want to get the majority of the people because those are your superfans so to speak, those are the ones who are out there sharing your story and your why with other people, helping refer new customers and new clients to you. So, I always say if you can get past the affinity, the people who are happy with you but not really talking about it and really make them feel valued. That's how you create advocates and advocacy is really the super secret sauce when you're talking about super fandom. >> So where should people get started to try to build super fandom within their client base? Is that really with the good customers that they already have, they try to get them to be advocates or I think most people spend so much time focusing on the fat end of the funnel as opposed to on the narrow end of the funnel and converting that transaction into a fan which is what it sounds like you're suggesting? >> Yeah, well, it's important to to focus on all parts of the funnel man, like I said that that awareness, that that fat of the top, you certainly need to be dealing with those people to get them further down. But the skinny part of the funnel is really where you want to make sure that people are continuing to drip out to the other side to make those referrals for you. So, absolutely focusing on everybody. One thing that I am always shocked I when I do consulting and work with small businesses and medium sized businesses, when I asked how much referral business they get, a lot of people don't know that number off the top of your head. So, if you're not tracking the amount of referrals, you absolutely need to know that as a metric, and the number one thing that you can do to increase the amount of referral business that you're getting is by asking your customers for referrals. It's so funny the amount of people who say, I hardly get any referral business at all. And I say, Well, when's the last time you asked? When's the last time that you went to one of your clients or your customers and said, I so appreciate your business. And I wonder if you know anybody in your network who could benefit from our product or service. And they say, oh I've never done that. But yeah, they wonder why they don't have any referrals so-- >> It seems like such an easy step but to your point, you're saying they're focusing on awareness, getting my brand, my service, my name out there, getting people to take action? >> Yes. >> And building that affinity and then I'm good, but that simply asking to make it a referral whether it's a yelp or something as simple as that seems like a pretty easy step. Strategically, how do you advise customers to get from that, take that if you look at it like a funnel like Jeff saying, take that group of affinity customers and convert some percentage to advocates, what's your strategy for helping a consumer brand or even a service provider, like an exterminator for actually making those conversions and then and then having that be a really kind of engine to drive referrals, to drive more leads to the top of that funnel? >> That's a great question. So, I like to talk about something I call the high five which is knowing the five most important people that have the potential to drive your business forward for the next quarter, the next year and the next five years. So, this is an actual list of five people. And any business owner hopefully can sit down and say, Here are the people that I need to really super serve in order to move my business forward. So knowing who those five people are, it could be an advisor, it could be an investor, it could be somebody you've never even met, maybe a thought leader whose thought that you really enjoy, that you think this person could really help me and open me up to a lot of people in their network if they knew who I was. Make a list of those five people, and then figure out how often you need to be doing something staying top of mind for those people. So for me, I like to make sure it's at least once every two weeks. So, sometimes it's as simple as sending an article and saying, Hey, I came across this article, I thought you would really love it, wanted to send it your way. Now and reality, did I just come across that article? No, I spent maybe an hour looking for the right article to forward that person. It's taking the time out to show them that they matter to you, so whether that's sending them a nice gift in the mail for no reason or a handwritten thank you note after they made an introduction for you. It's checking in on things, I always say, you should know what is important to the people who are important to you. You should know the teams that they follow, you should know their spouse, their children, the things that are happening in their lives so you can check in with them. And we live in an age where it's so easy to get information about anyone because all of us are putting content out there on the internet all the time about ourselves. So take the time to figure out what matters to those people who matter to you, and then stay top of mind, letting them know that they matter to you. So, like I said, for me, it's once every two weeks and I look at my list of five about every six months in terms of adding a couple of new people on maybe cycling some people off. But I've been doing this for four years. So, I have a list of 20 people. And I those are like my alums, some of the alumni of my high five, and I'm still extremely close with all of them. I still make sure that I'm trying to add value to them because having one person who's going to advocate for you could open the door for millions of dollars of revenue for you. So, it's just identifying who those people are, because to your point, it's impossible to sort of make everyone the most important person, it's impossible to take everyone at that third step and take them to the fourth step. So, rather than holistically thinking about it. I like to really drill in and say let's start with five. And if you've got 50 employees and you assign five people to each of those 50 employees to say make sure this vendor or make sure this customer, or make sure this partner feels very appreciated by you on a regular basis. You're going to, you really start to see the ROI very, very quickly in your business. >> So some of the trends, if we look at this we're all consumers of any kind of product service, we have this expectation, this growing expectation that we're going to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, have it delivered in an hour or a day, or so, we want to be able to have this experience on mobile, maybe started there, maybe finish it in the store, what are some of the trends that you're seeing that you recommend that the company with any product or service needs to get on board with, for example, this morning they were talking about progressive web apps and being able to deliver an experience where the person doesn't have to leave the app, or they can transact something like through Instagram. What are some of those top tools that you recommend to your broad client base. You got to get on board with like mobile, for example, right away. >> Yes, I was going to say the PWAs are absolutely critical, because I think we've all as consumers been in the situation of trying to load something on our phone, and it's five seconds goes by six seconds, I'm like forget about it. >> We're done. >> Yeah, I'm done, I'm over it. So PWAs is super important because it's all about putting your customer first and making things simple for them. The other thing is making sure that whatever system process you're using, everything needs to be connected. You can't be managing stuff across eight different platforms and expect for things not to fall through the cracks which is I'm learning so much here at Imagine and listening to all the best practices of people who are using Magento to manage every part of their business because something is seemingly minor as sending a confirmation email twice instead of once or having eight hours go by before the customer gets that, those types of things, say to a customer on a subliminal level, I'm not important, I don't matter, they're not putting me first. >> So just fan comes from fanatic. And there's great things about fans, and some times there's less great things about fans and we've seen a little bit of that here in terms of this really passionate community around Magento. And it was independent. And then it went to eBay and then it went back out of eBay. And now it's back in Adobe. And it's funny seeing the people that have been here for the whole journey. Part of that responsibility, if you're going to invite someone to be a fan is you have to let them participate, you have to let them contribute. And often which we're seeing, I guess, in Game of Thrones, I'm not a big fan, but if you get outside of kind of the realm of where the fans want things to go, it can also cause some conflict. So, how to people manage encouraging fans, really supporting fans, but at the same time not letting them completely knock their business off or hold the business back probably from places where the entrepreneur needs to still go? >> That's a great question. There was a really fascinating study that Viacom did a couple of years ago about fans. And especially in the under 35 sets, so millennials, gen Z. And the vast majority of people felt like fans have some ownership of the thing that they're a fan of. And that's a really interesting study in psychology to think about these people who feel the ownership. But you know, it's true. You mentioned Game of Thrones, that's a great example of seeing these fan bases who come up with names for themselves, and who are tweeting in real time about things that are happening. Magento a great example because open source has been such an important part of the culture and the history of the platform. These people feel in a very real sense this ownership. And you're right, I think sometimes that scares small business owners, medium sized business owners. They say, Well, we don't want to relinquish control. We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we're upsetting people. And I would say, You're right, fan comes from the word fanatic. And that fanaticism, that passion is something you absolutely want. Because I would argue that a greater threat than that is what I was talking about earlier, which is apathy. You don't want people to be like, I don't care. And passion is of course, the opposite of apathy. And that's what you're looking for. So I would say, are you going to put yourself in a position where sometimes there could be a disagreement, you could upset somebody? Absolutely, but you those are the people, it's like if you're in a relationship with somebody and you have a fight that passion that's there is because there's care on both sides. You're both super engaged, you're both very passionate about your position. So, having a system in place to defuse that by saying, I hear you I understand where you're coming from, let's figure this out together, is part of the customer service staff that you've just got to prepare for. >> Can you using, sorry Brittany, using all this data that's available that Magento, Adobe et cetera can deliver and enable organizations to understand that and maybe even kind of marry those behaviors with apathy on one hand passion on the other and how do we get to that happy medium? >> Exactly, how do we get to the happy medium, what are the data points that matter? How are we, the idea of super fan means something different to every organization. So, part of it is uncovering what it is that really matters to you. I always say a super fan is somebody who over indexes and their affinity for a product, service, brand, entertainer, therefore increasing the chance that they're going to advocate on its behalf. So, thinking about, there could be people who are spending a lot of money with your brand who just aren't really that passionate about it. They're not going to tell people and that's fine. But those aren't the people who would be a quote unquote superfan, even though they may be spending a lot of money with you. So, it's figuring out what the markers are that are important to your brand or service. I work with a lot of brands on this because it really is different for everyone. But figuring out who those people are and then talking to them because this is something that, there's so much psychology around the why. Like why people behave the way we do that the consumer behavior, the internal and philosophical drives that are making us make the decisions that we make and the best way to uncover that is to talk to your customers because a lot of times you'll learn so much about your brand, you'll find so many things. I always love talking to recording artists about this, they put out a new song or a new album and in the fans find all these hidden messages >> Taylor is known for that. >> Always some-- >> Taylor is one of the best in the world. And a lot of times artists will say, Oh, yeah, like, I didn't do that on purpose but I'm totally going to take credit for it because these fans found it. And oh, yeah, of course, I meant to do that. So, you'll find that some of these customers understand your brand oftentimes better than you do which is a really fun thing. >> It's also just the ecosystem. You my favorite one always reference is Harley Davidson, guess how many brands get tattooed on people's arms, and just the whole ecosystem of other products that were built up around the motorcycle, and to support kind of that community they weren't getting any nickels necessarily if somebody sold a saddle bag or a leather jacket, or whatever but it was such and it still is, I think such a vibrant community again, and as evidence by you put a tattoo on your arm that it's something to strive for, not easy to get. >> Why we always say build a brand not a business because the brand are those things that people are connecting to. We were talking about NASA before we started filming. I'm a huge space geek and Lisa loves space having worked for NASA in the past and that's one of those things, I don't know this to be true but I got to believe NASA way outpaces like every other combined government agency in licensing. I mean, people walk around wearing NASA logos on everything >> I saw at least three of them this morning. >> Yeah, I mean, I bought in the last month, probably three different NASA licensed products. So I mean that's the passion that if you can connect to somebody on an emotional level and make your story part of their story. They want to represent it, they want to get that Harley tattooed on their arm. >> That emotional connection but also that personalization that's key? >> Yes. >> What's difference in from your perspective on a superfan versus an influencer? Are they one in the same? >> It's a great question. So, they a lot of times are one in the same and that same Viacom study that I mentioned earlier. Something like two thirds of people said that they consider themselves to be pop culture influencers which sounds like a lot. But if you think about it, pretty much everyone is an influencer and that's because for Nielsen, the most trusted recommendation is or the most trusted form advertising is a recommendation from a friend or a family member, 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend or family member, which far outpaces every other form of advertising. So in a lot of ways, these micro influencers are the next wave of advertising. These advocates or these super fans are, I think in many ways an untapped well of resources for the fans who drill in and you mentioned Taylor Swift before. How many people listen to Taylor Swift for the first time because a friend suggested they listen to Taylor Swift. I would argue that lots and lots of people and Taylor said something to me years ago that like a former manager, or someone said to her, and that was, if you want to sell half a million albums, you're going to have to meet half a million people. That was said to her when she was like, 15, 16 years old and she thought, okay, yeah, I'm going to go meet half a million people. I'm going to be befriend them, I'm going to listen to their stories, I'm going to let them know what they say matters to me. And here we are, she sold, I don't know, 50, 60 million albums, however many she sold worldwide. And but that's really where it starts, that one to one connection. >> Seems to just kind of all go back to referral. And isn't that sort of the basic human connection? It's like, are we trying to over-complicate this with all these different tools that simply, even with hiring and tech or whatever industry, referrals are so much more important because you've got some sort of connection to a brand or a person or a product or service. >> You've got that connection, you've got somebody who's already very well qualified. And I like to talk about something that I call the wave method which the wave is a ritual hello, goodbye. How many times a day do you wave at people, countless. And virtually you say hello to tons of people everyday. People who are coming to one of your social pages, people who are engaging with your website. So I say, I encourage people to think about that hello and goodbye, that interaction. Think of a wave as an acronym and ask yourself, are you making everybody who's going to come into contact with you today feel welcomed? Is there something on your virtual site or in your real storefront. If you're a brick and mortar business that's going to make people feel welcomed? How are you making them feel like they belong? The A is appreciated, how are you letting those people know that they are appreciated by your business? I think I know I have often felt like I'm a number or I don't matter. Utility companies are notorious for this for making you feel like they don't really care if they have your business or not. Or they know perhaps that they're going to because there's not like a different water company you can you can use it your home. And that sucks, like we've all been made to feel like we weren't appreciated by somebody that we were doing a financial transaction with. So ask yourself, how can you make your potential and current customers feel appreciated? The V stands for validated, and one of the best quotes that I've ever come across is from Oprah. On her last episode, she was imparting some of the lessons that she had learned over the years of hosting her shows and she said she'd interviewed something like 30,000 people over the years, and they all wanted the same thing. And that was validation. They all want it to feel like they were important and their feelings mattered. I see you, I hear you what you're saying is important to me. So, validate your customers. One big mistake that I see people make all the time in customer service is when somebody has a complaint, having your rebuttal be like, Oh, I've never heard that before. Or it's 10,000 people haven't have had great experiences. That's absolutely the worst thing that you can ever say to somebody because you're bringing in other experiences that don't matter to them. It's a one to one conversation. It's a one to one relationship. So bringing in, that's like having a fight with your significant other and saying like, Well none of the women I dated before you ever had a problem with this, like how well is that going to go over? Like you don't want to bring in other experiences. So that V and wave validated >> And the E? >> and then the E is excited, making people feel excited because that passion, having people feel like you know you're excited that they're a customer of yours and you can bring something that's going to make their lives better is the most important key. >> Brittany, thank you so much. I could keep talking to ya. I wish we didn't end but we do, for sharing your experiences, your expertise, your recommendations on becoming any kind of brand with any product or service, generating the super fans. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. It was so great speaking with you guys today. >> Ditto. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this on theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas, thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen. Brought to you by X Ensure Interactive. >> Welcome back, everyone. Cube Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit. Twenty nineteen. I'm John. For whichever Frick. My Coast. This week. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Our next guest is Janine Falcone. Is the marketing agency lead in North America for a center in Iraq? Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having >> me love having the conversation just talking on before we came on camera around the role of the agencies. You guys are doing a lot of big work for big brands. B to C B to B. There's a big shift going on with Cloud computing. We've seen that movie is happening right now. Amazon, as you are all going on, but that what? The marketing world. It's not just about marketing. Cloud is a lot more going on there. The impact to the marketing world and the agency relationships are impacted. That's what's going on. Give us >> the state of >> the market, >> happy to sew an extension. Interactive. You know, a lot of clients come to us and they're living in this world. I talk with my hands. Sorry, living in this world of, like chaos, as I like to call it, because there's so many things going on the technology landscape that you described. It's crazy out there. Remember, the landscape used to be this big announces big. So there's all that sort of market buzz and chaos around. I should buy this technology in that technology, and marketers and CEOs they've all been out there doing, that's that's one piece. The second piece is the customer affectation, right? All that is evolving and changes a customer's always expect. I don't really carry our retailer bank whatever. They kind of have that uber experience that they all expect regardless of product or service or anything like that. So marketers have always tried to deal with that in the way they knew how. But then the third component is business climate and what's happening in their worlds with either shrinking budgets or aging workforce. I don't even mean age necessarily as much a skill set. Aging skill sets things that used to matter. Don't they've got that they've got organizational silos, they've got all these things. So those three things, plus I'm a marketer. I still have to deliver that old brand promise that they're told to dio, It's a crazy crazy time. >> All theaters air on massive change over chips happening. Marketers and CMOS also relied on agencies for help. Tell them they have domain expertise in certain areas, A and agencies and the other thing. But now that the value equations shifting in the economics underlying economics behind it are getting some visibility around its digital different new ballgame, you got a I and Machine Learning has caused that shift. So the question is, How should your customer how are your customers dealing with agency relation? Because in today's value exchange, >> totally and that's all >> don't often come ask us that so not only they have all those silos and all those things. They could have seventeen different agencies across multiple product lines that may have been doing a great job in their own silo. But who's bringing all that together? And then it's not even and my just not spending my money right with these agencies, like What are they delivering for that? So when they come to us, tow holistically, look across all of that and help them. We start with the customer in the center of all those siloed crazy areas. You've got to start with the customer, and what do they expect and how do you deliver to them? So, yes, we're seeing this crazy world in the agency space two of brandade disease desolate all the different kinds of agency >> toss another piece of fruit in the blender makes it all. So I was talking with the sea so that the chief information security officer at some chief security officer at Microsoft reports to the board in cybersecurity, going through the same transformation that it's happening, marking where now you have technology and AP eyes and and tools technical tools. So he's shrinking his supplier base down because he doesn't want his skills gas to get widened by having to learn new tools. So there's now a new forcing function on the tech side, and now we see that kind of creeping into the adobe conversation where it's like this techno involved. Yes, we now have toes, shrink suppliers even more so how do you get from seventeen to three years at the train? So there seems to be a discussion around the impact attack your thoughts. >> Yeah, well, absolutely. That was one of the areas I talked about. So what happens? There is they'LL need marketers to understand technology which today many do. Let's be honest, right? Like, ten, fifteen years ago. They didn't. Today they do. But it also requires you both internally and externally, tohave multiple skill sets. And sometimes they'LL say, Should I be bringing this in house shivering that in house? What do I do with this technology? And there's never one answer. There's never like you should enforce this or that. And so technology has had that massive impact on Oh, I could do this myself and then they realise that can and then back to the But do I have the right skill sets internally externally to be able to do that. And it's often seventeen different still skill sets to do one thing where it used to be. A lot >> of Jeff and I talked on the cue before about you know, the classic business school conversation around core competency should be in house Horak outsource your non core competencies. How did you see that evolved? Because at some point there has to be a core concert on data and things of that nature. So what's your thoughts? How do you advise clients on Okay, if you're going to go in house and start putting a toe in the water and building it out, it's an investment. And all I think about, what's the core competency? >> I mean core competence to me or anything related specifically to your industry that people have to continue to get skilled in an expert in. And they want to do just that. One thing. Sometimes people that are broader generalists in marketing and data, they might get bored doing that. But if someone is like, I want to be really good at this and I'm going to continue to hone my skills in that one thing Data Analytics, whatever, then that may be. And you live in the right market. You don't live in kind of a part of the country where it be hard to find those skills. Be honest. I mean some parts of the country, it's easier than others, so that is one way to look at it. But anything that requires generalist knowledge across industry knowledge or or things that are constantly evolving and you want someone else to pay for the training. >> What's the CMO conversation like for you in clients these days is actually lets a lot of stuff going on. We just illustrated the game is still the same. They gotta pride that brand promise. Now they got the text taxing always new things. Hopefully, Ball will move down the field faster. But what is the CMO conversation that you have? How they stay ahead of the curve? What's their edge? >> Yeah, >> how they posturing right now? >> I mean, I think it's an amazing time to be in marketing. So CM owes to me that are the pioneering. CMO is the ones that are really focusing back is in on the customer and developed, you know, delivering those relevant experiences. They're the ones that are being ex successful because they try toe, not certainly not. Ignore all of us chaos that's surrounding, but stay focused and then they don't worry about Oh, this isn't in my silo. I have to kind of reach across, and I have to make sure I get this first. They have to be the leaders. They have to lead the industry like knowledge and business would be the leader in the organization, whether or not they are and just be the pioneer to get that done, that makes them successful. The ones that are excited about that they're the future, writes >> funny. We interviewed a guy from Clorox while ago, and you think of CPG has been data driven forever right there coming out of there coming out of Cincinnati. They all got trained Teo G. But this is a whole different level of kind of, of data, of data driven execution's been than what they've been doing for years and years and years. That's >> right, because potentially they were product centric. So they dealt with their product in CPD, and I'm going to sell toilet paper. That's I'm going to be the best market or there is. But the customer expectations surrounding that have changed, and they expect you to know them in a relevant, non creepy way. And product marketing to customer marketing is a big shift, and potentially I know a lot. I know a little about a lot of industries. CPG has been very product focused, which is difficult when you now have to be customer centric, regardless of product right that your company is trying to >> send the >> changing rule of distribution, especially in cpt. Anywhere before they would. They would ship the the toilet paper, whatever they were doing, and it goes out the door and they don't know anything else about it to the next. Word comes in correct. Now they know how the products are being used. They got a direct connection to the to the customer, and they need to establish a relationship beyond just the actual execution of the purchase of a very different >> kind of a chance. Crazy. I love it. I think it's a crazy time >> to be able to do that. And again, the blurring between marketing and commerce and sales and service. There's all sorts of debates on where marketing ends commerce sales service begins because it's all clustered together now. Then there's creativity and technology and data and analytics all converging. So to me, people that understand all of those things at a high enough level and are good collaborators and orchestrators that know how to get things done, they will be successful. >> Do you take a lot of people tried to buy their way out of the problem because you know Martek technology has been around for a long time. Arguably, you know, kind of leading edge in a lot of the the things in terms of a web experience. But this, you know, so many of them. >> You can't buy your way out of the problem. Yeah, Yeah, except that. And >> buy it quickly, right? I'm going to buy it, and I'm gonna plug the sand. I mean, I feel like that might have happened years ago, and now you're right there seeing that. Oh, my God. Now, that, too, is like its own silo. Now they have a technology silo to, in addition to potentially some organizational silos that they have to break down. So But, you know, the good news is that everybody sort of sees this now and kind of gets it. And if people are just sort of focused on to do the right thing for the customer because if you don't, someone else will. And sometimes going back to what used to work works like Now, if I call a company, I have no expectation they're going to answer the phone. And when they do, you're like, Wow, that was a great experience. I scheduled a vacation. It was It ended up being non refundable. And I'm like, I'm just going to try to call. It was one of the online. It wasn't Airbnb was one of those like services I caught. They answer the phone. If seven o'Clock on a Thursday night, >> no problem. You can count. Like this is the greatest experience I've had. I'm going to use them again because I didn't expect >> that. So it's not like what used to work doesn't work anymore, but has to work on the right. >> Pleasant surprises. Exactly. Relevancy. That's healthy. And you got it. Yeah. And then they >> said I said, Okay, well, I mean, they're like, we don't need your information, you know, I have your cell phone, so I don't >> know. And I wasn't creeped out by that. I don't >> thank God. Now I don't have to fill out a form >> I need to do mother's maiden name, like, six different times. >> And then, you know what? I saw how you guys make >> money. Like I was so fascinated by this that I just had to sort of figure out the business model because I'm a marker there. And my point is that was. I don't know how much it costs them to do that, but that was a positive experience, >> President. People call in >> there, Bryan. Nobody call it. And I don't know how they got around the company for all I know. So I gotta ask you, I gotta ask >> you with all these new changes you mentioned in one of the great example of how the world's changing KP eyes also change around what's really what's relevant. Because these new things air going on where may or may not have KP I. So how does the CMO get out in front of that? How did they evolve their skill set to either either grok that understand all this new k p I potential? Yeah, and have that front and center and working through the marketing mix. >> Yeah, you can have KP I overload to write. So remember, old school still works. Brand matters. Brandt. No one worried about measuring that stuff years ago, and part of that is still relevant. I had a session earlier today and people talked about CP eyes like customer related influence and things like that, because that matters and some things you absolutely I know This is a Dobie a mike in trouble. You maybe can't necessarily measure. But, you know, it matters to your brand, and some of that matters to know how much you spend on that, how you sort of track that and maybe track I'm all about, like, mixing gray and mixing, you know, qualitative and quantitative stuff. That's part of the trick >> on these signals. Their market, their data signals totally put on the agency front. Go back to the agency for second because with sass, APS and these new things, people answer the phone, which has blended kind of channels. Is there a new agency model emerging around cloud and sass applications that that this doesn't feel like an agency but acts like an agency? Because if you're an agency you're providing a service, you have software service models out there. Self service is there in the evolution of change over and how ages new agencies looked like. And how does the CMO know if someone's a new agency is going to be relevant or not? >> I mean, it totally depends on the kind of agents, and I would tell C Motor not necessarily worry about that. I wouldn't worry about. Do I need a new kind of agency at all? It's like, What am I getting? What are they delivering for me? I would go back to the first question and what do I need to keep as a core competency? And inside versus outside I wouldn't worry about it. Might be the technology question. Right now, I'm gonna have even the others other crazy agencies in What I would worry about is what do I know? I need toe outsource and have people help me with that are going to come up with the best ideas. And I mean, agencies still do that because to come up with a creative idea, you need that expertise that is outside of your industry. So I don't see that ever changing >> don't ask in terms of because, he said, cause brand matters. And I always like a Harley Davidson is kind of the extreme brand loyalty where people tattoo it on their bodies and there's a whole ecosystem outside of the motorcycle. That's a really, you know, passionate group of people. Should everybody strive for that kid everybody. I mean they can't get quite where every tattoo and brands on their arm. But you know where we're kind of the limits And is it, you know, kind of appropriate based on what the product is, how people think about that. Specter. >> Yeah, I might be a little biased on that. I always think brand matters. I always think that when you think of something, if you don't in your head, know what that stands for, whether or not it's a positive or negative is not really relevant. It's yes, I think it does now. Should they strive to be that? No. But they have to be differentiated, and they have to have people know what they do quickly, because if you have to figure it out like mean, people struggle with that today in terms of knowing where to go for what, So without a clear value proposition, differentiation and a brand that matches that and a brand you can live up to with every experience, it's going to be rough. You might have some early success, but it won't. I don't know that it lasts their time and strong brands kind of carry through some tough times, too, You know, if sales are down on the market changes, >> we'LL keep doing our and our interviews on events and get smart people really smart people. And all the answers come out community. Thanks >> so much for coming on, sharing these awesome insights. Final question. What's going on? The show for you? What? Some of the hallway conversations here. You're speaking. What's the top story line for you here at this show? >> It's two things. It's what's going on. The market with our clients is as we just talked about. It's what's going on in our own industry. I mean, there's craziness in our own industry, which is kind of fun. You know what players do, what and who's going to do what and you know, where's this all going? And it's fun. I mean, it's it's really, really fun and exciting to be part of this industry. >> Well, thanks for coming on, Mr. Q. Where we're extracting the signal from the noise at this event. Adobe Summit twenty nineteen Talking the smartest people bringing it to you. Bring that data to you. We right back with more coverage after this short break

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you >> by Adobe. >> Well, Brian, welcome to the Cube Lives Conversations here. Recovering Adobe summat twenty nineteen in Las Vegas. I'm tougher with Jeff Frick co hosting for the next two days wall to wall coverage around Adobe Summit, a company that is transformed from some making software to being a full blown cloud and data provider. Changing the user experience That's our Kino revue. Jeff, this morning was the keynote. The CEO Sean Tom knew no. Ryan took over in two thousand seven. Bruce Chizen Cube alumni, right. What a transformation. They actually did it. They kind of kept down low. But over those years absolutely changed the face of Adobe. We're seeing it now with a slew of acquisitions. Now seventeen thousand people attending this conference. This is kind of interesting story, your thoughts >> a lot of interesting stuff going on here, John and I think fundamentally they they took the risk right. They change your business from a by a news buying new license every year for eight hundred bucks. Nine hundred bucks, whatever used to be for Creative Cloud to go to an online model. And I think what was interesting about what Johnson, who said, is when you are when you're collecting money monthly, you have to deliver value monthly. And it completely changed the way that they paste their company the way they deliver products the way their product development works. And they moved to as we talked about all the time, instead of a sample of data that's old and making decisions. Now you can make decisions based on real time data in the way people are actually using the product. And so they've driven that transformation. And then now, by putting your whole sweet and with these gargantuan acquisitions of Mar Keto, now they're helping their customers really make that transition to a really time dynamic, digitally driven, data driven enterprise to drive this customer experience. >> It's interesting. Adobes, transformations, realist, legit It happened. It's happening. It's interesting, Jeff, you and I both live in Palo Alto, and I was looking through my Lincoln and my Facebook. There's literally dozens of friends and your colleagues over the years that I've interfaced with that all work at Adobe but feed all the acquisitions. They've built quite a huge company, and they brought a different set of experiences, and this is the to be the big story. That hasn't been told yet. Adobe again. This our first time covering Adobe Summit and excited to be here and continue to cover this. But here's what's going on That's really important. They transformed and are continuing Transformer. They did it in a way that was clever, smart and very predictive in their mind. They took a slow, slow approach to getting it right, and we heard the CEO talk about this. They had an old software model that was too slow. They want to attract the next generation of users, and they wanted to reimagine their product and the ecosystem changed their business model and change their engagement with customers. Very targeted in its approach, very specific to their business model. And their goals were innovate faster, moved to the cloud moved to a subscription based business model. But that's not it. Here the story is, the data equation was some kind of nuances in the keynote, like we didn't get the data right. Initially, we got cloud right, but data is super important, and then they got it right, and that's the big story. Here is the data driven and this is the playbook. I mean, you can almost substitute Adobe for your company. If someone's looking to do Tracy, pick your spots, execute, don't just talk about >> it, right? Right? Yeah. They call it the DDO in the data driven operating model, and he pulled up the dash board with some fake data talked about The management team runs off of this data, and when you know it's everything from marketing spend and direct campaigns and where people are sampling, there was a large conversation, too, about the buyer journey. But to me, the most important part is the buying act is not the end of the story, right. You want to continue to engage with that customer wherever and however, and whenever they want you. There was an interesting stat that came out during the keynote, where you know the more platforms your customer engages with you, the much higher the likelihood that they're goingto that they're going to renew, that they're going to retain so to me. I think you know, we talk a lot about community and engagement and this experience concept where the product is a piece of the puzzle, but it's not. It's not the most important piece that might be the piece Well, what she experiences built around, but it's It's just a simple piece. I think the guy from Best Buy was phenomenal. The story, the transformation, that company. But they want to be your trusted. A provider of all these services of two hundred dollars a year. They'LL come take care of everything in your home so you know they don't just want to ship a box. Say, say goodbye. They want to stay. >> Well, let's talk. Let's talk about that use case. I think the best bike Kino Best Buy was on the Kino with CEO. But I think that what I what? I was teasing out of that interview and you just brought it up. I want to expand on that They actually had massive competition from Amazon. So you think, Oh my God, they're going to be out of business? No, they match the price. They took price off the table so they don't lose their customers who want to buy it on Amazon. You can still come in the story of experience, right? They shifted the game to their advantage where they said, we're not going to be a product sales company. We're going to sell whatever the client want customers want and match Amazons pricing and then provide that level of personalization. That then brought up the keys CEOs personalization piece, which I'd like to get your thoughts on because you made a stat around their emails, right, he said, Quote personalization at scale, Right? That's what they're >> that's that they're doing right? And he talked about, you know, they used to do an e mail blast and it was an email blast. Now they have forty million versions of that e mail that go out forty million version. So it is this kind of personalization at scale. And you know, the three sixty view of the customer has been thrown around. We could go in the archives. We've been talking about that forever. But it seems that now you know the technology is finally getting to where, where needs to be. The cloud based architectures allow people to engage in this Army Channel way that they could never do it before. And you're seeing As you said, the most important thing is a data architecture that can pull from disparate sources they talked about in the Kenya. The show does they actually built their customer profile as the person was engaging with the website as they gave more information so that they can customize all this stuff for that person. Of course, then they always mentioned, But don't be creepy about it. I >> don't have too >> far so really delivering this mask mask, personalization at scale. >> I think one of the lessons that's coming out a lot of our interviews in the Cube is Get the cloud equation right first, then the data one. And I think Adobe validates that here in my mind when it continue investigating, report that dynamic the hard news. Jeff The show was Adobe Cloud experiences generally available, and I thought that was pretty interesting. They have a multiple clouds because a member they bought Magenta and Marquette on a variety of other acquisitions. So they have a full on advertising cloud analytics, cloud marketing cloud and a commerce cloud. And underneath those key cloud elements, they have Adobe, sensi and Adobe Experience platform, and we have a couple of night coming on to talk about that, and that's making up. They're kind of the new new platform. Cloud platforms experience Cloud. They're calling it, but the CEO at Incheon quote. I want to get your reaction to that. This, he said, quote people by experiences, not products. That's why they're calling it the experience cloud. I hear you in the office all the time talking about this, Jeff. So it's about to experience the product anymore, >> right? It is the passion that you can build around a community in that experience. My favorite examples from the old days is Harley Davidson. How many people would give you know they're left pinkie toe, have their customers tattoo their brand on their body? Right in The Harley Davidson brand is a very special, a special connotation, and the people that associate with that really feel like a part of a community. The other piece of it is the ecosystem. They talk about ecosystem of developers and open source. If you can get other people building their business on the back of your platform again, it's just deepens the hook of engagements that opens up your innovation cycle. And I think it's such a winning formula, John, that we see over and over again. Nobody can do by themselves. Nobody's got all the smartest people in the room, so get unengaged community. Get unengaged, developer ecosystem, more talk of developers and really open it up and let the creativity of your whole community drive the engagement and the experience. >> We will be following the personalization of scale Cube alumni former keep alumni who is not at the show. I wanted to get opinion. Satya Krishna Swami. He's head of persuasion. Adobe had pinned them on linked him. We'LL get him on the Cuban studio so keep on, we're going to follow that story. I think that's huge. This notion of personalization of scale is key, and that brings us to the next big news. The next big news was from our friend former CEO of Marquette. Oh, Steve Lucas. Keep alumni. They launched a account based experience initiative with Adobe, Microsoft and Lincoln, and I find that very interesting. And I'd start with Ron Miller TechCrunch on Twitter about this. Lincoln's involved, but they're keeping in Lincoln again. The problem of data is you have these silos, but you have to figure out how to make it work. So I'm really curious to see how that works, so that brings up that. But I think Steve Lucas it was it was very aggressive on stage, but he brought up a point that I want to get your thoughts on, He said. Were B to B company, but we're doing B to seeing metrics the numbers that they were doing at Marquette. Oh, we're in the B to see rain. So is this notion of B to B B to see kind of blurring? I mean, everyone is a B to C company these days. If everything's direct to consumer, which essentially what cloud is, it's a B to see. >> Yeah, well, it's interesting records. We've talked about the consumer ization of again. Check the tapes for years and years and years, and the expectations of our engagement with applications is driven by how we interact with Amazon. How we interact with Facebook, how we interact with these big platforms. And so you're seeing it more and more. The thing that we talked about in studio the other day with Guy is that now, too, you have all these connected devices, so no longer is distribution. This this buffer between the manufacturing, the ultimate consumer, their products. Now they're all connected. Now they phone home. Now the Tesla's says, Hey, people are breaking in the back window. Let's reconfigure the software tohave a security system that we didn't have yesterday that wasn't on our road map. But people want, and now we have it today. So I think Steve's perception is right on. The other thing is that you know, there's so much information out there. So how do you add value when that person finally visits you in their journey? And let's face it, most of the time, a predominant portion of their engagement is going to be Elektronik, right? They're going to fill out a form. They're going to explore things. How are you collecting that data? How are you magic? How are you moving them along? Not only to the purchase but again, is that it was like to say, is never the orders, the reorder in this ongoing engagement. >> And that's their journey. They want to have this whole life cycle of customer experience. But the thing that that got that caught me off guard by McKeen against first time I went satin Aquino for an adobe on event was with me. All these parts coming together with the platform. This is a cloud show. Let's plain and simple. This is Cloud Technologies, the data show we've gone to all the cloud shows Amazon, Google, Microsoft, you name it CNC Athletics Foundation. This is a show about the application of being creative in a variety of use cases. But the underpinnings of the conversations are all cloud >> right, And they had, you know, to show their their commitments of data and the data message right? They had another cube alumni on Jewell of police have rounded to dupe some it all the time, and she talked about the data architecture and again, some really interesting facts goes right to cloud, she said. You know, most people, if you don't have cloud's been too much time baby sitting your architecture, baby sitting your infrastructure Get out of the way Let the cloud babe sit your infrastructure and talk. And she talked about a modern big data pipe, and she's been involved with Duke. She's been involved with Spark has been involved in all this progression, and she said, You know, every engagement creates more data. So how are you collecting that data? How are you analyzing that data and how are you doing it in real time with new real time so you could actually act on it. So it's It's very much kind of pulling together many of the scenes that we've uncovered >> in the last two parts of a Kino wass. You had a CEO discussion between Cynthia Stoddard and >> Atticus Atticus, other kind. Both of them >> run into it again. Both big Amazon customs, by the way, who have been very successful with the cloud. Then you had and you're talking engineering, that's all. They're my takeaway from the CEO. One chef I want to get your thoughts on because it can be long in the tooth, sometimes the CEO conversation. But they highlighted that cloud journey is is there for Adobe Inn into it? But the data is has to be integrated, totally felt like data. Variables come out the commonality of date, and she mentioned three or four other things. And then they made a point and said, quote data architectures are valuable for the experience and the workload. This is critical with hearing us over and over again. The date is not about which cloud you're using. It's about what the workload, right, right? The workloads are determining cloud selection, so if you need one cloud. That's good. You need to write. It's all depending on the workload, not some predetermined risk management. Multi cloud procurement decision. This is a big shift. This is going to change the game in the landscape because that changes how people buy and that is going to be radical. And I think they're they're adobes right on the right wave. Here they're focusing on the user experience, customer experience, building the platform for the needs of the experience. I think it's very clever. I think it's a brilliant architecture. >> Yeah, she said that the data archive data strategy lagged. Right? The reporting lag. They're trying to do this ddo m >> um, >> they didn't have commonality of data. They didn't have really a date. Architecture's so again. You can't build the house unless you put in the rebar. You build the foundation, you get some cement. But once you get that, that enabled you to build something big and something beautiful, and you've got to pay attention. But really, we talk about data driven. We talk about real time data, they're executing it and really forcing themselves by moving into the subscription business model. >> Alright, Final question I want to get one more thought from you before I weigh in on my my answer to my question, which is What do you mean your opinion? What was the most important story that came out of the keynote one or two >> or well or again? You know, John, I was in the TV business for years and years before getting into tech, and I know the best buy story on what came before them and what came before them and what came before them. So what really impressed me was the digital transformation story that the CEO shared first, to basically try to get even with their number one competitors with which was Amazon in terms of pricing and delivery. And then really rethink who they are Is a company around using technology to improve people's lives. They happen to play in laundry. They play in kitchen, they play in home entertainment. They play in computers and education, so they have a broad footprint and to really refocus. And as he said, To be successful, you need to align your corporate strategy and mission with people's strategy and mission. Sounds like they've been very successful in that and they continue to change the company. >> I agree. And I would just kind of level it up and say the top story, in my opinion, wass the fact that Adobe is winning their innovating. If you look at who's on stage like best buy into it, the people around them are actually executing with Cloud with Dae that at a whole another level that they've gone the next level. I think the big story here is Adobe has transferred, has transformed and continues to do transformation. And they just had a whole nother level. And I think the story is Oracle will be eating their dust because I think they're going to tow. You know, I think sales force should be watching Adobe. This is a big move. I think Oracle is gonna be twisting in the wind from adobes success. >> Well, like he said, you know, they tie the whole thing together from the creativity, which is what creative cloud is to the delivery to them, the monetization in the measuring. So now they you know, they put those pieces together, so it's a pretty complete suite. So now you can tie back. How has my conversion based on What type of creative How is my conversion based on what type of campaigns? And again the forty million email number just blows me away. It's not the same game anymore. You have to do this and you can't do by yourself. You gotta have automation. You got have good analytics and you got a date infrastructure that will support your ability to do that. >> So just a little report card in adobe old suffer model that's over. They have the new model, and it's growing revenues supporting it. They are attracting new generation of users. You look at the demographics here, Jeff. This is not, you know, a bunch of forty something pluses here. This is a young generation new creative model and the products on the customer testimonials standing on this stage represent, in my opinion, a modern architecture, a modern practice, modern cloud kind of capabilities. So, you know, Adobe Certainly looking good from this keynote. I'm impressed, you know. Okay, >> good. Line up all the >> days of live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Doby summit. I'm John for Jeff. Rick, Thanks for watching. We'll be back with a short break

>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering the Conference Boards Sixth Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back here, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Mater Class at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. Really excited to be here, never been here, surprisingly, for all the shows we do just up the hill next to VMware, and Tesla. This is kind of the granddaddy of locations and innovation centers, it's been around forever. If you don't know the history, get a couple books, you'll learn it pretty fast. So we're excited to be here and our next guess is Antony Brydon, four-time founder and CEO, which is not easy to do. Again, check the math on that, most people are successful a couple times, hard to do it four times. And now he's the co-founder and CEO of Directly. So Antony, great to see you. >> It's good to be here. >> So, Directly, what is directly all about for people aren't familiar with the company? >> Most companies are excited to, and pursuing, the opportunity of automating up to 85% of their customer service. That's the ambition, and giving customers a delightful answer in their first experience. Most of those companies are falling down out of the gates because there are content gaps, and data gaps, and training gaps, and empathy gaps in the systems. So we build a CX automation platform and it puts experts at the heart of AI, letting these companies build networks of product experts and then rewarding those experts for creating content for AI systems, for training AI systems, for resolving customer questions. >> Right. So let's back up a step. So Zendesk is probably one we're all familiar with. You send in a customer service node, a lot of the times it comes back, customer service to Zendesk. >> Yes. >> But you're not building kind of a competitor of Zendesk, you're more of a partner, if I believe, for those types of applications, to help those apps do a better job. >> We are, we're a partner for Zendesk, we're a partner for Microsoft Dynamics, for Service Cloud and the like, and, essentially, are building the automation systems that make their AI systems work and work better. >> Right. >> Those are pure technology systems that often lack the data and the content to deliver AI at scale and quality, and that's where our platform and the human network, the experts in the mix, come into play. >> We could probably go for a long, long time on this topic. So what are some of the key things that make them not work now? Besides just the fact that it's kind of like the old dial-in systems. It's like, I just want to hit 0000. I just want to talk to a person. I have no confidence or faith that going through these other steps is going to get me the solution. Do you still see that on the online world as well? >> No, there are very clear gaps. There are four or five areas where systems are falling down. AI project mortality, as I refer to it. Very few companies have the structured data that systems need to work at scale. >> On the back, to feed the whole thing. >> That's right. Labeled, structured, organized data. So that doesn't exist. Many companies don't have the content. That's a second area. They may have enterprised knowledge bases, but they're five years old, they're seven years old, they're outdated, they're not accurate. Many companies don't have the signal. When a automated answer's delivered, they have to wait for a customer to rate it, and that tends to be really poor signal on whether that answer was good or not. And then last, many companies just don't have the teams to maintain these algorithms and constantly tune them. And that is where experts at the heart of a platform can come into play, by building a network of product experts who know the products inside and out. These could be Airbnb hosts for one of our customers, these could by Microsoft Excel users in the Microsoft example. Those experts can create that content, train the data, and actually resolve questions, filling those gaps, solving those problems. >> Right. I'm just curious, on the expert side, how many--? I don't know if there's best practices or if there's kind of certain buckets depending on the industry. Of those expert answers are generated by people inside the company versus a really kind of active, engaged community where you've got third-party experts that are happy to participate and help provide that info. >> Over 99% of the answers and the content is actually generated by the external network. >> 99%? >> 99%. You start with sources of enterprise knowledge, but it's a long, hard, arduous process to create those internal knowledge bases, and companies really struggle to keep up, it's Britannica. By the time you ship it it's outdated and you have to start all over again. The external expert networks work more like Wikipedia. Content constantly being organically created, the successful content is promoted, the unsuccessful content is demoted, and it's an evergreen cycle where it's constantly refreshing. Overwhelmingly external. >> Overwhelming. I mean, I could see where there's certain types of products. I was telling somebody else the other day about Harley-Davidson, one of the all-time great brands. People tattoo it on their body. Now, there aren't very many brands that people tattoo on their body. So easy to get people to talk about motorcycles or some of these types of things, but how do you do it for something that's really not that exciting? What are some of the tricks and incentives to engage that community? Or is there just always some little corps that you may or may not be aware of that are happy to jump in and so passionate about those types of products? >> There are definitely some companies where there's very little expertise and passion in the ecosystem around it. They're few and far between. If you find a product, if you find a company, you can find people that rely, love, and depend on that company. I gave some of the B to C examples, but we've also got networks for enterprise software companies, folks like SAP, folks like Autodesk. And those networks have experts that are developers, resellers, VARs, systems integrators, and the like. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the talent and the passion exists, you just have to have a simple platform to onboard and start tapping that talent and passion. >> So if I hear you right, you use kind of your Encyclopedia Britannica because that's what you have to start, to get the fly wheel moving, but as you start to collect inputs from third-party community, you can start to refine and get the better information back. And I ask specifically that way because you mentioned the human factors, and making people part of this thing, which is probably part of the problem with adoption, as I'd want confidence that there's some person behind this, even if the AI is smart. I'd want at least feel like there's some human-to-human contact when I reach out to this company. >> Yeah, that's critically important, because the empathy gap is real in almost all of the systems that are traditionally out there, which is when an automated answer's delivered, in a traditional system, it typically has a much lower CSAT than when it comes from a human being. What we found is when you have an expert author that content, when his or her face is shown next to the answer as it's presented to the user, and where he or she is there to back it up should that user still need more help, there you retain the human elements that personalize the contact, that humanize the experience, and immediately get big gains in CSAT. So It think that empathy piece is really important. >> Right. I wondered if you could share any specific examples of a customer that had an automated, kind of dumb system, I'll just use that word, compared to what they can do today, and some of the impacts when they put in some of the AI-powered systems like you guys support. >> So one of the first immediate impacts is often when we go in, a automated or unassisted system will be handling a very small percentage of the queries, and percentage of the customer questions coming in, and-- >> And people are going straight to zero, they're just like, I got to go to a person. >> Yeah, we're mostly in digital channels, so less phone, but yes, because the content there-- >> As an analogy, right. >> Because the content isn't there, it doesn't hit and resolve the question in that frequent a rate, or because the training and the signal isn't there, it's giving answers that are a little off-base. So the first and lowest hanging fruit is with a content library that's get created that can get 10, 50, 100 times broader that enterprise content pretty quickly. You're able to hit a much broader set of questions at a much higher rate. That's the first low-hanging fruit and kind of immediate impact. >> And is that helping them orchestrate, coordinate, collect data form this passionate ecosystem that's outside the four walls? Is that, essentially, what you're doing in that step? >> It essentially is. It is about companies having these ecosystems of these users, millions of hours of expertise in their head, millions of hours free time on their hands, and the ability to tap that in a systematic way. >> Wow. Shift gears a little bit, you are participating on a panel here at the event, talking about startups working with big companies and there's obviously a lot of challenges, starting with vendor viability issues, which is more kind of selling to big customers versus, necessarily, partnering with big companies. But what are some of the themes that you've seen that make that collaboration successful? Because, obviously, you've got different cultures, you got different kind of rates of the way things happen, you've got, beware the big company who eats you up in meetings all the time when you're a little start-up, they'll kill you accidentally just by scheduling so many meetings. What are some of the secrets of success that you're going to share here at the event? >> So we've got experience in that. Microsoft is a partner of ours, Microsoft Ventures is an investor. I think the single biggest key is an aligned vision and a complementary approach. The aligned vision where both the start-up and the partner are aiming for a similar point on the horizon. For example, the belief that automation can delight a very large set of customers by providing them a good, instant answer, but complementary approaches where the core skillsets of the companies round out each other and become less competitive. In this case, we've partnered with-- Microsoft is best in class AI platform and cognitive services, and we're able to tap and leverage that. We're also able to bring something unique to the equation by putting experts at the heart of it. So I think that architectural structure, in the first place, is a great example of kind of getting it right. >> Right. And your experience, that's been pretty easy to establish at the head-end of the process, so that you have kind of smooth sailing ahead? >> No, I don't think it's easy to establish at the head of the process, and I think that's where all of the good work and investment needs to happen. Upfront, on that kind of shared vision, and on that kind of complementary approach. And I think it is probably 20% building that together, but it's also 80% just finding it. The selection criteria by which a corporate partner picks a startup and the startup partner picks the corporate partner. I think just selecting right is the majority of the challenge, rather than trying to craft it kind of midstream. >> If it doesn't feel good at the beginning, it's probably not going to to work out. >> Right, it's about finding it. It's a little bit like the Venture analogy. Do they find great companies, or do they build great companies? Probably a little of both, but that finding that great company is a large part of the equation. >> Yeah, helps. So, Antony, finally get a last question. So, again, four successful startups. That does not happen very often with the same team. And look at your background, you're a psychology and philosophy major, not an engineer. So I'd just love to get kind of your thoughts about being a non-tech guy starting, running, and successfully exiting tech companies here in silicon valley. What's kind of the nice thing being from a slightly different background that you've used to really drive a number of successes? So I think the-- I think two things, I think one, coming from a non-tech and coming from a psych background has given us an appreciation of the human elements in these systems that tech alone can't do it. I'd say, personally, one of the impacts of being a non-tech founder in this valley is a heck of a lot of appreciation for what teams can do. And realizing that what teams can do is far more important than what individuals can do. And I say that because as a non-tech founder, there's literally nothing I could accomplish without being a part of a team. So that, I think, non-tech founders have that in spades. A harsh and frank realization that it's about team and they can't do anything on their own. >> Well, Antony, thanks for taking a minute out of your time. Good luck on the panel this afternoon and we'll keep an eye, watch the story unfold again. >> Yep, I appreciate it. Thanks very much. >> He's Antony, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Master at the Master Innovation Class at Xerox PARC, thanks for watching.

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube, we're at E3 at the LA Convention Center, 68,000 people milling around, but we've got kind of the backdoor access here to the Warner Brothers Games booth, so we're really excited to be back in here, the inner sanctum, talking about some of the new games coming out and we got Phill Ring, he's the Executive Producer of TT Games, Phil, great to see you. >> No, thank you very much for having me. >> Absolutely, so you're in charge of this wonderful game, that we've got on the wall behind us, the Lego DC Super-Villains? >> Sure, yeah, I'm lucky enough to be one of the incredibly talented team, 'cause we're really excited about this game, Lego DC Super-Villains is something we've actually been playing around with as an idea for a while, you get to be the villains, you get to be the bad guys, so we're really excited we actually finally get to show and talk about it. >> Right, after doing what, three games of Batman, so now you get a flip over, you get to be the Riddler or the Joker? >> Yeah, this is it, so with the kind of DC universe, we did the Lego Batman titles, but DC has amazing villains, you've got Joker, you've got Harley, you've got Lex and we were like you know what? Let's play as those, let's do something really cool, let's do a story where we're focusing on the villains, because we've never done it before, we think it'll be quite fun and hopefully people are gonna really enjoy it. >> Great, so it's coming out, so give the particulars for everybody at home, who's waiting to get their order in. >> Sure, so it's available October 16th, it's actually available for pre-order now and depending where you're pre-ordering it from, there's actually a really cool Lex Luthor power-suit mini figure you can get, so it features in the game and then you can actually have that model sat on your desk, so I'm really excited, I'm gonna run off and pre-order it as soon as I can, 'cause I want that figure. >> Well, that's cool, but the other feature you talked about before we turned on the cameras, you can actually make yourself into a Lego figure, right? >> This is really cool, yeah. So when we were looking at this game, we were sat there thinking, okay, villains are really, really cool, but I wonder what it would be like if I could put myself into this world, what happens if I'm playing with Joker and with Lex, so we decided to put the Character Customizer in, so right at the very beginning of the game, Commissioner Gordon's heading to find out some information about this new character and then you customize that character and that's your character, so you make whoever you want, as crazy as you want, there's loads of kind of depth to the Customizer, you can change decors, colors, torsos, facial features, hair pieces and then that character appears throughout the story, so they walk out in a cut scene and that's really cool and then that character unlocks new powers and abilities and becomes stronger as you play through the game. >> Right, so I'm just curious on kind of the evolution of the game, again you did some earlier versions, that weren't the same game, but you know, this one is kind of built onto that, what did you discover, in terms of how people play the game? One of my favorite topics is degree of difficulty, >> Sure. >> How do you figure out the degree of difficulty, to make it difficult enough from excited to attack a challenge and conquer it, but not so difficult, where I'm just banging my head against a wall and throw my controller out the window and say, I just can't get through this thing. >> So that's something that the team do really, really well. We always look at it and go, okay, we know that these games are for a younger audience or at least to start with, so we want something that an eight-year old kid, who may have never played a Lego game before can come along, have loads of fun with this world, so we're making sure that we're kind of educating the player, we have a new tutorial system in this game, where we can show little videos to go, so you've just unlocked this cool power, this is how it works. So we can kind of educate people, but then we know that we're gonna have like either fans of Lego games, but also like DC Comic fans, like we have people kind of telling us, "Oh, I play this with my wife and things," so they want a bit more of a challenge and that's when we get to go into like the Free Play world, so once you're playing the story, you can then go explore all these locations and you find the slightly trickier puzzles, where it's like, oh, I need to figure out what I need to do here, what character do I need, what ability do I need to use? So having that kind of accessibility, so it's really accessible to get into the game, but then there's loads of depth to it, >> Right. >> so that's really cool for us and it's one of these things that we're really kind of happy with, 'cause we also find that the eight-year old kids run around doing all the hard puzzles and we struggle with them, so sometimes it swings, so. >> I was gonna say, so what are some of the things you measure to see if you're hitting that objective? Is it time in a level? Is it time being in there? I mean, what are some of the factors, that you guys are actually looking and measuring to see if you maybe have to make an adjustment, based on the actual behavior? >> So we love getting people to play the game, so we bring kids in and we'll sit there, then we see them playing it and if they're getting stuck, if there's something that's not really kind of standing out to them, if they're spending too much time in an area, not knowing what they're doing, we'll go okay, right, we need to change that, we need to signpost that differently, we need to turn round and say, how can we make it clearer to the player, so they know what they do, but also keep the rewards, so that they feel like they've achieved, that they feel like they've figured it out. >> Right. >> So that's one of the things, like if someone's getting stuck on a level and they're there for like three, four, five minutes and they don't know what to do, we don't want that experience for people, so we'll sit there and go, okay, how can we make that clearer? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can maybe flash a piece of Lego or something and sit there and go, these Lego bricks, maybe you wanna smash those up and that's also really cool, 'cause villains get to smash things up. >> Right, right. >> and go, okay, if I break that, I can make that clearer, then the player will then know what to do and they'll be able to progress. >> So it's really signaling is really the big kind of, way to help them get over that, versus completely changing that piece of the play? >> Yeah, we really do think that we can hopefully change the puzzles to be able to do that, we have had instances though, where we sit there and go, actually, no one gets this, this is too complicated, back to the drawing board and so we'll rip a puzzle out and sit there and go, actually, how do we change this, this is overly complicated, it's too confusing, let's do something different, let's do something that's really cool and it also means that we get to go, let's have a second stab at it and sometimes we get really cool results from it and some of the puzzles are even better than what we had previously, so. >> And the other piece I think is really interesting is clearly these are very well-known brands, Lego's a very well-known brand, DC is a very well-known brand, so you've got a narrative, you've got a story, you have kind of the look and feel, at the same time you want players to be able to do all kinds of things and you don't necessarily know where they're gonna go, how they're gonna interact, so how do you kind of balance the play with the narrative? >> So one of the great things about this game is from a story point of view and a narrative, we actually, it's an original creation and we worked really closely with DC and that allows us to kind of really help with the kind of pacing of the adventure, so as you're playing through and you start off on the first level, when you're breaking out of a prison, you then get dropped into the Open World Hub and we get to signpost people and say, hey, you can go over here to continue the story, but if you wanna go off and explore, you do that, go for it, go see what you can find and then we kind of have something that allows players to keep coming back, because these worlds, we know that there are massive fans of them, so if you turn round to someone and say, you can go to Gotham City, they'll know where they wanna go, like if I'm a Batman fan, I'm like, I'm going to the Iceberg Lounge, I wanna see what it is. So we give players that freedom to really explore it, but then always kind of let them be able to kind of return to the story path and that's another thing that we think is really important, because when people are playing these games, we want them to be able to make the choices of how they play the game. >> Right, great, that's interesting, so if there is a place, that they want to go to, 'cause they love Gotham City, they're big fans of Batman and it's not there, you guys hear a lot of feedback? I mean, do people come back, so that you've got to pump that into the next iteration of the game and the next update? >> Yeah, we do, we listen to what fans do and we've been doing that for years, so ever since we've been doing these DC titles, we sit there and go, what do people wanna do, what do people wanna see? One of the things that I love is that we have massive DC fans in the office, so a lot of the stuff, we'll sit there and we'll see like requests coming in on social media going, I really hope this character's there and we get to look at our character list and go, yep, he's there, who put it in? And then we go chat with them and they go, of course I'm gonna include that character, I love them and some of them are really obscure. >> Right. >> But yeah, we love listening to feedback and seeing what people expect and what they want to see from this world. >> It's really interesting balance, 'cause you get all the leverage from those known brands, those known characters, those known stories, >> Sure. >> but at the same time, as you said, you've got a lot of people, that are really into it and they're gonna hold you to a standard, >> Yeah. >> to make sure, that you're representing everything as they think it really should be. >> Yeah, very much so and this is the other thing about having fans in the office is we keep ourselves to that high standard as well, we sit there and go, it needs to be right, like I am a fan of Gorilla Grodd, he needs to do everything I want him to do, because I know this character inside and out and so when we have people, who are that passionate about the game on staff, we just wanna be able to share that with the world and so when we hear feedback, that people go, "Oh, we love it, it's exactly what I wanted," it's like we love that, it's incredible to know that we kind of feel like we've got it right, we've got these characters right. >> It's so cool though, just the integration of the Legos with all these other brands and just the, and it's not even the Lego blocks, the Lego people and how well it's been able to be integrated with all these other brands and the integration just seems to work so, so, so well. >> Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough to be with TT for over 11 years now, so being able to work on these games and see how we can do a Lego version of these stories and these worlds and these universes, I'm so privileged to be able to do that and the Lego version is different, so Lego DC Super-Villains is a world of DC, that you won't see anywhere else, because it's our take on it, >> Right. >> it's the developer and working with DC, being able to go, let's make something cool and working really closely with Lego and going, what sets are you making? Let's put those in, that's really cool, so. >> It's awesome, alright, well Phill, thanks for taking a few minutes, congratulations on the game and good luck on October 16th. >> Great, thank you very much, thank you. >> Alright, he's Phill, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from E3 and LA Convention center. Thanks for watching. (dynamic music)

(quiet jazz) >> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit North America 2017. Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, live in Los Angeles to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America, I'm John Furrier. My cohost, Steve Miniman. Our next guest is Jono Bacon, who is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting in the community. A great talk here-- >> Jono: Thank you. >> at Open Source Summit. Great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. >> Congratulation on all your recent success, on the personal and business side. Congratulations, great to see you. So, bottom line, Open Source Summit is kind of powered by the Linux Foundation, but pretty significant accomplishment and State of the Union, if you will, calling an Open Source Summit, big tent event. What's your view on this? How do you explain to folks watching? Is this a new event, is it a combination of multiple events, certainly a great, great big tent, >> Jono: Yeah. >> cross pollination. Whatever you want to call it. But what is this event about? Share your opinion. >> I think it's interesting, and I don't work for the Linux Foundation, but I've worked very closely with them for a number of years. And I think what we've been seeing is that in the earlier days of open source, there was, you know, the Linux foundation have played a fairly key role in certain specific areas. And in recent years, they've become a real center of gravity around open source in a variety of different areas, from automotive to cloud and beyond. And obviously there's a ton of events that are happening all over the world. And the open source thing I think is interesting because it's really an umbrella event that's got four other events that are part of it. So the event that I was running, which we launched this time around, was the Open Community Conference, which is kind of like one thread of this broader event. So one of the things I like about it is is different events from my experience draw different types of audiences. The Linux Foundation events have traditionally brought a lot of professionals who work in the industry. In a similar way, that happens at OSCON as well. But I like that the events kind of become a little bit more organized and diversified into those four areas. And I think what happens then is you get a greater bandwidth of content and discussions that go with that. >> I think it's an interesting point of these other streams, if you will, kind of going into the big tent event. It's got an ecosystem vibe to it, cause you don't want to lose the specialty of the topics and interest at the events that matter for the audiences on a content basis and face-to-face communications. But it's interesting that they're taking this approach because, when you look at it, the scale that's coming, in open source generally, categorically, if you put all of the code together, it's exponentially growing. >> Jono: Oh, yeah. >> So, there's a flood coming, there's a big open source flood of code coming. So, I think it's time to think architecturally about the dams and the rivers and the flows. To your point, this is a super important point in history. >> Oh, it's without question. And one of the things that's interesting to me is in my work as a consultant, when I help companies to build communities, it's broken into a few different layers. For example, so one is a technology layer, like which of the lego bricks that you're going to choose to put together, and how do you click them together in different ways? And that's where I think the LF has become a real center of gravity around what those projects are and how to integrate. But the other thing that we're starting to see more and more of is the formalization of the software development lifecycle, which is, it's not nearly just writing code anymore. It's about automated testing and continuous delivery and deployment, and all these different pieces. So I think we're seeing a formalization of the Lego bricks, but also the instructions for how you click them together. And that's really important if we're going to broaden out this bubble. Because this is a bubble that we're in right now. This is full of invariably tech companies talking about technology. But when we get into the bigger enterprises, when we get into non-tech into the-- >> John: Blocking and tackling, the realities are there. >> And there is so much nuance wrapped up in open source that it's alien to the people outside of this world, that we need to build that better interface for that. >> And that's just putting some hardening around either software or process that there's some comfort and reliability to the users. >> I'll give you one example. Like one company that I was working with, who were a large hardware company, fairly unfamiliar with open source. And one of the first questions they asked me was, "What does success look like? We know what all these options are, we see all the things that people are talking about, but we don't know how to determine what success is." And I think even just that, it seems like an obvious thing to the people in this room, but it's not obvious to a lot of people who are new to consumer technology this way. >> They want to see a finish line or some KPI that's says, we're done! >> Jono: Exactly! >> Shipped! >> And also because this is technology that's built by a broad diverse community of people, you then, a lot of these organizations then say, "So, what is my expected social responsibility here?" So, like how do I participate in this world that I'm broadly unfamiliar with? To me it's like a hip hop guy who's trying to join a metal band. You know? (John laughs) It works differently. >> It's completely different genres of developers and also environments. So, what's your advice to customers? Because they have to navigate because the mainstream adoption of Linux, obviously, and now new projects as they graduate or come to fruition will be deployed. So there is an ops, the DevOps certainly is a movement we're seeing, we can agree on. But now I got to put it into production. I'm a bank or I'm an enterprise. Hey, I got some guys that are monitoring. We're not that active, but we're happy to use it, be a user. How do you talk to that customer? >> Jono: Right. >> The way which I try to approach it is is to break it into a few different areas. The first thing is to first of all make sure that everybody's got the same sense of what the problem is that you want to solve. One of the things that was most transformative to me when I started consulting was it's amazing how many people think they're solving the same problem, but they're actually on a completely different grade of the same problem. So to me, what I like to do, is I like to define what I call a set of key themes which are these are the big rocks that we want to target in a time frame, six months or a year, or whatever it might be. Particularly with, when you're either doing community strategy or development, or you're doing a level of open source, it's fundamentally cross-functional. It involves marketing, engineering, product, there are executive stakeholder requirements, and then there's the people on the ground who are delivering those, so getting those themes in place I think is critical. But then to me what's important next, is to break a broader strategy down into smaller, consumable pieces. I think one of the things where a lot of companies get stuck is they're aware of these different Lego bricks that are available to them. They're aware of some optimizations in terms of workflow, but it's such a huge thing to bring into an organization that invariable is already got a very, very, stodgy or very specific culture that they've got to somewhat unseat. So to me, you need that combination of permissive, top-down approach, which is invariably your exec saying we see value in this, but then you need to break the strategy and the execution down into smaller manageable pieces that a team can wrap their head around. >> We talked to the Cisco guy, Ed, and he was, we were talking about DevNet, a huge developer community for Cisco. DevNet Create was kind of their cloud-native group that they've put together, great little skunk works, worked out great. But those are two languages. It's two worlds. The semantics of what they're saying is the same thing, but the translation is needed. This seems to be a common thread within the DevOps community now that the rubber hits the road, and people see the obvious benefits of what is true private cloud or cloud native. So, how do you go ahead? You provide like a dictionary, and say, "Hey, here's the translation. Okay, he really means that." I mean, are you being more herding the cats, being a translator, or is the client further along than that in your mind? >> It varies, it does vary from company to company. And a chunk of this, at least from my experience, is there is a significant translation layer. One of the things I talked about in my keynote on Monday was I see collaboration ... When I do community strategy, but fundamentally, it really is organizational design. It's just outside of a company in some cases, and sometimes inside of a company. In an organization, you'll have a set of stakeholders making decisions, and then the people who've got to execute on those decisions. And there is often a massive translation layer between them. I run a conference called the Community Leadership Summit each year at OSCON, and every year a couple hundred community managers come along, and I hear the same story from a lot of them, which is, I joined this company, I started building out, I started doing my work and my manager wasn't happy. And to me it's because the execs are defining value that they want to see, but it's not getting translated into tatics, and invariably a lot of the folks who are coming into it-- >> John: Where their ROI calculations are-- >> Yeah, a lot of that's-- >> They're not seeing a real answer. They don't know what success looks like. >> And they come in, and they don't necessarily have the strategic background to internalize that requirement into a place that they can move it forward. So, you get this kind of, this impedance mismatch. So, a big chunk of what I tend to do is to really try to understand what those requirements are and to work across the organization to try and-- >> John: You're doing architecture? Like what would be organizational behavior architecture in the wild, but also an arbiter to the managers. It's looking good, it's like you're trying to the score of the game. You're keeping-- >> Jono: And some days as well, as I'm sure anyone who's watching this, will have seen this with the companies they work with, this isn't rocket science. You know, what someone says they want, this is going to sound incredibly patronizing, it's not meant to, but when someone says what they want, invariably what they actually want is not that thing. So for example, I was working with a company a couple of months ago and they were saying, "We just want growth. We absolutely want to grow as quickly as we can." And when I dug into it with their CEO, what they really wanted was brand recognition and acceptance. And those are two very different challenges that you got to approach there. >> John: Stu, get a word in, I'm sorry if I've taken all of it. >> Yeah, John's passionate about community if you can't tell. The question I have for you is, building a community takes time, and things are changing faster than ever. How do you help people manage that pace of change versus I want results? It seems strategy is something that is for today, and we're changing often. So, how do you manage that give and take of growing yet breaking? >> It's a great question. And again, I think it varies. To me, there's some fundamental pieces that are involved in the way that I, and I take one approach and other people will take different approaches, I'm certainly not the only person who's doing this. The approach that I like to take is is we first of all need to treat communities as a journey. I think a lot of people think we have a product or a service, let's get people interested, and it's seen as a series of individual interactions with individual people. Whereas the way I like to look at it is when that person discovers your product, your service, your framework, whatever it may be, there's a journey from how they learn about it, how they go up an on-ramp to get something done, how you get people making their first contribution or how they derive their first piece of value, and then how you incentivize and reward them to keep them moving along the journey. So to me I look at it as this zoomed-out birds-eye view of this journey that I want to craft. And then I like to break that down into small bite-sized pieces that form the strategy. But the other thing is, and this varies depending on the company, is to what level of transparency and openness you need to communicate with different people. So, for example, one of the first things I do with inner source when people bring in open source principles inside a company is to make sure we have weekly reports going out and we're updating the stakeholders, more specifically, on a regular cadence. Because in that kind of environment where there's an existing enterprise, we all see these like digital transformation consultants come in-- >> Oh god, it's a total gravy train. They make the bookings and the billings. Reminds me of the old ERP deployments. Write a big fat check, and it'd be like, all these consultants come in and make all the cash. >> I think a lot of people look around thinking, alright, Lunchbox, you'll be here for a year. You'll be gone then, all right, and we'll go on to the next thing now our CEO cares about. So to me it's like-- >> John: Well, the consulting is being disrupted. It's interesting, you're a contrarian in your world because you have a consulting firm, but the old model things used to be the next gig is get that next consulting gig, so you worked not to actually put yourself out of a job, which is where the client wants to get. And that's where Agile and cloud has come in. It's interesting is, this is where the work product is. You know what success is in that model. You can come in and say, look, we did our work, everything. You've got a community that's vibrant. You got operational, they operationalized your value. >> Jono: Yep. >> You don't need me anymore, unless you want me. So, it's one of those kinds of conversations. Your thoughts? >> I agree. And it's interesting you mentioned Agile. One of the things that I've noticed as well, and I'm sure lots of not just consultants but people notice this as well is there are, I think there are broadly two types of people in the world. I think there's people who take a very kind of organic and somewhat animated approach to how they do things. And then there's some people who really need a roadmap. They need to follow a plan. I think a lot of people who are building organizational design or building communities default to we need to create a process and a workflow so people can follow that and we can have a sense of order. I don't think most people naturally want to work like that. I think there's a reason why people don't stick with to-do lists. It's because people like to have a more organic way of working. And a good example of this, in my mind, is Agile. Some people will take Agile to the nth degree with story points and epics and a lot of that kind of stuff-- >> You serve the process, the process doesn't serve the objective. I mean, it's the classic effectiveness model. But, I mean, that's the whole point. I mean, you could foreclose opportunities if you're too structured. But yet you got to have some boundaries, let the ball bounce around. So, you kind of want both. What is the ideal in your mind? >> In my mind, the approach that I'm a big fan is an approach called munsing, which was a story of, I forget his name, there's a story of a guy back in like the 50s. And he basically owned a TV factory. And what he'd do is he'd go up to like an engineer who's building one of these big, bulky old TVs, and he'd basically pull out components until it stopped working. And then he'd put that last component in so it would be the minimum level of components for it to work. Ended up saving the company a ton of money. I like to take the same approach process. What's the minimum level that you need that gives people the creativity to be successful in a predictable way? So, like with Agile, these epics and stories and things like that, I think a lot of that stuff is just there to deal with crappy product managers, like people who aren't very good at manning your project. No process is going to deal with someone who's not good at organizing. >> You need to bring to me the right level of the human ingredient and the process is what keeps people ticking over-- >> The other thing too that I find in that area is people kind of redefine, or they maybe mischaracterize what outcome is. Everyone's outcome driven. Love that word. (Jono laughs) It's all about the outcome. In this case, the TV's got to work with a less amount of moving parts. >> Jono: Right. >> That's the outcome. And so, outcomes can be bastardized if you will, could be really mangled in its definition. How do you work with clients on trying to really temper and set the expectations on what the outcome is? Cause the manager still wants to know what the outcome is going to be. So, do you reverse engineer from there? How do you tackle that? >> Jono: It's interesting. A big chunk of it for me is just being realistic. There is no minimum amount of work that needs to be put in to achieve any kind of community. I think you can build a tiny community with one person. However, depending on the requirements and the goals, there's just certain things you have to do. And there's certain time and resources that are required. And also just expectations. Like one of the expectations that some people wrestle with I think is, if you're building a community they're either inside your organization or outside, it's only going to succeed if a broader set of people participate. You know, we see this trend where you hire a community manager and that person lives in a forum or a slack channel to build out the community. Doesn't work. >> John: Yeah. >> Because the people in that community want access to other people. >> This value creation mindset in communities. Value has to be a group dynamic. This individual contributions, I get that. But the group dynamic is critical. Not just a message board moderator. I mean, that's basically what you're saying. >> Jono: Exactly. >> That's a message board. >> Nobody wants to deal with >> John: That's a tool. >> the interface of the thing you care about. And that's the community manager. So, a chunk of this then is a different mindset in how people operate. One of my clients is a company called HackerOne. I wrapped up work with them a little while ago, and their CEO is this guy called Mårten Mickos who-- >> John: Yeah, Mårten's great CUBE alumni. >> Phenomenal. For me, he's one of the people I most respect in our industry. >> John: He's a great strategic thinker, understands community, knows tech. Great guy >> Jono: Amazing. >> One of the things that he said when he joined HackerOne was I want everybody in this company to know a hacker. Everybody's got to know our audience. Everybody's got to understand the needs, the desires, the insecurities, the worries, the dynamics, otherwise we can't build a community. It's not just hiring a person to interface to that. That's one of the trickiest things because, again, it takes time. >> John: It's alignment to the audience. >> Right >> John: This is classic. >> Ingratiating in and actually being cool. Aligning with them >> Right. And if it's done well it's really rewarding because I think people who ordinarily wouldn't see the fruits of their labor. >> Well, Jono, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up the segment here on what's exciting you about potential new things that are coming around the corner. Obviously, we see the promise of blockchain which could have a great big application for communities. We're doing some things with it now that we're testing in our community around trying to create these new value networks. Certainly, there's new tooling coming out. Things like theCUBE and content and communities. New things are coming. The growth is going to be here which is going to create great new opportunities. >> Jono: Yeah. >> What are you excited about as you want to navigate the community landscape? Because the thesis is more people are coming in, more rivers of distinct audiences are going to want specialty but yet the broad market ... What are you excited about the community opportunity? From compensation to interaction to culture. What's your thoughts? >> There's a few things I'll subdivide it into things that relate to my bread and butter which is communities and things just more broadly in technology. The one thing I'm really excited about communities is I feel like the value proposition has become well understood, is not just in open source but outside with Proctor & Gamble, H&R Block, Harley Davidson, all these examples. Where people see the value in doing this work and doing it well. And that's great because I think we're improving the state-of-the-art of how we do this. One of the reasons why I got into this was I want my career to leave a fingerprint on structured, predictable ways in which we can do this as opposed to seeming magic science that a lot of people seem to think community is. >> John: Or a series of one-offs that are not understood or can't be operationalized or leveraged in any way. >> Jono: Yeah, exactly. From a technology perspective, there's a bunch of things. I'm really excited about crowdsource security, things like HackerOne, Bugcrowd, Synack, things like that. I think there's a lot of excitement in my mind around bringing open source into financial services. I think that's an industry that's ripe to be disrupted which is a sentence I never thought I'd ever say. Ripe to be disrupted. (John laughs) And then I'm also really excited about the work that's going on obviously in A.I., but the intersection of A.I. with kind of like voice control. Obviously, things such as Google Home and Alexa, but also things like Mycroft. I think blockchain is interesting. It's kind of less interesting to me. It's not really something I've really been following very closely, but I think it is. I think it's pretty neat. But then also just the formalization of the end-to-end software development lifecycle and how we're seeing, you know, GitHub was transformative in technology for a lot of companies. And now we're seeing GitHub as one piece, and you've got continuous delivery and continuous deployment. And also, we manage ideas, the project manager, all that kind of stuff. >> I think there's a lot of transformative ideas coming. And I think it's super exciting. Congratulations on all the great work you're doing. >> Jono: Thank you. Appreciate it. >> I just think that the self-governing community model that's now becoming mainstream people are starting to figure out how to balance that with the command and control top down and hierarchy job definition specifics, and balancing that. I think the self-governing open source model certainly prove that. And communities as a working example of what you can operationalize. >> It's exciting. >> And crowdsourcing just takes it to the consumer level. >> Right. >> Okay, it's working there too. Okay, great job. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> John: Jono Bacon, >> John: Bacon Consulting. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Palo Alto Studio to have a Cube conversation today. Conference season's slowing down a little bit so we're going to do Cube conversations in the studio so it's a little bit different format, not in the crazy madness of a conference but we're really excited to have our next guest on, he's Matt Zili, he's a VP of Product Marketing at Marketo, I think first time on theCUBE, so welcome Matt. >> Thank you very much, great to be here. >> Absolutely, so you're Marketo, Marketo's been in the marketing, automation, digital, engagement space for a long time but you guys are really starting to change the way you think about things, about engagement. Engagement is this elusive, I don't want to say Unicorn 'cause the term is overused but it is right so how do we get that deep engagement with customers, and how the companies really establish that, and that's something you guys are trying to do more work with, and help enable to do better, so how do you think about when you think about engagement? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think it's what we realized these days is the currency that every company needs to have, has to have, because if you look back over the last 10 or 15 years, what the digital world has gotten us, as companies, is volume. We can go blast a message out all over the world, and just hope that one small percentage point of those folks will actually engage with us, and that's just not going to work anymore, we're all too familiar, we kind of black out, how to ignore all of those messages, and so the real key movement forward is how the companies really deeply engage with their audience, with their customers, with their potential customers, and we're trying to help companies do that. >> The other thing that's really changed is the avenues, the venues, the potential touch points have grown so much, where there used to be in the mailbox outside your house then there was email was dominant for so long, but now it's Snapchat and Facebook and Linkedin and Twitter and all these things, which A, are so omni-channel but B, give a level of measurement opportunity that you never really had before. So how is that changing the way that marketeers think about, knowing, connecting with touching regarding a campaign etc. but again, engaging. >> Yeah, it's a great awesome opportunity on one hand, and this unbelievably significant challenge on the other, where on the positive side, we have all of these avenues for engagement, where we can try to have a connection with somebody when they're on Facebook, when they're thinking more about how a brand might intercept with their personal life, than they ever do elsewhere and that's a great opportunity for marketers 'cause in the digital world, you can measure the effectiveness of all of these things, but on the flip side, as you alluded to, we've got a new opportunity to do that everyday, some new channel, some new touch point comes up and so, as organizations, we have to get really good at managing this complexity, one, just to make sure we're in the right places, and two, to make sure that we've got a uniform, consistent, story that's being told, across all these places and we're not sending a message out on Snapchat that misaligns with what's on our website or who our brand is. >> And it's interesting we had Karen on the other day, talking about the concept of adapted engagement, she had her three As of engagememt and really, this concept of the context matters, context has always mattered, not only the channel, but the timing and just because you can, and just because you've got this massive kind of technology, can and if you will, that you can send a lot of things, a lot of ways, a lot of time, you can't, just 'cause you can, doesn't mean, you can, so when you think about adaptive and trying to be kind of responsive and in sync with the opportunity and the offer as well as the appropriateness of the timing, as well as the match with the individual at the other end of that channel, what are some of the factors that people should think about, that companies should think about is their weighing, you know I cannot just spray and pray, 24/7, that's going to just saturate and kill people. >> I think I'm going to steal your technology, cannon analogy 'cause that's right, it's a cannon that could end up killing people or certainly, killing a brand, and so the way we encourage companies to think about it today, is you have to bring together all of these different insights you might have about a potential person, customer, potential customer, and figure out how to use that, to provide something of value, to them and that's going to adapt over time, we don't have perfect visibility yet into everyone we might want to engage, we learn over time and 10, 20 years ago, the best we could do was try and understand someone's demographics and used that to make a best educated guess, a guess about what they might want. That doesn't really work all that well anymore, when we can now think about all this behavioral data, and when we learn what somebody's looking at on the Web, or on Facebook, or what they're engaging with on Snapchat, that's way more insightful for us to make an educated guess about what might provide somebody value, as the next thing we put in front of them and so, it really is this concept of just constantly adapting the experience, we're delivering to people and it should just get better and better and better over time, as we learn more about what they want and what they're looking for. >> Right, one of the interesting things we see over and over a lot of tech events, is the concept that you have your data in-house, but then there's all this public data and other sources of data, and really to grab that competitive advantage, you need to combine the proprietary data, as well as the public data, and then combine them using the algorithms to get the insight, that maybe your competitor doesn't have, how are you seeing this actually executed in the field, is it easy to do, hard to do, still early innings for people trying to figure it out or is it relatively mature in terms of people using all this different data? >> Yeah, I think there's no question people are using data, more effectively and using just more data now than ever before but it hasn't yet manifested itself in a way where they're using it to deliver the best perfect thing to every single customer, so there's still a long way to go, and some of the things that we see, hold people back is, you mentioned we've got all these different touch points and channels popping up, the scope of how data is expanding is still going far faster than we can even keep up with, and in many organizations, all of those pieces of data will sit in different silos, so even for the companies that have managed to bring it all in-house and trying to get it at least inside the walls of their company, it still probably doesn't sit in one place that will allow somebody to actually gain insights from it and then use those insights to do something and so, I think that's where we see the next few years are going to take us with a combination of AI technologies that can do a lot of the heavy lifting, of looking at the data and gleaning insights from it, to getting them at somebody's fingertip whether it's a marketer or whether it's somebody driving customer experience so they naturally use it to do something informed for a specific customer. >> Right, the other kind of concept we hear over and over and over is kind of the segmentation of one, and the industry that I think is the most interesting to watch on this is insurance, car insurance, 'cause it's easy right, 'cause it used to be your age, your sex and if you were married, and the maybe did you have a red car, and maybe did you travel more than X number of miles, but now, you know with the progressive thing you stick in the dashboard, or let's face it, your cellphone, they can know a lot more, if you roll through red lights, do you spend too much time on your couch, do you tend to drive at 2.30 a.m. on Saturday night and see other things that can really determine ultimately what your rate is. On the other hand, at some point in time, if you're a big company, the overhead of managing to that level and to segment your offerings to that level maybe exceed the value of doing that, so as you see kind of people narrowing in, honing in on their segmentation and execution, what are some of the lessons learnt about, how tight can you get that, can you have infinite number of skews to provide a slightly different flavor of your service to any number of consumers or is there some kind of happy balance that you see the world kind of moving towards? >> Yeah, I think the biggest point we make is there's no excuse for not thinking that way today, there's no excuse for making strides towards delivering on an audience of one, or customer of one. I think it varies pretty wildly by business whether you can do that in your core operations, whether an insurance company can really come up with the right package price, product etc. for that audience of one, that's a big problem certainly, but at least when we think about how we engage with our customers, there's no excuse not to think about it that way today 'cause the very least we all have at our fingertips, the technologies that will let us choose how to engage with someone, what channel to engage with them, what timing, cadence to engage with them and so we can make progress even if we're not necessarily at the point of using all this information to deliver one perfect message to one person at that exact moment. There's a lot of work to be done today to get there. >> Right, the other piece that's interesting is advocacy, and again Karen talked about that as well in her three As of measuring engagement and it's a really different type of relationship to have with a customer that's not necessarily so transactional but much more relationship much less about this transaction and much more about the lifetime value the customer and again an example we shared with Karen, is Harley Davidson is just an iconic brand that people have such a connection to, that they will tattoo it on their body which if you're a brand manager, you're going to say, well, you know that's phenomenal, so you would see advocacy in companies wanting to change the nature of the relationship with the people that buy and use their services, what are some of the best practices you see, what are some of the ways people are trying to flip the bit if you will from a transactional to a relationship type of engagement. >> Yeah, I think there's certainly those iconic brands and products that do a lot of the heavy lifting for companies to do that effectively. Harley Davidson starts with the product, starts with the motorcycle and people love that but for a lot of companies that maybe don't drive that level of passion around the product itself, that's marketing's opportunity to go in and capture that and so I think what we see the most successful and forward thinking organizations do today is think about the entire life cycle that way with an eye towards advocacy because the thing that not everybody has capitalized on today is whether we like it or not, all of our customers have a megaphone and that we know and in a lot of ways, we try to manage the negative sides of that to make sure that the negative messages aren't getting out there and avoid that but we haven't used it enough to make sure we use that to drive the positive messages out in the market and so when companies kind of shift from the transactional approach from the, I just got to acquire new customers or I've got to get these customers to buy more, to a world where they're really thinking about a group of people that could really be advocates, almost on behalf of the brand, almost like their working for the brand to do that and set up a set of initiatives to drive that, it leads to 10, 20, 30 X yields down the road, an ROI down the road because everybody does have that opportunity to be an influencer today and brands can really harness that. >> So do you think the essence of that is brands finally figuring out that they no longer have exclusive rights to control the message, I forget the tweeter, of a meme somewhere you know that your brand is no longer what you're telling people it is, your brand is now what people are telling you what it is and as you said, people didn't have the giant microphones right, they had letter to the editor, who sees it compared to literally worldwide casting ability of a message and if you create it craftily and with a little bit of humor it might pick up and go viral so is it a reaction to that or do people finally figure out that it's seems so stupid to me, obviously it's always easier to sell more chiggers than clients than to get new so why suddenly is advocacy getting the bright spotlight when this should have been something that people were executing all along? >> Yeah, I think it's like most things, it's not just marketers, customer success, everyone's understood the problem and the opportunity for a long time and social is an area that has been around long enough that I think everybody understands it's really a question of what can be done to execute on it and if 80% of marketing budgets were self spent on acquiring new customers, it's no surprise that they're not executing on it, all that effectively and so I think the transition we're going through right now is brands are starting to re-align their dollars, leverage the new technologies and point them at this area of advocacy, as much as their pointing them to other areas, versus maybe they were just of lesser importance years ago so I think everybody's known it for awhile, but they're now just finally acting on it. >> And of course the other thing now that's so different than it used to be in the past especially in large broadcast media you know people measured audience but you really couldn't measure uptake and write the classical saying, I know I'm wasting 50% of my marketing budget, I just don't know which 50% it is. The ability to measure now is higher than we've ever had, the ability to A-B task or A-B-C-D-E-F-G task is like never before at the same time again referencing our conversation before you still have to have a narrative, you still have to be kind of a personality as a brand, or else you'll just get wiped out right so it's a weird dichotomy of the soft and kind of the hard elements of going to market. >> It's exactly it, if you look at what a lot of companies have done in the last 10, 12 years is digital has exploded and certainly beyond even 12 years, there's been a shift from the emotive storytelling side of marketing over to the data driven operational side of marketing, the idea of I can send out a million emails and I know 100,000 people will open them and some subset of those will click on them and that's an important piece of marketing today certainly but I already know the needle has swung too far. When we think about the engagement economy, we think about the core of this is being able, a brand being able to engage deeply on an emotional level with their customer and audience, it requires a brand narrative, a brand story that's relevant to them, it's rolled out appropriately to them that's shared across all these channels with them 'cause if you don't have that and all you have is the operational side, you'll never be the Harley Davidson iconic brand and has that emotional connection with their customers. >> Right, okay so before I let you go, I know you guys have been doing, did a research study that's going to be coming out shortly, I wonder if you can share, preview any kind of the highlights, in terms of what was the purpose of that first off and what are some of the preliminary findings that you could share before the actual data comes out. >> Yeah, absolutely, it's been really insightful for us, what we did, is we went out and surveyed a bunch of consumers and buyers, and a bunch of marketers, and we tried to understand is the story the same across both sides, what people value, what they want, what marketers were delivering, what they think they're delivering so it's been really insightful to understand what the world looks like today when it comes to engagement and while there are a lot of insights, I think the thing that everybody has acknowledged is how important this is, how critical it is in this economy to make sure that you do have that emotional connection with the brand, if you're a consumer, somebody you want to do business with and marketers and brands acknowledge how important it is to have that with their customers, where the gaps are, is how it's being actualized, is it actually happening, the beliefs from some companies is that they're doing this incredibly effectively, and yet the feedback from the customers is that they're not, and so that divide is what we have to resolve, as brands and as companies over the next few years, otherwise someone will come in and disrupt us and take advantage of that. >> So have you found any good objective measurements that people should, I mean obviously, there's not one golden metric, we would already have known it, but what are some of the things that marketers or companies should be looking at, to see if they're doing a better job or doing a good job? >> Yeah, I think that you know without question, looking at your competitive landscape and talking to your customers in a way that can really get you that feedback, you have to seek the answers to find out how good of a job you're doing versus looking at the efforts you're putting in place, and I think that even in itself can be a challenge for a lot of companies is to really get out there and try and get an objective understanding of whether they're doing it or not, and I think when you start there, in almost every brands' case, they're going to find surprises about how their customers really feel about them, how their potential customers really feel about them and identify the opportunities to close that gap. And then of course wandering through the crazy landscape of technology to try and figure out the right things that allow them to close that gap. The good news is there's shortage of options to do that today. >> And don't send 100 question questionnaire, oh my god, I just got one from JetBlue, was happy to fill it out, I lasted I dunno, a lot of questions, I thought and then I just ran out of gas, and c'mon, it's a new world order. >> And so you wouldn't put that in a list of engaging tactics >> A little trade right, give me a little value, I'll give you a little info, value-trade, value-trade, don't get to the whole multi-variate -- >> People have seconds, you can get them for seconds, you're not going to get them for minutes or hours. >> Alright, Matt we look forward to the research coming out and again, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. >> Appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> A pleasure, Matt Zili, he's from Marketo, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're having the Cube conversation in our Palo Alto studio. The conference season is taking a little bit of a break, so now we can do interviews in the studio which is a little bit more comfortable situation, and we're really excited to have first time guest Karen Steele. She's the GVP of corporate marketing at Marketo. Karen, welcome. >> Thank you, very happy to be here Jeff. >> Absolutely. So, you are talking about something that I've seen in the research coming up to this about engagement. And right, everybody talks about engagement. What is engagement? People are trying to measure engagement, >> Karen: Yep. >> But then it seems like so many people are still stuck though on the mass broadcasting kind of numbers. The want big numbers which is a very different number than engagement. So You guys are getting really into this. Obviously Marketo a leader in marketing innovation and marketing platform. Is this new? Is it renewed focus? I mean, how do you guys deal with this whole concept of engagement? >> Yeah, so thanks. It's a great opening question because we are passionate about engagement. And in fact, we believe that today, people, human beings want to be engaged with as opposed >> to marketed to. >> Right. >> So our CEO created a vision of this idea called The Engagement Economy. And the idea is that everybody and everyone is connected. Today with the digital transformation happening around us, you can touch people, touch customers anywhere and everywhere throughout their journey. You know, before they buy from you, during the sales process and post sale. So, it's all about creating experience and we think the way to do that is through engagement. >> But it's kind of interesting 'cuz the dichotomy is we're in this Google world, right? And the Google world is, you know, build great engineering, people will come. It's all about the data. It's cookies and where have you been and you know, recommendation engines. And more of this kind of, feels more machine-y And not necessarily engage-y, Which is more of a person to person than necessarily a machine to person. >> Karen: Correct. >> But yet, even the person to person is still supported by and enabled by a lot of this technology. So it's this inter, intertwining of both kind of a person to machine, or machine to person, >> excuse me. >> Yep. >> Versus really connecting with, whether it be the brand, Whether it be a person that represents >> the brand >> Right. >> So how, how do you see this kind of evolving and how can people not get too wrapped up >> in the machine-y part? >> Right. >> And actually build a relationship, another word instead of engagement, with their customers, or even take it another step, with their constituents, if you will? >> Yes. >> And their community, >> even more passionate. >> Yes. Yeah, so I think it's interesting you brought up the machine aspect, 'cuz there's sort of a positive and negative. So if you think about the space we're in, it's called Marketing Automation. And it does feel sort of process oriented and machine-like. But at the end of the day, marketing has always been about the human being and building that relationship. And technology has just simply helped facilitate that and do it through multiple channels like never before. But it still comes down to the marketer's primary role is to connect with, in a personalized way, in an authentic way and create a relationship. A relationship that's going to generate advocacy for the brand, that's going to ultimately generate revenue for their business. So it's really important that engagement is about the human being and it's about how you can create positive experience throughout the lifecycle of the journey. >> Right, it's interesting you say experiences too, 'cuz we've seen a huge shift in into customers wanting really more of an experience or an engagement that's potentially tied to a brand. But you look at great experience marketers like Red Bull, >> Yep. >> To pull one out. >> That you know, buying and drinking a Red Bull, the way they've positioned that in the marketplace is really being part of this really cool thing. It's visually stimulating, it's you know, a lot of >> adrenaline, >> Yes. >> and a lot of cool stuff. And then the other one I always think of is Harley Davidson. And the passion that that community has around that motorcycle. But it's so much more than driving that motorcycle, >> You know? >> Yep. >> It's the open road and it's all the accessories and stuff that they put. You know people brand it on their arm. >> A lot of people. >> Right. >> So, in terms of you know how, how does that translate with newer brands? How do you try to get that type of connection with your customers, hold it, and I think you've mentioned in some of the things I've looked up for the interview you know, really thinking about the lifetime value of the customer as opposed to a transactional relationship? >> Right. >> That's a one time shot. >> Yeah, I mean a lot of the examples you, you just gave are very experiential in terms of the physical aspects of seeing, and feeling, and touching a brand. But a lot of digital marketing is, is not physical. And so you're communicating with people through a lot of channels that that are bits and bytes, and they're not looking somebody in the eye. And so I think being in touch with your brand and the messages you want to deliver. Making sure they're relevant and they carry your brand promise forward, and they connect with what that person wants to hear at exactly the right times. So for us engagement is, is about being smart in terms of reaching the person. If I use a social, or excuse me, a mobile device and that's my preferred way of communicating with you, I want you to reach me through that device, and not try and get me through direct mail or an email campaign. I might not pay attention to any of those things. So having that intelligence about your customer, or your prospect, or your partner, or even your employee is going to give you a better option to engage with them and create that one to one while you're still marketing one to many. >> Right. >> In terms of >> the actual relationship. >> And the other challenge a marketer obviously has too, is, I don't know who said it, we do too many shows. But you know, when it's done well, when suggestive selling is done well and recommendation engines are working well, it's magical. >> Yep. >> Right? >> It's what I want, when I want and it's presented to me. >> Yep. >> If it's done poorly, >> it's creepy, right? >> Yep. >> I don't necessarily >> know that you want to know that that was, you know what I was looking at. And obviously the target example which now is way far in the rear view mirror. But you know just because you have all the data, doesn't mean you can use all the data. And the challenge and the nuance of knowing what to use, when and where. >> Right. >> Well now you have >> so much more, kind of ammunition in >> your quiver if you will. >> Yep. >> Is a whole different type of a challenge. >> Yeah I think it's, it's a good point, and I think you're right. You don't want it to feel like big brother and somebody's following or stalking you, that's the last thing you want. But I think paying attention to the response, paying attention to a personalized message, testing that message, seeing what comes back, and helping execute the next thing that you do. And so there's sort of a fine line, but I definitely think the marketers are using the analytics today and it's just getting smarter and smarter. And we're going to talk about adaptive coming up here, >> I hope? >> Right, right. >> And you know, the big buzz right now which is AI, you know, what does AI mean for engagement? And we have some ideas around that >> as well. >> Right. >> Okay, so you broke it down to >> the big threes >> Yep. >> of the engagement economy. So the art of story telling. >> Karen: Yep. >> Adaptive engagement, >> as you just mentioned. >> Yep. >> And then advocacy. >> Karen: Yep. >> Which you talked about earlier before. So let's, let's kind of touch base on each one of those >> things. >> Great. >> How do you define 'em? Why are they important? So start out with the story telling. >> Yeah so it comes back to what we've already been talking about, which is the one to one relationship. Understanding who you're talking to. Crafting a message that, that resonates. Having that message be front and central to what your brand value is. You know, we are more prone to buy from somebody if we value their brand. You might make choices and pay a price premium if you care about a brand or how a brand interacts with you. So crafting the art of story telling is the right message, making sure it resonates, understanding your audience, and connecting it to the brand so you can make that >> emotional connection. >> Right, right. >> So how do you >> So, done, done well, >> you can do a very good job. >> Right, and it's always interesting to me, I always think, I watch sports on TV, right? I always think of the poor guy that just got assigned, I got to do a car commercial. Like, how many car commercials have been created up till now? And I got to think of a new one. >> Right. >> But, >> But you know, kind of traditional, kind of high end TV broadcast commercials are really story telling. I mean, some of them are fascinating what they can actually convey in a 30 second >> ad. >> Right. >> Or whether it's a Coke commercial and makes you cry at the end. So that, that, and that format has, has pretty well developed. But how are you seeing it translated into all these various digital formats and really short engagements, or it's a Snapchat, or it's (snaps fingers) you know a quick hit on Instagram, or it's a Facebook post. >> Karen: Yep. >> How are you seeing some of that story telling evolve into these different kind of communication mediums, if you will? >> Yep. >> And, and you >> you have so many that you have >> to >> Right. >> Jeff: to manage, right? A huge challenge. >> Yeah, and again, I think it's the authenticity as I said, but also the personalized nature of it. I want to deliver a message that matters to you. Where you want to receive that message. I might want to deliver something different to somebody else through an entirely different channel. So, but crafting the story, having the story be based on what you stand for as a brand, and the value for that customer, or whoever the message is, you're attempting to land it on >> Right. >> is still foundational and fundamental. And I think that a lot of the marketing, because technology's automated so much, we've lost a little bit of the art of the story. And really making the story connect back to you as a brand so you deliver the best message to your customer. >> Right. So that kind of feeds into your second one which you described as adaptive engagement. Which I presume is situational, contextual. >> Correct. >> That defines the how, the when, the where, the why. >> Yeah. Yeah, and I think in terms of our vision, so yes it is about delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person to get the response you want. That's sort of the basics of adaptive and being able to do that very flexibly with technology. But when we think about adaptive and the next generation of it, we think about the impact that AI will have on engagement or marketing. So imagine a marketer today could say to their engagement platform, let's say the Marketo engagement platform, "I want to understand an outcome "and the best way to go about it. "I want to know how I can increase sales "in a particular region, in a particular quarter." And the engagement platform, based on that outcome that I want, will help determine what the right campaign is, what creative elements you put in that campaign based on the assets you've created, and importantly, who you target. And what is the audience? And think of almost just creating that outcome, having the platform deliver that whole experience when you push a button. And that entire campaign gets executed. >> Right, right. >> So that, I think is the future of adaptive. >> Because you'll be able to run you know, A/B test is probably not a very accurate description, >> right? >> Right. >> 'Cuz it's a multi, much more multivariate test that you can run and really >> start to optimize >> Right. >> for a much tighter group of attributes of your customer. >> Than >> Right. >> you ever could >> Yeah, and we >> in the past. >> Jeff: Or try to think of every kind of variable. >> And we do that today, but I think, I think now what we're saying is the marketer's going to truly be in the power seat where they can say not just, "Here's two ideas, test one against the other." It's basically, here's the outcome I want. >> Jeff: Right. >> Tell me exactly the best way to put that message out. What channel it should go through, who it should be delivered to, and run it. And so I think that's going to be the future of adaptive. >> Interesting. And then the third A, that you have, of engagement economy is advocacy. >> Heart and soul of any brand strategy. You know customers, loyal customers, are great customers and you want to create advocacy and relationships. I think when companies talk about advocacy, they talk about "I want a customer reference. "I want somebody who's going to approve a customer story "or a quote in a press release." We go far beyond that when we think about advocacy. We want customers that are going to partner with other customers and make the community around us better. >> And so, >> Right. >> they're speaking on behalf of our brand, Marketo, but they're also making our brand stronger and the relationships they're creating around Marketo. So we have a program called Purple Select, which has about 1200 customers, that every single day you know, we're putting challenges forward for them. We're offering them places to go, you know, generate conversations in community. And as a result they give stuff back to us. >> And they >> Right, right. >> make things available to us that otherwise wouldn't be. >> It's really kind of analogous to open source, right? The fact that you know >> all the smartest people >> Yep. >> in the world, don't happen to reside in your four walls. >> And >> Yep. >> you know, if you can use your product service offering platform, store, as a basis point for an engaged community to engage around, through, with. >> Correct. >> You know, >> you get you know, one plus one makes three, or ten for that, so huge. >> Absolutely. >> Huge kind of shift in, in thinking to really kind of open it up and to share and be collaborative and find out what other people >> are doing. >> And let, >> I think that's a great point. And let the advocates be your heroes. Let them advance their careers based on learning your technology, participating in your community and taking you know, their businesses forward in terms of success from a marketing standpoint. >> So I'm just curious in terms of the holy grail of measuring engagement. You know, kind of your thoughts on that. I mean there are obviously engagement measures out there. >> Karen: Right. >> How do you, you know, what are some of the things you look at to measure engagement. Or that you tell people they should look at to measure engagement. And how do you see engagement as a metric, as an actionable metric kind of evolving? Now that we have so many more potential touchpoints, >> datapoints, >> Right. >> other ways to measure. >> Yeah, so I think in the traditional marketing automation world, which we have played a big part in over the years, the true measurement has always been about pipeline. >> 'Cuz you're >> Right. >> you're doing campaigns to generate revenue for your business. I don't think that goes away, but it gets extended to across the entire lifecycle. So it's not just new customer acquisition. It's up-sell, it's cross-sell, it's renewals if you're in a softwares as service business. So it's lifetime value, not just revenue. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> It's advocacy, not just references. It's you know, peer to peer. There's this whole idea of voice of the customer. There're new companies out there like TrustRadius and G2 Crowd which provide platforms now for customers to do reviews on products and rank companies. And making that available to users gives everybody a voice in the process. >> So. >> Right. >> There's a whole bunch of new metrics, many of them are going to be, you know, very, very much around emotional connections back to your brand. And participation in the community. Today we have the marketing nation which is a 60,000 person community. The way I can cultivate content on that and grow people's roles in participating in that dialogue, is certainly an engagement measure for us. And it will lead to stronger sales, it will lead to stronger you know, preference in terms of our brand. It will lead to premium pricing if we want to do that in the future, et cetera. >> And then I wonder too, if you could just speak to the evolving role of marketing. Not only within the company, but specifically within IT spend, and business analytics spend, and really as a driver. >> Because before >> Yep. >> the analytics was really a service provider to the rest of the company >> and we gave you >> Yep. >> your quarterlies and your weekly sales reports and you know, that was kind of the role of IT. Now we're seeing IT as a business partner stepping in to say, "Here's all these cool technologies." But now marketing and the marketing automation which is way ahead of the automation >> Right. >> in a lot of >> the other places, is really driving that, and you've got measure, measurable results, and you can connect to all the different channels that are new that weren't there two years ago when you just had newspaper and >> Yep. >> and billboards and TVs. >> So you know, as that has evolved how have you seen, you know, marketing's role change in terms of kind of, power seat at the table, driving IT, investment decisions and those types of things? >> Obviously Marketo's >> Yep. >> were those decisions for a lot of companies. >> Yeah and it's a great conversation because there's been a lot of talk about the, the hybrid CMO, and what does that look like today? Because the CIO and the CMO now have to be in lockstep. In many cases now, the CMO's technology budget is looking as large as the CIO's technology budget. >> Right, right. >> And so. >> And then there's this other notion of if marketing owns the customer experience, or all things around customer engagement, are they not, in fact, the chief customer officer? And so, there's a whole bunch of things that I think are crossing lines. But I think it's great news for the marketer, because they need to be more customer centric, they need to be more data centric, and ultimately they sit in a really pivotal place in the organization to achieve many of those things. >> Right. And it's still interesting, and for all the soft things, I'll call it a soft thing, of engagement and lifetime value and some of these, some of these things that aren't necessarily tied to the bottom line at the end of the quarter, >> Right. >> every quarter. >> We still have to respond to that. And at the end of the day there has to be some, some ties, some connection, some demonstrated >> value of these efforts. >> Right. >> It can't just be for you know, apple pie and lemonade, I forget the expression. But anyway (laughs). So, 'cuz it still has to tie back to business, right? >> Absolutely. >> Still has to pay the bills, >> still has to get more sales. >> Absolutely. >> But what you're >> saying is, is it does. Engagement does translate into sales. >> Engagement translates to sales. Engagement translates to brand preference. Engagement translates to price premium. Engagement translates to advocacy. I mean, engagement is, it's such an active way to move the market forward that I think there's going to be a whole set of new metrics that combine sales enablement and sales processes as well because as marketing and sales partner, you know, from a sales engagement standpoint to go after named accounts, the ones that are most strategic to the business we're going to see a huge shift in terms of sales, sales engagement metrics as well. >> Just as you're saying that, I'm thinking of brands, right? And always the debate about the power of brand, and does brand still have power? And I think it does, but the market's really kind of bifurcated where either the brand is super powerful, or has zero power, you know, kind of depending on the product or the engagement. It sounds like really, engagement is probably the best way to make sure your brand can't be replaced by the old white label stuff that they used to have at the grocery store. >> Karen: Yeah. >> 'Cuz people got to be connected. >> Karen: Yep. >> Jeff: Not just a label. >> And they need to care about, people need to ultimately care about the relationship. Not the one thing. You know it used to be you dropped a direct mail, it was sort of an episode and you were never having a dialogue. Today, there's so many ways and so many channels to reach people, you have to have a consistent way to engage and a consistent way to look at, did I move the needle forward? Am I ultimately renewing that customer? Or generating more loyalty from that customer? Or you know, referenceability or advocacy. And so, engagement helps you do that through all the channels. >> It's interesting 'cuz the customer can engage with you, whether you, or communicate with you, whether you >> necessarily want it or not. >> That's right. >> And in new ways that were heretofore nonexistent. >> Karen: That's right. >> Fun stuff. >> Yeah. >> Great place to be. >> Well Karen, I loved >> Yeah. >> sitting down and talking about engagement. It's a thing we talk about here all the time. >> Great. >> It's really how we should measure success, it's how we know we're getting through and look forward to a follow up. I know you have some research coming out, and some books coming out, and Marketo's up to all kinds of stuff. So we will look for that in the not so distant future. >> Awesome. >> Alright. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to it. >> Absolutely, she's Karen >> Thanks a lot. >> Steele from Marketo, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching, we'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)