>>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of IFS Unleashed in Miami. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here half a day so far, having great conversations. It is so great to be back on the show floor and I'm getting that sentiment from the IFS execs, their customers, their partners, and the ecosystem. I'm pleased to welcome Kathy Hall as my next guest, the SVP of experience at ifs. Kathy, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. >>Love talking about the customer experience. Talk to me, but the employee experience is equally important because they're like this, but talk to me about your role as the SVP of experience and what that entails. >>Yeah, so I'm really, really fortunate at IFS to be SVP across experience. So I do a lot of work with the r and d team, but I also have a role that spans sales consulting support so I can really get involved in any part of the organization to enable us to deliver moments of service. So I'm really, really fortunate. I've got such a broad remit and really work on everything from the user experience and what the product looks like, feels like, how it interacts, how it moves, how we put our partner, the technologies in there, everything to their customer experience. So how people find it if they have to engage with support or what it's like in presales. And we are really trying to wrap that up into a total experience so that we bring all of those parts together and really productize our experience so that every customer gets a fantastic experience and the best moments of service. So yeah, it's like a short job title and it's a really kind of big role. It's fantastic. >>It is. It's very, it's very encompassing. You have so much visibility across the entire organization that impacts the customer in many different ways. I can't only imagine that having that visibility in that role really helps to create not only a great customer experience but a, a great experience for the employees. And those two things I always think of them as like this, like inextricably linked. >>Yeah, exactly. And we've done a lot over the last couple of years of really trying to make sure we've got the data so we understand both from a product point of view and a service point of view, what our users and our customers think about that moment of service. Where the friction points are, you know, what's really good and, and we can use that to coach our employees to celebrate success, to give people kudos for the fantastic work they do. And that really enables us to create a hype around the customer within, within ifs. And just last week we were celebrating CX day and we did a whole week and had our own sort of internal hashtag of CX days every day. And that was fantastic to really galvanize that spirit of those ifss, you know, Team Purple, really being at the forefront of how we deliver that, that customer experience. And it's fantastic for our customers, but it's also brilliant for our people because it's motivating and, and it empowers people to, to be able to do a great job, which is what we all want to do. >>Absolutely. Employees need to be empowered because if that's not there, then the customer experience inextricably linked will suffer. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the role. Has it been something that's been the, a focus of ifs? Cuz there's, you guys have so many unique differentiators for, for a company that isn't widely known, but talk to me about how that came about going, you know, what we need to be able to take to really look at the customer experience through many different lenses, take their feedback and really deliver a product experience that is seamless so that they can deliver those moments of service. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, when, when Darren took over a ceo, we've been on this really kind of passionate journey to bring service to our customers, bring value to our customers, you know, we really value is at the heart of, of everything for our customers. And, and so it's our ethos too. And so we've, we've sort of woven this value into everything that we do with that focus on the customer. So my role started off sort of more in the come in and then try and understand it from a very product point of view, but in today's kind of world products and service lines emerging things need to be unified. You know, if you go back 20 years a product was built and it got shipped out and somebody picks it up and they implemented it and then there was a support and there were sort of these walls in between, but now of course it is a cloud company and those walls don't exist anymore. >>Product features are coming out regularly. The code sort of flows through the system out to customers. The way that we service has to be different. And so we're thinking all the time, how do we get that to be a seamless process and how do we enable, for example, data within a customer system to identify opportunities to create more value for that customer using technology like AI for example, and then being able to highlight that value back. But then maybe you say to the presales person, okay, this is the precise demonstration and capability that the customer needs to see because this is what the, the system's telling us is the business case. And that then flows through to the scope and it enables us to, to deliver that value. So it's really changing the way that we think about these things and unifying together that product and that service into this kind of bigger total experience and this end to end experience. >>So we're really looking at what are all the friction points along our journeys with the customers, How does it stop them getting value? How do we prioritize that value and, and therefore how do we reimagine an end to end experience? So as that thinking's evolved, my role's also evolved from being quite product centric to being very much across the organization. And I'm lucky I come from a commercial and operational background, so I've got a vast amount of experience in delivering these types of solutions. So that's really helped as well because I'm able to see that that full end to end and, and I've got a, you know, brilliant team of people and, and it comes back to the point where we said before, the people ifs are so engaged to want to deliver value, to want to deliver the moments of service that, that it's kind of easy, you know, just got to kind of focus people in the right way and, and the s comes together. >>That's nice to hear. And that's actually the vibe and the sentiment that we're getting from this. You know, talking about the end to end experience. It's so critical because people used to tolerate fragmented experiences. We don't anymore. One of the things that went away, I think or is in massively short supply during Covid and may not come back as patience and tolerance, right? So being able to deliver that end to end experience to your customers through what you're doing internally is critical for differentiation, for competitive advantage, and of course for your customers to be successful with their customers. >>Yeah, and there's so many parts of that that you could un pick. We, we could spend hours talking about it and as consumers our expectations are huge and we carry those expectations into the workplace. And in the same way, you know, at IFS we want our team to be motivated and, you know, proud and excited about the moments of service they're delivering. Our customers want the same thing from their teams and that also means they want a system where it's easy to train, easy to use, you can pick up, it looks great, you know, it gives users love ifs and it kind of gives them a tool that helps 'em get the job done, doesn't stand in their way. So, you know, all the kind of things we think about internally and how we're measuring customer experience also translates and resonates with our customers. Everything we think about how, you know, our people need to be empowered to deliver a customer experience. That's the same messages that, you know, we hear back time and time again from our customers. So there's so many parallels and we're really able to work with our customers to kind of do both at the same time, which is fantastic. >>Talk about measurement. What are some of the key indicators of success cus success in in from an experienced lens internally and with your customers? >>Yeah, so I mean there's all the obvious ones about, you know, MPS and CSAT and customer effort score. We also put a lot of value into the qualitative feedback. So we use customer A avail, which is an IFS product to collect data on our own moments of service. And you know, the numbers are great and they tell a story, but I also get really sucked into reading the comments back from the customers and there's kind of text analytics and sentiment analytics and for me that's becoming the more powerful kind of piece of data to look at because a story conveys much more than a simple number and it's also something that goes global as well. You know, different countries score in different ways. There's different kind of, you know, there's a lot of gaming that can go on with a score. It can be quite difficult to really interpret, but a but a story and understanding the sentiment behind that customer, that's gold. And if you can put those together and have a way of on scale being able to interpret that analysis, which we can do, you know, that becomes something quite special. So for me it's about a shift to understanding more of those stories as well as keeping, you know, the kind of traditional, traditional measures across the, the learning across the journey points, >>Right? The, the value, I always think the value of the voice of the customer is probably invaluable to organizations because it's honest. >>It absolutely it's honest. And I think once you've got those stories and you've got those metrics and then you're looking at your operational metrics, so what does that mean then in terms of, you know, recur revenue and what does that mean in terms of margins and the costs? And being able to put those three things together so that you couldn't understand the levers that you've got and the, and the results of those levers, that becomes really powerful. And that's really what's driving our, our customers for, for them to deliver in their moments of service as well, which ties back into when we're working within customers and engaging with customers and looking at that value story, doing the value assessments more able to use the, the evidence from industry and previous customers and, and the data sources available to help them also project, you know, an operational efficiency here will have this c CX benefit but actually also has this value benefit >>Oh, a value back to the business. I mean a a good experience is transformative. Yeah, >>Really powerful. >>Any industry. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's so powerful and you know, that really resonates with our customers and that's what they're trying to, to achieve all the time. And so when they're looking at IFS cloud in particular, they're looking at how, you know, the, the software can help them achieve those moments of service and perfect those moments of service and all the technology that comes into play that can enable people to improve those moments of service at the same time as getting those operational benefits. And that enables organizations to then invest more in the customer experience, more advocacy and, and really, you know, feels growth. There's, there's no denying that now you have to have that experience and, and at your point before the expectation from as others consumers, we won't tolerate a bad experience anymore, which is a good thing. >>It is. We, we've all had met plenty of those throughout the last two and a half years. Last question for you, you, what are some of the things that are next for experience at ifs? I know you mentioned before we went live that you started during the pandemic, so you go, go get to meet your team finally, but what are some of the things that excite you about the momentum that you guys are carrying through the rest of the second half? >>Yeah, so our focus now is really bringing the component parts together. So we have several tools across our whole experience that leverage from our IFFs cloud platform in order to deliver those moments of service to our customers. But those tools have grown up in different areas of the business because there's been a specific need in that area of the business. So tools at the pre-sale stage, tools that enable us to deliver scope, more frictionlessly tools that enable us to, to identify and capture value. The next stage is bringing those all together. So this week I announced our vision for experience and the experience hub and that really being a place where you get that thread of value throughout the whole experience where everything is tied into one place and it makes it really frictionless for our customers to get the value from ifs. >>And that's critical. You guys have north of 10,000 customers, it's only growing. Kathy, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about the end to end experience that IFS delivers internally and externally to its customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you for having >>Me. My pleasure. For Kathy Hall, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube live on the show floor of IFS Unleashed from Miami. Stick around. My next guest joins me in just a minute. I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld, 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, we're in Moscone North lobby, I'm John Furrier. My cohost Stu Miniman. We're here with two great guests, David Appel, Vice President C2 Space and Intelligence and Defense, Civil Solutions at Raytheon, and Gil Shneorson, who's the senior vice president general manager of VxRail, of Dell EMC, great to have Raytheon, anything with space Stu and I get jacked up for that. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah I appreciate it, thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Gil, VxRail, got a customer here, impressive role out. Talk about the story. >> Well I think it starts with the fact that we have recently announced our support for Pivotal community services over VMware Cloud Foundation over VxRail which has actually the only Q-rated automated stacking industry that allows people to leverage containers and infrastructure as a service on one stack and we've been doing this for about three years now in a different way called Pivotal Ready Architecture and Raytheon has actually adopted that architecture to help their customer, the air force. And that's why we're here today together to talk about you know. >> Seriously modernization couldn't be a more important conversation in government solutions, you guys are a big provider, Raytheon, known for the tech chops, known for having good engineering. Talk about the solution, what you guys did, what's the use case, talk about the deployment. >> Yes with what's going on with the federal government for a while is the acquisition processes and what's taking sometimes years or decades to get software in the field is causing a lot of unmet requirements and needs of the ultimate user, the war fighters out in the field, to be met. So we've been on a journey for the last two years with Pivotal and Dell of how to help the air force, modernize the air force has gone under a transformation and a program called Kessel Run which is where we've deployed the Pivotal Ready Architecture to allow us to quickly deploy an infrastructure and allow us to focus on the end users and develop the capabilities that they need worldwide. And what took years and to now months and days so it's been a fantastic journey. >> Tell us what that means for the folks that might not know the pace of the procurement process. I mean some of this stuff is like 1995 procurement rules. I mean modernization these days is such an important part of it because the impact is significantly relevant. Share some color into the process. >> If you think about in the commercial world today where hundreds of applications be deployed overnight and updates on the what, hourly basis. In the government space it can literally take years to define a requirement, then you have to go through a budgeting cycle all the way up through congress and then you have to go through an acquisition cycle that could take a year to complete and so by the time you're actually fielding capability it is literally five years or more by the time the need was actually identified. And in that five years the technology probably changed which means your solution has probably changed from what's currently available. So shortening the cycles is what it's all about. >> And that's really about having the right product at the right time, not the old product five years ago. How fast things change, it's pretty important to have that nailed down. >> It's pretty amazing and you know I think you look at transformation and there's usually a trade off. What we have been working on and what we're announcing but really what we've been leaving over the last four years is a way to transform but stay close to your core. In other words transformation without trade offs. And so if you can get your VMware stack now running containers in a fully managed automated stack you don't have to change your skill set and you can do all of that and start innovating while staying very close to your core competency. You know you transform but you don't have to go too far and I think the story what Raytheon did is fairly amazing because they turned, you know, what did you tell me, a 50-year-old process, you know in like in less than half a year you turned automated systems that you know saves the US air force a lot of money. >> And lives too, are saved. I mean you're talking about people in the field, this is about people's lives too, I mean this is the money making. >> And it's been about transforming the culture of the way the DoD does software and the first example that Gil is mentioning was tanker planning which was the ability for the air force to refuel flight missions in the air, would typically take over eight hours to plan. And it was done by a white board. It was done manually. And in order to automate that and shrink the time, again that would have gone to that five year procurement cycle. We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal-ready architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field. That's done two things. It's from a financial perspective it's saving over $200,000 a day in just fuel costs from optimizing the tanker planning. But more importantly it's actually more efficient and protecting the safety of those flight crews. They're not in the air as long, they might not be in a hostile environment as long, so the security of the air force is even more important. >> As Pivotal always says they're outcome driven and that's pretty good outcome. I mean talk about the impact that you've had on everyone else around you because I'm sure there's some blockers in your way, people's feathers got ruffled, but then people see success they want to come copy it, right? So that's a pattern you see in a lot of government work. Hey there's a new way to do it, modern way. >> Yeah so our hindsight we're seeing it in two ways. One from a broader DoD perspective. The air force was out front here. They established this and from a DoD perspective what they're calling their Kessel Run initiative is really taking off. You're seeing other Kessel Run like programs being stood up like a program called Kobayashi Maru and Rogue Blue and a few others across DoD. So it's proliferating out across the DoD from a customer perspective, DoD customer perspective. From an industry perspective you know our competitors are quickly trying to catch up to us and they're trying to, you know, copy our playbook but we're continuing to innovate and continue on this journey so we're moving ahead with Pivotal and Dell. >> First of all David I think Pat Gelsinger must have been talking to your team because you're mashing up Star Wars and Star Trek with Kessel Run and Kobayashi there. But talk about mashing up, the stack that you're putting together, VxRail was really built around simplicity. It delivers that, that's what hyperconverged infrastructure does. You start talking about VCF and containers and PKS on that, Kubernetes nobody says is simple, but you know help us walk through, you know, how simple is it for you to leverage and deploy this. You've got organizational challenges and other things, so, you know, where is the solution, it sounds like you use the ready node, and where directionally is it headed? >> Yeah let me answer from this perspective. So we started this journey with Pivotal and the air force about two years ago. And at that time we started with a group of probably a dozen or less folks that actually even understood the technology or the products and the solutions that Dell and Pivotal bring forward. In those two years we're now up to over 100 people. Fully embracing the technology. It's creating an environment where it's easier for us to recruit and retain people because it's modern, it's not the old ways we used to do business. And we're finding that it's been very easy to deploy, very easy to train people up and very easy to operate. So from that perspective it's just been fantastic from not just the technology perspective but also the cultural transformation perspective. >> Yeah Gil I'd love you to comment on that because you know remember gosh when CI and HCI first rolled out you know the people that had those jobs were worried we were going to take their jobs away. Now when I hear your customer talking about, you know, it's easy to train them and even easier for me to recruit and retain, a powerful story. Are you hearing that across your customer base? >> Yeah I'll tell you what's a little different. In the past we have simplified things and we've made work somewhat go away but there was no alternative work. Today every developer, every IT person, they can't wait to go and be a dev ops person, right? So for IT when we come in and we say we're going to take this off your plate so you can free up your time, it really means something now, 'cause they know exactly what they want to do. They want to go and they want to be dev ops, they want to develop new apps, they want to move forward. And so it's very syngergistic in a way that we offload some of the burden from them and they actually do free up to do cooler stuff and then they like it. >> And they get to keep their traditional apps, with containers, gives them great capabilities. Not the throwaway. >> And that's a great point I think as I said before and it's really important to convey this, the transformation without trade offs is a big deal because they can keep the application. They can run the same environment. Right in our case they can do it you know at ease and in remote locations all over the world with less management. And at the same time they can innovate and manage those environments. And I think as long as we can keep that up we'll make a lot of people productive. >> Well I got to ask David the security question because one of the things that comes up all the time obviously Department of Defense, security's top of mind. Industrial IOT are now not just malware getting in for credit card information, you're talking about actual equipment, you're talking about flights in the air, hacking with physical things is a concern and it's a big IOT kind of conversation. You're in the middle of that, this is your world. What's your thoughts on the security? >> You know so we've obviously had to go through that in order to get authority to operate to push things into theater and one of the strongest benefits we've seen is the dev ops process and the platforms has all that security built in and all the testing as we're going through it. So the thousands of tests that are running as new threats are identified, the platform is updating with the latest patches or whatever it may be, so. >> John: On the automation stuff? >> On the automation side of it. So we're actually seeing a lot of the security, I don't want to call it risks go away, but our ability to mitigate them is being built into the software itself. So we haven't seen an issue yet where we haven't been able to get things authority to operate and push it out to the field, so. >> There's a high bar there too, obviously. >> It's a very high bar, very high bar, and that was part of the also the challenge of getting systems fielded in months and days versus years because of the ability to get that operations. >> Now this is a really big story I think. First of all Raytheon's a well-known brand, but, the modernization of getting stuff into theater and or into your production theater, military operations, that's a big deal, I mean, I think people don't really understand that aren't in government how fast this happens. I think that's a real testament to the solution, so I mean. >> Well the powerful thing to it is the national defense strategy is all about capability at the speed of relevance, and that's all about technology. Future wars aren't going to be decided by the size of your army or the size of your arsenal. It's going to be about how do you get data to decision makers faster and how do they can act faster. And that's where software and this infrastructure we're putting in place and putting capabilities in the hands of people that need it faster. That's what it's all about. >> And you know Secretary Matthis who was former Secretary of Defense said 48% of all the casualties are usually frontline war fighters. And that's where the technology edges so to speak. So again this is such a cutting edge topic, talk about it for days. How do you feel about this? This is pretty exciting. >> I'm just happy that every time I come into theCUBE, this is the second time I do it with a customer, you give me the opportunity to learn, you know, have a deeper relationship with one of my of probably now 7,000 customers. Which you know is really hard to keep up with these days and so you know we make technologies for people to use and when you see it in the field doing good it's a great thing. >> Well it's a transformation story. It's really a great transformation story. They have to, making a difference. >> Great, David, would love to hear, you know, what's on your ask for your partners that are deploying. Kind of give us a look forward roadmap that you can share. >> Yeah again I go back to everything we're about right now is speed and and getting capability faster. Currently in our marketplace right now we're fully embracing agile dev ops and everything it takes to deploy software from that perspective. Moving into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and autonomy are the big things that are on our horizon from a technology perspective. And as our partners are in those areas and can help us bring more capability in that, that's going to help our end customer, the DoD, faster as well, so. >> What's the big takeaway from VMworld this year for you guys? What's the big observation? >> I'll be honest this is my first time at VMware. I'm amazed, I was at Dell Technology World a few months ago, I've really enjoyed it, I think it's a great event. And I'm just enjoying learning all the technologies so, it's, I've enjoyed the day. >> Gil what's your big takeaway? >> Well I'm part of the family. So I'm a little more familiar and even for me-- >> Whoever: You were briefed. >> No, no, even for me the rate of innovation that Vmworld puts out there is amazing. Right and you see how everything plugs together and you see how the vision keeps being, you know, completed, right, and we're in a good spot in the sense that we actually have what people need right now. And we do it better than everybody else. And you'd think that being number one in almost every category you'd be sitting there complacent and no, you know, we keep pushing the envelope, doing more innovating, more integrating more, so it's very exciting to see what's happening. >> Well great story here, Raytheon congratulations for your success I think it's super important to have a prepared military, certaintly, and saving lives and doing it in a modern way is kind of of a miracle these days in government, so congratulations. >> And I thank our partners for continuing to innovate 'cause that's helping us so. >> All right, great story, CUBE coverage here, Vmworld 2019, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)