>>thank you everyone for joining. I'm here today to talk about English controllers. AP Gateways and service mention communities three very hot topics that are also frequently confusing. So I'm Richard Lee, founder CEO of Ambassador Labs, formerly known as Data Wire. We sponsor a number of popular open source projects that are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, including telepresence and Ambassador, which is a kubernetes native AP gateway. And most of what I'm going to talk about today is related to our work around ambassador. Uh huh. So I want to start by talking about application architecture, er and workflow on kubernetes and how applications that are being built on kubernetes really differ from how they used to be built. So when you're building applications on kubernetes, the traditional architectures is the very famous monolith, and the monolith is a central piece of software. It's one giant thing that you build, deployed run, and the value of a monolith is it's really simple. And if you think about the monolithic development process, more importantly, is the architecture er is really reflecting that workflow. So with the monolith, you have a very centralized development process. You tend not to release too frequently because you have all these different development teams that are working on different features, and then you decide in advance when you're going to release that particular pieces offering. Everyone works towards that release train, and you have specialized teams. You have a development team which has all your developers. You have a Q A team. You have a release team, you have an operations team, so that's your typical development organization and workflow with a monolithic application. As organization shift to micro >>services, they adopt a very different development paradigm. It's a decentralized development paradigm where you have lots of different independent teams that are simultaneously working on different parts of the application, and those application components are really shipped as independent services. And so you really have a continuous release cycle because instead of synchronizing all your teams around one particular vehicle, you have so many different release vehicles that each team is able to ship a soon as they're ready. And so we call this full cycle development because that team is >>really responsible, not just for the coding of that micro service, but also the testing and the release and operations of that service. Um, >>so this is a huge change, particularly with workflow. And there's a lot of implications for this, s o. I have a diagram here that just try to visualize a little bit more the difference in organization >>with the monolith. You have everyone who works on this monolith with micro services. You have the yellow folks work on the Yellow Micro Service, and the purple folks work on the Purple Micro Service and maybe just one person work on the Orange Micro Service and so forth. >>So there's a lot more diversity around your teams and your micro services, and it lets you really adjust the granularity of your development to your specific business need. So how do users actually access your micro services? Well, with the monolith, it's pretty straightforward. You have one big thing. So you just tell the Internet while I have this one big thing on the Internet, make sure you send all your travel to the big thing. But when you have micro services and you have a bunch of different micro services, how do users actually access these micro services? So the solution is an AP gateway, so the gateway consolidates all access to your micro services, so requests come from the Internet. They go to your AP gateway. The AP Gateway looks at these requests, and based on the nature of these requests, it routes them to the appropriate micro service. And because the AP gateway is centralizing thing access to all the micro services, it also really helps you simplify authentication, observe ability, routing all these different crosscutting concerns. Because instead of implementing authentication in each >>of your micro services, which would be a maintenance nightmare and a security nightmare, you put all your authentication in your AP gateway. So if you look at this world of micro services, AP gateways are really important part of your infrastructure, which are really necessary and pre micro services. Pre kubernetes Unhappy Gateway Well valuable was much more optional. So that's one of the really big things around. Recognizing with the micro services architecture er, you >>really need to start thinking much more about maybe a gateway. The other consideration within a P A gateway is around your management workflow because, as I mentioned, each team is actually response for their own micro service, which also means each team needs to be able to independently manage the gateway. So Team A working on that micro service needs to be able to tell the AP at Gateway. This this is >>how I want you to write. Request to my micro service, and the Purple team needs to be able to say something different for how purple requests get right into the Purple Micro Service. So that's also really important consideration as you think about AP gateways and how it fits in your architecture. Because it's not just about your architecture. It's also about your workflow. So let me talk about a PR gateways on kubernetes. I'm going to start by talking about ingress. So ingress is the process of getting traffic from the Internet to services inside the cluster kubernetes. From an architectural perspective, it actually has a requirement that all the different pods in a kubernetes cluster needs to communicate with each other. And as a consequence, what Kubernetes does is it creates its own private network space for all these pods, and each pod gets its own I p address. So this makes things very, very simple for inter pod communication. Cooper in any is, on the other hand, does not say very much around how traffic should actually get into the cluster. So there's a lot of detail around how traffic actually, once it's in the cluster, how you routed around the cluster and it's very opinionated about how this works but getting traffic into the cluster. There's a lot of different options on there's multiple strategies pot i p. There's ingress. There's low bounce of resource is there's no port. >>I'm not gonna go into exhaustive detail on all these different options on. I'm going to just talk about the most common approach that most organizations take today. So the most common strategy for routing is coupling an external load balancer with an ingress controller. And so an external load balancer can be >>ah, Harvard load balancer. It could be a virtual machine. It could be a cloud load balancer. But the key requirement for an external load balancer >>is to be able to attack to stable I people he address so that you can actually map a domain name and DNS to that particular external load balancer and that external load balancer, usually but not always well, then route traffic and pass that traffic straight through to your ingress controller, and then your English controller takes that traffic and then routes it internally inside >>kubernetes to the various pods that are running your micro services. There are >>other approaches, but this is the most common approach. And the reason for this is that the alternative approaches really required each of your micro services to be exposed outside of the cluster, which causes a lot of challenges around management and deployment and maintenance that you generally want to avoid. So I've been talking about in English controller. What exactly is an English controller? So in English controller is an application that can process rules according to the kubernetes English specifications. Strangely, Kubernetes is not actually ship with a built in English controller. Um, I say strangely because you think, well, getting traffic into a cluster is probably a pretty common requirement. And it is. It turns out that this is complex enough that there's no one size fits all English controller. And so there is a set of ingress >>rules that are part of the kubernetes English specifications at specified how traffic gets route into the cluster >>and then you need a proxy that can actually route this traffic to these different pods. And so an increase controller really translates between the kubernetes configuration and the >>proxy configuration and common proxies for ingress. Controllers include H a proxy envoy Proxy or Engine X. So >>let me talk a little bit more about these common proxies. So all these proxies and there >>are many other proxies I'm just highlighting what I consider to be probably the most three most well established proxies. Uh, h a proxy, uh, Engine X and envoy proxies. So H a proxy is managed by a plastic technology start in 2000 and one, um, the H a proxy organization actually creates an ingress controller. And before they kept created ingress controller, there was an open source project called Voyager, which built in ingress Controller on >>H a proxy engine X managed by engine. Xing, subsequently acquired by F five Also open source started a little bit later. The proxy in 2004. And there's the engine Xing breast, which is a community project. Um, that's the most popular a zwelling the engine Next Inc Kubernetes English project which is maintained by the company. This is a common source of confusion because sometimes people will think that they're using the ingress engine X ingress controller, and it's not clear if they're using this commercially supported version or the open source version, and they actually, although they have very similar names, uh, they actually have different functionality. Finally. Envoy Proxy, the newest entrant to the proxy market originally developed by engineers that lift the ride sharing company. They subsequently donated it to the cloud. Native Computing Foundation Envoy has become probably the most popular cloud native proxy. It's used by Ambassador uh, the A P a. Gateway. It's using the SDO service mash. It's using VM Ware Contour. It's been used by Amazon and at mesh. It's probably the most common proxy in the cloud native world. So, as I mentioned, there's a lot of different options for ingress. Controller is the most common. Is the engine X ingress controller, not the one maintained by Engine X Inc but the one that's part of the Cooper Nannies project? Um, ambassador is the most popular envoy based option. Another common option is the SDO Gateway, which is directly integrated with the SDO mesh, and that's >>actually part of Dr Enterprise. So with all these choices around English controller. How do you actually decide? Well, the reality is the ingress specifications very limited. >>And the reason for this is that getting traffic into the cluster there's a lot of nuance into how you want to do that. And it turns out it's very challenging to create a generic one size fits all specifications because of the vast diversity of implementations and choices that are available to end users. And so you don't see English specifying anything around resilience. So if >>you want to specify a time out or rate limiting, it's not possible in dresses really limited to support for http. So if you're using GSPC or Web sockets, you can't use the ingress specifications, um, different ways of routing >>authentication. The list goes on and on. And so what happens is that different English controllers extend the core ingress specifications to support these use cases in different ways. Yeah, so engine X ingress they actually use a combination of config maps and the English Resource is plus custom annotations that extend the ingress to really let you configure a lot of additional extensions. Um, that is exposing the engineers ingress with Ambassador. We actually use custom resource definitions different CRTs that extend kubernetes itself to configure ambassador. And one of the benefits of the CRD approach is that we can create a standard schema that's actually validated by kubernetes. So when you do a coup control apply of an ambassador CRD coop Control can immediately validate and tell >>you if you're actually applying a valid schema in format for your ambassador configuration on As I previously mentioned, ambassadors built on envoy proxy, >>it's the Gateway also uses C R D s they can to use a necks tension of the service match CRD s as opposed to dedicated Gateway C R D s on again sdo Gateway is built on envoy privacy. So I've been talking a lot about English controllers. But the title of my talk was really about AP gateways and English controllers and service smashed. So what's the difference between an English controller and an AP gateway? So to recap, an immigrant controller processes kubernetes English routing rules and a P I. G. Wave is a central point for managing all your traffic to community services. It typically has additional functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, a >>developer portal and so forth. So what you find Is that not all Ap gateways or English controllers? Because some MP gateways don't support kubernetes at all. S o eso you can't make the can't be ingress controllers and not all ingrates. Controllers support the functionality such as authentication, observe, ability, developer portal >>that you would typically associate with an AP gateway. So, generally speaking, um, AP gateways that run on kubernetes should be considered a super set oven ingress controller. But if the A p a gateway doesn't run on kubernetes, then it's an AP gateway and not an increase controller. Yeah, so what's the difference between a service Machin and AP Gateway? So an AP gateway is really >>focused on traffic into and out of a cluster, so the political term for this is North South traffic. A service mesh is focused on traffic between services in a cluster East West traffic. All service meshes need >>an AP gateway, so it's Theo includes a basic ingress or a P a gateway called the SDO gateway, because a service mention needs traffic from the Internet to be routed into the mesh >>before it can actually do anything Omelet. Proxy, as I mentioned, is the most common proxy for both mesh and gateways. Dr. Enterprise provides an envoy based solution out of the box. >>Uh, SDO Gateway. The reason Dr does this is because, as I mentioned, kubernetes doesn't come package with an ingress. Uh, it makes sense for Dr Enterprise to provide something that's easy to get going. No extra steps required because with Dr Enterprise, you can deploy it and get going. Get exposed on the Internet without any additional software. Dr. Enterprise can also be easily upgraded to ambassador because they're both built on envoy and interest. Consistent routing. Semantics. It also with Ambassador. You get >>greater security for for single sign on. There's a lot of security by default that's configured directly into Ambassador Better control over TLS. Things like that. Um And then finally, there's commercial support that's actually available for Ambassador. SDO is an open source project that has a has a very broad community but no commercial support options. So to recap, ingress controllers and AP gateways are critical pieces of your cloud native stack. So make sure that you choose something that works well for you. >>And I think a lot of times organizations don't think critically enough about the AP gateway until they're much further down the Cuban and a journey. Considerations around how to choose that a p a gateway include functionality such as How does it do with traffic management and >>observe ability? Doesn't support the protocols that you need also nonfunctional requirements such as Does it integrate with your workflow? Do you offer commercial support? Can you get commercial support for this on a P? A. Gateway is focused on north south traffic, so traffic into and out of your kubernetes cluster. A service match is focused on East West traffic, so traffic between different services inside the same cluster. Dr. Enterprise includes SDO Gateway out of the box easy to use but can also be extended with ambassador for enhanced functionality and security. So thank you for your time. Hope this was helpful in understanding the difference between a P gateways, English controllers and service meshes and how you should be thinking about that on your kubernetes deployment

(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)