>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to Seattle, Washington. We are here at Smartsheet engaged 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. You're watching the cube. We are here with a cube alum, a cube veteran, Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at constellation research at at Washington DC. Thank you so much for returning to the cube. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic but a fascinating one. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the workplace is driven by the new, the rise of digital technologies. >>Sure. I mean while it digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? And so we've had the past waves of productivity tools and then mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality are going to literally change how we perceive the workplace. And then we have just everyday trends like remote working. And now people can work from anywhere, right? It's fantastic. And that's, that's really revolutionized a lot of things. There are things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote work force. Companies like ADP have a quarter of their workforce working from home, right? Accenture, same thing. They're getting rid of office space and they, they work out of their house unless there's a client site. And because you can create a, create the experience that you want. And one of the really big trends is this is this trend towards being able to shape the employee experience the way that you want to, using the tools that you prefer. >>And some people call this shadow it, other people call it innovation, right? And so that's one of the, one of the big changes. And then we have things like the gig economy, which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms. And that's, that's really quite exciting too. So all these, this confluence of forces all enabled them driven by technology. But it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload workers that are not lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this. And that's another big challenge. >>Well, you also get this tools proliferation, which they're just not, they're just not word and, and Excel anymore. But you've got a tab open with Salesforce, you've got a tab open with Slack, you've got Gmail open, you've got docs open and you've got Smartsheet open. You might have a JIRA open. I mean, so how is that gonna sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of apps that we have to keep up >>and we need all this technology to do better work. I mean the, these apps provide value except that it's increased in the onboarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us to train people. In some companies it's hard to retain people because they feel like they have to go to work and there's this onslaught of technologies they have to have tabs open and get their jobs done. And they do. And so we're seeing things like, you know, we're at the Smartsheet conference where, you know, how can we centralize work a little bit better, streamline it by integrating the tools and creating more focus in on what we're doing. And that's a very big trend. So my latest digital workplace trends report, we say this, we're seeing these hubs form, you know like Slack is another work hub that's become very popular inside of organizations. >>They have over 1100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So we're dealing with this complexity, you know, starting to be able to do this now, but it's early days still a big challenge. So what's a, what are you seeing now? So what's the, what is the answer then? I mean we have you just described all of these trends that are taking place that are making, making the work modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers who have, they're dealing with cognitive overload leaders who want more with less. What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? We talked already about Smartsheet and Slack. We see the new digital experience platforms are emerging and low code and no code is also becoming popular. >>I'd be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamline experiences. So the CIO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, solve his problem right away there. They're knowledge workers are just being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employee experience, the 100 top moments and then he built experiences that enabled, you know, project management and onboarding and all of these key activities to be friction-free built out of their existing applications, but streamlined to just what they needed to do. And he used this as his top priority as a digital leader is to say, we've got to take as much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining and simplification. And we now have tools that allow that shaping to happen very quickly. It's almost reminds me of kind of the competition for Deb's right now. >>It's the competition for employees. And then we've talked a lot about the consumerization of it in mobile devices for the customer experience, but there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same kind of expected behavior, right? Or expected inner engagement interaction with the apps on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers. Cause I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available. But yeah, we only get 2% unemployment in the Bay area. Now it's creating effectively negative unemployment, right? Anything under 3%. So this is the challenges. Employee experience is usually low on the priority list for CEOs. They usually have analytics and cloud and cybersecurity and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet customer experience is, is one of those priorities. But how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to deliver it with? Right. We're seeing you can do with talented people, is expecting to do a great job. And then give them a bunch of hard to use tools, right. Which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that prioritization go up a little bit because employee experience is part of delivering great customer experience and it's how you, how you create that experience to begin with. So small >>and leaders are seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that their workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. >>Yeah. And now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before and I'm sure you've seen the numbers that are, most employees are disengaged at work. The majority, right between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous untapped investment that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employee experiences. And what's disengaging is, as I mentioned, you know, giving a talented person allows you tools or allows you experience, right and expect them to do great is right. It doesn't happen. >>How much do you think AAL or excuse me, AI and machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job. >>Yeah, it's, it's interesting cause there's, you know, there's two sides of the coin there. Some people like a, a job that they can just kind of phone in and it's kind of rote and they can come in, they don't have to think too hard and then they can go home to their family and some people are hired on that basis. Right. Um, because that's the challenge. AI and machine learning will absolutely automate most rote work. If you look at like Adobe sensei, I was at the Adobe conference and, and they were talking about how all of these creative types, you'll have all these mundane tasks automated for them. And I could see everybody looking at each other going, I get paid to do. >>Right, right. >>So you know, it, you'll see things like robotic process automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CIO is how they had, they cut like 25% out of their call center because they handed it over to the box. Right. You know, as bill processing, that's one of the, and sorting and matching bills, the invoices, it's a manual job even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happen about the most rote level and it just, but it's just going to climb up from there. >>What do you see down the road though? I mean in terms of those, in terms of those employees who are raising their saying hands saying weed, I kind of want that job. I are you, are you seeing what's going to happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they, are they going to be invested in by their companies? >>Well you hope so. You know, it's interesting. We see that all the big vendors now have these big education programs. Salesforce has Trailhead. SAP just announced open SAP where they giveaway massively open online courses. And you know, Microsoft has done this with Microsoft developers network way back in the day, trying to educate people. I mean you can get re-skilled for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenges. Even though every technological revolution in the past, and it looks like this one too has totally changed the employment picture. Uh, uh, by and large it creates more jobs than we lose. And that looks like it's going to happen here. But the people who lose the jobs aren't the ones that tend to gain the jobs, the new jobs, right? Yeah. The, it's hard to take somebody who's, who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new AI algorithms because that's where the next strategic jobs are going to be directing the AI to do all these things. Right. And so I think the short term is going to be dislocation and it's happening so fast that unless society, government, and enterprises really intervene that to upskill these folks, we are going to have a challenge. >>Well, we're in this really weird time too, in between, I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right? Which is perfect for autonomous vehicles, you know, to carry a lot of that freight and everyone pretty much agrees that's going to happen. At the same time, there's, there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today. Uh, like there never has been. So as these weird, and again, it's probably not the best thing for a young kid to get into, right? Because it's not, doesn't have a lot great long. >>Right? Right. >>Well, and you know, you look at Uber and their stated direction is, is they want to get rid of all these drivers, right? They want it, they want self-driving taxis. And you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen, right? Uh, and so the unskilled labor is going to be hit by far the worst. You have to become skilled labor in, in the digital economy. Uh, and so a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to, to get the skills into people's hands. You know, like Facebook and other large organizations don't even require a college degree. What they want people, the people that can deliver, they can take these things and create the, you know, the, the great products of the future. And so, you know, those everyone has to become a knowledge worker. >>And, and as Laird Hamilton said on the main stage today, it's the, it's the, the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of, wow, I don't know much about that. I bet. I guess I'd better learn about it. And then learning a lot about it along the way. We all have to be able to adapt and adopt those new, >>no, absolutely. Now the, uh, uh, and so w we see up-skilling and cross skilling becoming more transdisciplinary. So business people are becoming it folks now and it folks really business people, you know, we've had this business, it divide for a long time and cracks me up. I still go to big companies in the it departments using its own building. Right. But those days are going away. And now seeing that, you know, now as it people over on the business side that live there now. Right. You know, so we're seeing this kind of, this blending where digital is infusing everything and so you have to become digitally competent. Uh, and this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the, you know, the, the, the digital workplace, the average user has had the number of applications they have to learn double or triple in the last just the last five years. Right. So it's a big challenge. >>So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your, >>Oh, a game design. Know the gaming industry is bigger than the movie by a large, large margin. Right. And, and that, that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality really come from. And then you can go into business. Right. You know, >>even sociology majors can design games. >>Yeah. It's just, you know, it's just get, like you said, it's, it's the poor tweeners right. That get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new, yeah. I'll have to take care of. And unfortunately, uh, not a lot of great record of retraining today, but maybe that's going to have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. Right? Yeah. Well, and there's these big market places now you can build the career of your dreams. You'd go to Upwork or Gigster. I mean, these are big job markets where you can go and find work and do it from anywhere using a tablet you bought for $50 off Amazon. Right, right. You know, it just that most of you aren't even aware of that. They can do that. Right, right, right. >>So it's this fast changing world. Put a few bucks away for insurance and you've put a few bucks away in your 401k and you, yeah. You know, not just living off the cash plus a little bit to cover your costs, which unfortunately a lot of their, like the Uber drivers and the Lyft drivers are anyway, you know, they're not really banking that thing for building a, a career. Well, I've crawled to those platforms and it's interesting, entrepreneurial activities, very common in places like Asia, right? Where if, you know, they come here, they build businesses right away. Right. And they're used to that. So w and we lost some of that, but I think we were gave a economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know? Right. >>Well Deon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure having you. Absolutely. Thanks. So Jeff. Thanks Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned to more of the cubes live coverage of NJ engaged 2019.

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

(mellow music) >> Voiceover: Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE, here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. WandaJean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show! >> Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. >> Well we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. >> As Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our digital learning ecosystem. So, we have a learning management system, we use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and, you know, all the way around, create efficiencies. >> And how (chuckles). Are the employees willing to go there? Or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? >> Well, I'm a teacher at heart, so what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, "WandaJean, we really want to learn "how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, "there's lots of data." I tell them, you know, "Come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets," and then I want them to tell me the story about their process, and then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming, and say, "Oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this." So, I want to make sure they're comfortable and, you know, listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process, I'll know how far I can go. >> Now are these kind of next-gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto? Or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and putting them onto? >> I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So, it's knowing where the tools are, and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools, and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business. And how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are, most of the time, digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. So we're definitely no short of tools. But sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out, "How do I get my process "a little more digitized and save myself some time?" >> So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through, in terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually, and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? >> Okay. So, I like to look at things from the triple constraints: Cost, quality, and speed. So, when you think about cost, quality, and speed, you want to take cost out of the process. You want to improve the quality by, you know, creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that, whatever it is, to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list, when it comes to, you know, how are we going to implement this new digital process, Smartsheet is up there. It's the all-in-wonder. I call it the all-in-wonder tool at work, and people say, "Okay, here she comes. "She's going to talk about Smartsheet." That's because, I always say, "Smartsheet does a thousand things." That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about a thousand things. I only want to tell you about the things that, you know, you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, "Look what else I found." So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together, and I say, "But did you see this?" And so, this whole, you know, Santa Claus is comin' to town (all laugh) That's kind of what it feels like. >> So, how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that, A, you know, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in you know, kind of how the teams form, and what's kind of the collaborative workgroup as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? >> I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So, what information is going into this process, what do I need to do with it, and then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff, from a process perspective? So I like that. The @mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those @mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments. And you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But, if you do this @mention, I've noticed that people, when they're using the app, you know, the @mention comes through. Even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, "Oh, somebody's talking to me here." And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So, another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So, a lot of meetings, "'Kay, give me the status, what's the status." Well we can certainly just automate those reports, and make it exactly what, you know, the executive or the leader wanted to know, from a high-level perspective. And so, we don't have to have as many meetings. >> I love it though. That collaboration means cutting out collaboration. >> Mm-hmm. >> That is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is, understanding the upstream and the downstream. Because we heard on the main stage, and we are hearing a lot today, about how it's providing much more visibility. And leaders are able to see the big picture, and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees, for the people who are several notches below, to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? >> Absolutely. So, inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team, and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and, you know, we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need, and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I looked at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great. But when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So, if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, "Oh, automation, it's coming, "and a robot's going to take over my job!" It's not that it's going to do, I have lots to do. But having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me, and 4,000 of them, and everybody might want something from WandaJean. So, I have a intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me, and I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones, and which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, "You know, what have you done for me lately?" And so, all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing, and I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more learning requests, and this many people wanted to learn about a tool, and, so I would have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. >> That's really interesting, right? 'Cause then you go from, the classic paradigm is there's data, right, which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight-up inbound form, to actually get a whole lot of information on what's going on in that community, and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. >> Yes, well we create job requisitions and we hire people for roles. You know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It will be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done, versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So, sometimes it looks really different, like, "Wait a minute, I think I need some more money." (Rebecca laughs) "'Cause I didn't get hired for this." >> Right, right, right, I've done so much more. >> Yes. >> Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization, and the ways in which the Smartsheet is helping break down those silos. >> Okay. So I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you that I believe that silo is an acronym for Secrets in the Learning Organization. And when you have those secrets, and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company cost, quality, speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes. And the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rockstars for the company. So, putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is, when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints, and you know, "Why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this?" Where, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. We can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we could have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without Smartsheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So, I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? (laughter) But if Bob gets pulled into that Smartsheet, it shrinks the world, and it makes our big giant company just that much smaller, and people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. >> Love to get your take on re-skilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're currently doing re-skilling in terms of tools to execute different, you're training people to probably be more collaborative by using these tools and that different types of process. So important that re-skilling happens in the future, as all the jobs change. Just, you know, are people up for this? Are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that there're different ways to get work done than maybe our tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back, saying, you know, "That's not the way we did it 20 years ago!" >> Exactly, you do have that, you do have that. But, you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company. We are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally but I think globally. So that just means, if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of, and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales, and that it's applicable. You know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So, create the fix, and then celebrate that socially, and show someone else, you can do it too. >> Rebecca: You can replicate this. >> You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see when you were larger, you know? You want to see the before and the after, and make sure that, you know, and when people see that, like, "It's possible? "I don't have to be, like, this superstar coder?" When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing, what our employees do. >> So, as a Digital Learning Evangelist, I mean, I don't know, how many are there of you in the world? And is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understanding? I mean, what is it like, and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? >> Well, in other companies, of course, our social networks, LinkedIn and those professional communities that I'm a part of, Smartsheet has a user group community, we can share there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer. And we have a Smartsheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. And you have people coming there and saying, "Has anybody ever done this?" When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing, and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that, you know, I found out that Starbucks actually used Smartsheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a Smartsheet forum out to their baristas, "Are you okay? "Can you make some coffee?" And, you know-- (laughter) >> Can you make the coffee. >> "And, oh by the way, take good pictures of the damage, "so we can submit it to our insurance." So, that's something that our company can use. And I'll take that back to our team, and say, "Guess what Starbucks did with this?" And, "Guess what PayPal did with this?" I sent PayPal's Smartsheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not just that they were impressed. It's that, over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, "We're going to create an integrated marketing calendar, "and we're going to use Smartsheet." That just made me feel so rewarded, that, you know, somebody is listening. You're not just talking! (Rebecca laughs) There are some converts! >> Great. Well, WandaJean, a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Please come back again. >> Yes, I will! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Fricks, stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of ENGAGE 2019. (minimal techno tone) (mellow music)

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone. You are watching the cube and we are here in Seattle, Washington at Smartsheet engage 2019 I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We're joined by Mark Klein. He is the principal at populace. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thank you. So you have a very cool job. Tell our viewers a little bit about populace and about what you do. Sure. So populace is actually an architect firm. Our main focuses architecture. We one of the largest sports architecture firms in the world. So we build stadiums and arenas and convention centers and airports and places that people gather is our bread and butter is over 500 worldwide employees that work on that. But we have an event office out of Denver, Colorado where we take our architectural principles and apply them to major gatherings of people in the sporting world and other areas. >>And these are sporting include the includes include the final four >> in the Olympics and all of your NFL major events that are not a regular season game. All of your inner NHL events that happen in stadiums outdoors, all star games, things like that. Any major event, it's a nonstandard event. They really call on us to help make sure that that goes off without a hitch. Yup. >> All right, so talk a little bit about what it was like before you believe what it was like before you use Smartsheet and entered the, the headaches and the problems and that and now what life is like now. Sure, >> so a little more than 10 years ago when I joined the firm, we had a good stable of events and events. We're still kind of just operating off spreadsheets and back in napkins and drawings and things like that as security and to nine 11 was actually a major factor in kind of the growth of our industry where events now had to be planned a little more with more scrutiny. >>We needed a way to better pull our information together and get everybody to to, to, to collaborate on one set of drawings, one schedule who's doing what and when. And Smartsheet has become that prime resource for all of our event planning >> and for in for an event, there's so many outside contractors that you guys have to orchestrate with, whether it be the teams and the associations and the security and the venue and the concessions. The list goes on transportation, on and on and on. So to be able to bring outsiders into your project, >> and that's a new set every year with every event. So you think of the final four, we're going to a new city every year. So EV, I have literally eight months to work with a team to plan a major event that's going to be seen by hundreds of millions of people. And then I've got to pick up and do it again in another city and then another. >>And we're doing that across dozens of events across our team every year. So we may have a vendor that touches the system once. We may have someone who sees us once every third year. So within our environment we have extremely high turnover of people. We have very short period to get them up to speed and working with us. So Smartsheet has been really, really a big part of Hey I need you to better get in here, get your information and work with the tool, get us the information and guess what, you're going to get some feedback on this one too. So it benefits them. >>Right. It's just interesting to me that the level of granularity and detail, you know, we get, we go to a lot of events, obviously there's so much minutia that you have to keep track of from printing on the napkins, you know, to signage, etc. But at the same time, especially in the sporting world, you know, there can be huge changes, you know, especially at the same plow who wins a game, changes the venue. Right? So how do you, how do you use a tool to manage the boat? The tremendous detail when you have the opportunity to plan versus the change of plan a we got to got to shift, >>he hears well so, so we use a lot of the tools that Smartsheet is has built into it for automation. So for example, at the final four, we don't know our teams until Sunday night and that that that Monday we have decor going up, team specific decor. So locker room assignments. As soon as the game is final we send out notifications in Smartsheet to the decor printers that you're printing this graphic, this size, these a locker room assignments, these are the bus assignments. So all of that is, is queued up and ready to go. Um, so a lot of those last minute things that you may think of, we've thought through them and are ready to trigger as many as we can. You're never 100%, but if we can get that 80% 90% triggered and out the door as soon as the decision is made or the team has decided that lets us deal with those others that are a little less planned. >>So, but those are ones where, you know, those are sort of the known unknowns. What about when you have the unknown unknowns, when things like bad weather can affect an event or, I mean, how do you, how do you use Smartsheet into change on a dime when that happened? >>So, um, we, we plan and we plan and we plan. So for example, bad weather is something we have multiple plans for. But where Smartsheet comes into play as I have real time scheduling information sitting on my screen in a control room at an event. So if we have a weather event, we have two or three options that we can pick from. But I'm now looking at the realtime Smartsheet schedule going, all right, if we select option one, be aware we're going to affect these items. If we go with option two, these are the items. So it's the information that has been gathered through that planning phase and everybody's put their information in. So I know what our action is going to cause and the ripple effects of those. >>And Lindsay, the smart, the choose your own adventures when you were a kid reading those, choose your own adventure, want to open >>a door and guess what's there. I want to open a door of a decision and know that this is the follow on effect and I can look at the schedule and the vendors involved of who I'm about to impact with my decision. Right. And do you have the car, you have the comms and all that stuff dialed in there as well? Correct. Yeah. So we're on radio and we're, you know, these, these events, we run control centers. So there's eight or nine of us sitting in a control room. I, I send Mark meter a picture every year of my Smartsheet screen with some field of play behind it, beautiful ball or basketball field and go smart. We're ready to go, keep it up, keep it running for the next few hours. So, um, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly intense time. Um, when, when we opened doors or we turn on the cameras if those events, because let's face it, there's 70,000 people sitting there and there's usually three triple digit, a hundred millions of people watching on television. >>So it has to go right. That's a lot of pressure. Yes. How do you deal with it? How does your team deal with it? I mean you're used to it of course, but is there, uh, it's the confidence in the plan. I think that has really shaped how we get to that point and don't and don't overreact or get too caught up in the moment. So, um, what we do within the planning of, of our events and with our staff and is we put everybody's tasks in in Smartsheet of course. So my tunnel captain only has to focus on the 40 things that he or she is responsible for. So he may be standing at a team tunnel and we've extracted from the schedule are Austin, here are your 40 items. Don't worry about every, all the chaos going around you. Cause I've got 40 other people out working those items. >>So we filter schedules by either location or staff member so that they can put their blinders on and stay focused on their tasks. And that's really how people can focus and stay. Stay in the moment. What's coming next? What do I need to worry about? Cause there's 4,000 line items in that schedule. I can't have him trying to figure out what are his right at that moment. Mark, I would shift gears a little bit cause you guys came from an architectural bet, the company's architectural background and buildings, venues and stadiums. We just had the new chase. Then you just got finished in San Francisco. Beautiful new facility as the way you guys think about, it's kind of people centric. It's Vinnie's for people in its events for people. What are some of the kind of the guiding principles that make for a good event? A good venue from the people experience point of views. >>There's really multiple sets of customers that I look at at every venue. Obviously we always started the field of play. You gotta get that right? It's gotta be a hundred yards long. It's gotta be. And I thought they broke that rule the other day. We won't go there. Um, so feel to play out. So you've got your competitors, your spectators, and then your operators. All three of those. We focus on all of them equally because if one piece of that triad doesn't work, then the overall experience doesn't work. So obviously the field of play honestly is the easiest part to deal with. But it's an important part. So you look at how a team is going to arrive at a venue bus, whatever the case may be, so that they get to their locker room, get to their services that out to their field and back and forth to media obligations. >>So you don't want to put a media work room halfway across the stadium because then they're making a long Trek. It's a little things like that in the, in the team component, spectators, obviously theirs could be 50 to, if it's a baseball park, 50,000 up to 70,000 in a stadium. We want to ensure that they're going to fully enjoy their two to four hours in that building. Um, so we work on scheduling with our vendor. The one of the biggest things we found in the, in that area is we have really engaged with our contractors, the concessions folks, because they were kind of operating on their own. So engaging concessions to say, don't be moving product when there are people in the building, no one, the timeouts are, we'll call you from control based on the schedule so that we're synchronizing building operations so that they're, the customers are running out of water. >>Well we didn't run out of water, we couldn't get it to you. So things like that are really important to our planning. And then the group that really gets overlooked at, I spend a lot of time on is the people that helped build and get the building ready. Because if my vendors are having a rough time getting their things in the building or building the platform I've asked for or setting up the stage, they're just not going to be in a good frame of mind when the lights turn on. And I want everybody to be, yeah, let's go. We've had a great experience in the five days leading up to this event, whatever it may be. I'm ready now to put on a show. So we use Smartsheet IX so much with our vendors to help guide them through the build process, scheduling, deliveries, getting their credentials where they're going to park and where do I take my breaks? >>Everything is there at their fingertips. So even the mom and pop vendors that I deal with, and there are quite a few of them from city to city, feel like they're as important as my Avi company. So they're excited. They do their load in there like, Hey, this is a great experience and now they're here to help support the event. And then when I call and go, guess what? We have a problem. I need your help. They're going to share, Mark, what can we do? Right? Cause they're there, they're enthusiastic and they didn't feel like I beat 'em up right during that load in great, great insight. People centric. But you're talking about it's treating people like people, not just that they are some cog in the wheel that they are to to execute this task. Right, right. Yeah. No happy staff deliver happy events. >>So what's next in terms of, in terms of a broader adoption in terms of more improvements that you're seeing on the pipeline? Um, so I'm really excited about the collaboration component that was announced today at the keynote. Um, we are an architect firm, so the base of all of our plant, all of our events is a set of drawings, drawings that show what we need, where it is, when it's gonna happen. So all of our non drawing material has lived in Smartsheet for 10 years. I'm now gonna be able to bring those drawings in and get the collaborative information to feedback. So we take a drawing, we'll send it to CBS and say, please Mark up how you think we've drawn your broadcast compound. That has all been email. Now with this collaboration tool, it's going to live in Smartsheets. So I cannot tell you how excited I am about the collaboration component. >>It's gonna. It's gonna really streamline how we do our business. I, I'm kinda lost for words to get in there and try it. My staff is gonna probably go Mark. You can't go to any more conferences, but, uh, I think it's really going to be a great addition to our work process. Um, the other one that has been a personal part of mine, a personal goal that I've seen is the adoption by our staff are the to day work process. Um, I listened in the office, we have a big open work plan space and I listened for my staff going, I've got to put this plan together, attract this and I go, I literally will stand up and walk over. Have you thought about using Smartsheet? And half of the time they haven't. And um, I will say, let me help you through it. Let me get you started and see if it works for you. >>Um, so that organic growth with Smartsheet, um, is, is the big step that we're doing on a day to day basis, um, to get staff introduced to a new way to work and be more collaborative of how they, they manage your information. So, um, just that that kind of growth is, is, is ongoing. Um, but after I've been to the conference, I can say I've got a little more knowledge about it. Let me, uh, let me, uh, help you out a little bit and get you to use it. Right, right, right, right. And you're even finding ways to use it in your personal life, you said? Sure. I use it for home tasks. We plan, we plan our kid's birthday celebrations in it. So my wife and I will share a sheet about who's visiting for graduation. My daughter's high school graduation is coming up. We actually post a forum on Smartsheet coming where they staying at the tag that I put up on the wall over there as people think I work for Smartsheet with how much we use it. So yes, it bleeds into the personal life, but why not exactly a word. I don't fix it. Thank you so much for coming on. The show is a lot of fun talking pleasure. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. Have more of engaged 2019 here in Seattle. You're watching the cube.

>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the cube covering Smartsheet engage 2019 brought to you by Smartsheet. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Smartsheet engage here in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Jeff Frick. We have Chris Marsh on the program. He is a research director of workforce productivity and compliance at four 51 research. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you have just completed a massive report that really looks at the future of work and, and the premise is that the future of work is changing dramatically because of the rise of digital technology. It's, it's, it's changing the way companies think about employees, the way employees think about their jobs. Give us, give us sort of the high level findings here. >>Yeah. So yeah, a big report took me most of my summer so I kind of hibernated for a good month and a half to do it. Um, and yeah, it crystallizes a lot of our views around how, you know, protest technology and culture coming together to, to ground new ways of working. Um, and I guess the basic premise is that, uh, we all know this pervasive friction across day to day work. I mean we've sort of dysfunctional accepted that as the status quo, but actually we seen a lot of our survey research that it's being regarded increasingly in the upper echelons of management within companies as a priority that needs to be, that needs to be addressed. In fact, we had some survey work, um, that came out of failed recently. It was to base it in line of business decision makers and it was what should IUTs priority be when it comes to transformation initiatives and number one was improving the productivity and collaboration experience. >>Now if you put that in the context of all the other things on its plate, the fact that that's number one when traditionally it hasn't been, it's insignificant. And actually we did the same question, same survey September last year. It was number one then. And that was the first time it blips on the radar. So this is, you know, written up the agenda, exec management, it leadership, um, and now looking at ways to address that pervasive friction. So, I guess the basic premise of, of our thinking is that a lot of the legacy technologies on, I mean, they've led to that friction in some ways, right? So most companies have organized in one way or another around the silos that applicate traditional applications have created. And that's created organizational silos and, and hence all of the friction. But we see a lot of interesting new technology trends and tooling that are allowing people to basically operationalize work in the seams between those legacy systems. So lifting some of the data information and potentially workflow workload out of those systems and having them in a, you know, some of the new types of work platform that we're seeing, you know, which Smartsheet's a good example to actually operate in a much more agile way. And we call that shift one from systems of record, which we kind of understand to what we call systems of delivery. Um, so that two, we'll have a big gravitational effects on the way the rest of the business application landscape evolve. >>So didn't, uh, it, uh, kind of grow up to support the silos that were defined before. There was it, there was always sales, there was marketing, there was the executive suite, there was accounting. Um, and, and the it and the apps grew to be aligned. So do you think now that the actual collaboration apps like Smartsheet can actually pull, can pull the silos of the organization into this more hybrid structure? >>Yeah, I think, I think that it certainly looks like, I think that's what companies want to happen. Um, I think it's still early days. I mean the w the way most companies are set up in know actually has a lineage going back a couple of hundred years. The industrial revolution and mechanization leading to standardization, leading to compartmentalization. And then you have lines of businesses we kind of currently understand it. And that's why this is such an interesting time at the moment because a lot of that is breaking down relatively quickly. Um, and obviously the competing area has been the prime catalyst for that. Um, so yeah, I mean, you know, other things that come out of our survey research, massive appetite from senior managers for more collaboration across departments. Right? So, not just within teams, which in and of itself is a challenge, but across departments. Um, so you know, marketing, speaking more often and more purposefully with finance, legal speaking more often with operations. So there is an appetite for higher order types of, not just collaboration but actually work, design, planning, work, execution, um, not just sitting in those departmental silos. >>What is driving this at this appetite? Because I mean it would seem like it was always there and maybe there's just a recognition that we have the tools and the technology to actually execute or is there something that's actually fundamentally changing about the global world that we're living in? >>Yeah, I mean, so we talk about it in the report about this era of personalization, right? Which is just everything we've seen explode in the consumer domain around technology and the climatization we've all had to new kinds of digital experience and how they are coming into the workforce. People want new people will have expectations when you come to digital experience as part of their day to day work. Um, and so that's one thing. The, obviously the related element to that is that companies need to be much more agile in responding to disruptions in their own market. And this is obviously vertical agnostic now. So if there's one thing that you really need to make sure you're good at in the digital age, it's being agile, right? Spotting the sort of signals in the market, understanding what they mean in terms of customer demand, and then you know, catering to that demand quickly with some kind of new products or service or experience. >>So I think it's that need to be able to respond really quickly because there's so much disruption that technology has brought to us. That means that companies are saying, okay, we can't any longer wait six months for this just project life cycle is work life cycle to, to, to run its course. We need to respond more quickly. We need to organize much more agile. We all need to be on the same page when it comes to what we're supposed to be doing. Right? So there's a big demand for a clear line of sight across work. Um, so I think that's, that's probably where it's coming from. All companies realizing we need to act quicker, respond quicker. >>I'm curious, you know, it took a long time for dev ops to really be accepted as the optimal way to create products. Right. Versus a PRD and an MRD and then a PRD and then we define it and we take these when we build in and shoot, we miss the market. Right. It changed in terms of actually running the business though. I mean, do you have any kind of point of view on how long it will take for people to figure out that yes, we can make micro adjustments on our strategy based on speed, competitive threats, but at the same time I've got to be executing on some of these longer term objectives as well, which I would imagine would be a push back on that, on that technique. >>Yeah. I mean it will take as long as the technologies need to have to emerge to support companies really operating in that kind of agile way. Um, I mean one of the things we talk about, um, is the, what we call the three A's, right? So the imperative to be agile operationally, I think there's growing realization that that means that there needs to be tooling to support more autonomy, which is the second, a while more autonomy for more of the workforce to do higher order types of thing. So rather than having the centralized teams of process specialists or you know, technical experts, that needs to be more capability in the tooling, the everyday tooling for, for people to design work and execute on it. But that really is dangerous if you don't have the alignment piece, which goes back to kind of what you were saying about we can't just have a distributed set of teams who are going off and doing their own thing. >>There needs to be alignment back to strategy. There needs to be alignment potentially back to governance and compliance and there needs to be alignment potentially also to work that's adjacent but relevant. It's happening in other teams maybe in other departments. So I think that's really the sweet spot. How do you balance those three things? Um, which is driving a lot of the new interesting technologies that we're seeing emerge. But you know, we're still in relatively early days I think. Um, so you know, give it some time to, to play out. There's different layers of abstraction I think in software that that needs to happen for organizations to really be able to operate in that agile way. There's resource management, this planning, this process automation. A lot of these things have been resident really in discrete kinds of tooling, but the broadly being democratized and Smartsheet's actually a good example of the type of company that's beginning to offer those kinds of capabilities. Workforce wide to Smartsheet users where as they were may, may be previously just to preserve certain types of specialists. User >>I want to ask about what you, what this means for the individual employee in terms of it sounds as though he or she will be more empowered to do more and execute a but also expected more of a moral be expected of that employee in terms of what his or her skill levels are. And then I also want to ask what you're seeing here at Smartsheet engage that is most interesting to you, particularly as it relates to the report. >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I guess it's inevitable that more will be expected of employees, but I think, you know, in a, in a sense what we're seeing is the balance of power shift, not in an absolute terms, but, and, and you know, relative to how, how it's looks historically towards the employee. So at definite strand of inquiry amongst our clients and four or five, one has been how do we create an employee engagement narrative, right? There's growing realization that we've talked about customer experience for a long time, but we've, we've, we've neglected the idea of an employee experience. Um, so more companies are realizing that happy employees tend to be the more productive ones. So how do we introduce the right combination of tooling technologies and then compensation and then career opportunities to allow people to feel more engaged and empowered so that they can do those higher order kinds of things. Um, and this, yeah, this is, this is happening in a very kind of organic way. So, um, you know, I, I don't see this as companies saying, you know, you need to now achieve more. It's a little bit more, we need to provide you with the ability to achieve more. That's really the role of anybody who's making a decision around technology and an enterprise at the moment. >>But it's interesting because the, because the company has so much more data than they had before on kind of execution and some of the demos in the, in the keynote in terms of what are utilization, how many hours are you applying to this task? So it almost feels like there's more of a, in a treating people like a resource versus treating people like people. And I'm just curious how that, you know, kind of place, cause you, you want to do that, you want to measure, you want to know how your resources are allocated. At the same time there they're people, they're not machines and they're motivated as people and that's how you keep them or lose them a lot of times is the people part, not necessarily the job or the tasks. So how does, how does that map end? If I'm aggressive and I'm feeling good, yeah I like doing more but there's probably a lot of people that aren't necessarily up for that. I mean there's been a lot of all of >>'em talk in this conference already. Um, but more broadly in, in other forums of, um, the implications of more data in the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the degree to which, you know, by automating things that may previously have been done manually, is that going to upset people? I think on the whole, um, you know for a lot of types of work that may be Smartsheet is enabling, that's not so much of a concern cause you'll see here from their users very engaged, very enthusiastic. They want to get as much value in leave, which out of the platform was possible because they realized that's allowing them to do things that previously hadn't. But there is that sort of dichotomy of um, at what point do we automate things and not give you a choice in the fact that that's been automated. But I think these guys and another, the industry broadly is, is very conscious of that. So where you see all the kind of data being leveraged to do intelligent recommendations, intelligent notifications, there's going to be a wary eye on doing that without either an optin aware. An optin maybe isn't required, at least having permission from the end user to accept the implications of whatever's being recommended to do. So. I think on the whole, you know, people are sort of trying to figure out what that balance, >>what do you think this means for the war on war for talent? Because, I mean, this is the, this is the topic that the technology industry in particular, it's really grappling with, particularly when there are so many, uh, high level skills that are needed skills in, uh, AI and ML and other kinds of specialized technology. How do you, how do you put your, your findings in that context? >>Yeah, I mean it's, it really came on the agenda, this theme, um, couple of years ago, if not a little bit sooner than that as, as a really strategic issue. And in fact we see that in our own survey research where we asked the question to, um, employees across the workforce manage non-managerial to C suite and it was, you know, strategically one, what one thing do you need to improve on? And it was, um, uh, it was basically recruiting, developing and managing talent. And that's a head of, you know, everything else, like improving our, um, product differentiation, improving our customer experience, um, coming up with a strategy that's more fit for purpose, right? It was all about talent and people and managing people. So it's definitely risen up the agenda. I mean, I think one of the things that companies definitely, uh, beginning to think about is how to um, increase the acquisition of skills in the existing workforce and their way that's quicker than the way that's being done now. >>So actually one of the other areas we cover in our research is the shift from like traditional learning management systems, which have been kind of compliance oriented. You need to do this course or training because we need to show that you've done it to the kind of new generation of Alec speeds. We're learning experience platforms which provide much more agile ways for people to understand skills gaps and take on those skills. So I think that's gonna be a big driver actually of of the agile ways of working that we're talking about. But also how people address talent. The talent was, if you can't find that externally or you can't find enough externally, um, you can look internally of course, to existing employees and make sure that they have the platform to, to acquire new skills. >>And it's almost by a rule, you can't find it externally. Cause right now, just the, the, just not that much labor out there to go get, it's just so competitive. So you've got to develop a lot of that inside. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, and it's not just sort of technical skills, it's other kinds of skills. Right. Um, but I think there's a, I think there's a nascent appetite amongst a lot of the workforce just to do that from a career progression point of view. Right. If you know, and I think that's one of the implications of companies trying to find ways to be more operationally agile, manage resources and more kind of agile ways. You know, it might be the case that people who maybe wouldn't be considered for a particular role, um, might now be considered because they re they, you know, saw that there was a capacity problem, a resource problem. They learnt the skill they can be assigned to that kind of project. Whereas previously maybe lines of department lines of business prevented that visibility into who has skills across the workforce. >>That's interesting. Do you have a point of view about kind of workforce transformation and you're giving a talk tomorrow how to avoid the Frankenstein workforce experience just for effective workplace transformation. But it's an interesting play that digitally transform your people to digitally transform your business. People talk about doing it to the business, but they don't talk about doing it to the people. I talk about the workflows and the customer engagement. You're taking it down, you know, start at the base, start at the bed. >>Well this is, I mean this is a, a lot of the reasons as to why companies like Smartsheet came about. I mean digital transformation I think is a kind of narrative has done a good job of, of making companies realize they need to change and they need to change quickly. Technology is a big enabler of that, but it's tended to be kind of top down way of thinking about it. It's tended to be sort of, do you have like a center of excellence? Do you have a technology council? How do we sort of transform from core outwards? It's not really been grassroots from the bottom up, but increasingly tooling like Smartsheets enabling that to happen. Right. How do you get people really engaged using new kinds of tooling to do higher order things? How do you connect that with work that's being done elsewhere? So it's a much more bottom up movement. How I think about workforce transformation and digital transformation has been, and I think more more people are cutting onto the fact that that's the way you need to think about it. >>What's your number one advice for an executive who doesn't have time to read the 47 pages? >>Yeah, I mean I guess it goes back to the, to to maybe the um, those three A's I was talking about earlier. I think my, you know, certainly progressive companies, but I think it's mainstreaming that companies are realizing they need to be more agile. Um, you know, in a broad brush and obviously depends on the context that company, who their customers are and what they're trying to achieve. Um, but really I think it should be a consideration, especially when thinking about workforce tooling and like knowledge worker tooling. To what degree is that giving more autonomy to those people to do higher order things and but also, you know, again, can you tie that back to your goals as a company, right? Because we've had certain technologies in the past of decade that have created a bit of a wild West, right? People go off and do different things and then there's, there's a lack of visibility, a lack of line of sight back to strategy. But if you get the sweet spot in your technology choices between do that, do they help us be operationally agile? Are they giving people a highroad, you know, more ways to do higher order work. Can we tie that back in the way that we need to? Then I think you're at least thinking about it in the right way. >>Really analogous to shadow it is. As you're sitting here talking about kind of the ground swell up of people finding tools to enable them to do their job better and get around kind of the hierarchy that existed in got in their way before his son. You know, there's a lot of parallels to what happened there before. Finally the corporates figured out, okay, we actually need to do dev in public cloud. There's a lot of advantages, et cetera, etc. >>Yeah, there is, but it's kind of like a legitimate version of shadow it. Shadow it was like we call it, we don't like the tools we've been given. No, we don't have them. Let's go and find ones. Yeah. >>Right. Right >>now it's like the ones that are enterprise grade happens to be the ones we also are using. Right. So that's, that is the super interesting, um, sort of wave that companies like Smartsheet carrying these tools fundamentally appeal and they have lots of evidence that are appealing virally. >>Well, I mean the fact that you can collaborate with people outside your company on your license for free and I think Mark said 50% of their users are people that are outside of the organization of the licensee. That's a pretty, pretty, I don't want to say Trojan, uh, strategy, but certainly certainly feels like, you know, a great way to permeate, which I think back like at last, Ian with the way they got started with, you know, a $10 10 seat license and, and again, AWS and some of these early kind of backdoor ways in to deliver real value that people were willing to put the credit card down. Yeah. Right. >>But you know, I mean, so I guess the challenge for Smartsheet and others are as he became a more enterprise grade platform, how do you keep that user appeal? Right. Cause that could obviously be one scenario which has more features, more complication actually more difficult to use, more complex. These guys are very conscious of it. Others in that sort of environment are very conscious of it. Um, but yeah, I mean the whole can do thing which um, Anna talked about this morning in the keynote. It's interesting. It's like a really interesting sort of democratized way of talking about power users that we kind of used to talk about the sort of folks that have that technical ability. And they're the ones that drive some kind of work initiative. Um, you know, platforms like Smartsheet and others are giving more people the ability to be that power user. And that's, that's kind of cool. >>Awesome. Great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned. You're watching the cube.

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick and Jeff and I have been live at Smartsheet Engage all day Jeff, we're in not Vegas. >> Not Vegas. >> Bellevue, Washington, this has been a really electric event. They keynote kicked off this morning standing room only, they have doubled in only their second year they have about 2,000 attendees, 1,100 customer companies represented here, they had customers from 20 countries, they more than 50% female attendees for the second year in a row, but we've heard such great groundswell stories all day. >> Yeah, it's been a good day, Lisa. You know, there's a little bit of confusion in this space, I think there's a lot of tools around workplace productivity, we got to hear from a couple analysts and how they're reshaping the way that they define those tools and that's okay, and I get it, but there was no question about the three customers we had on and the passion that those three customers had, kind of old school shadow IT implementations, they brought the tool in from their prior work, plugged it in and are having tremendous success, even the last one, to the chagrin of the parent company that builds software to do the same thing, so there's really no substitute for that type of passion and you know, we've seen these kind of communities grow before, I remember early days at the ServiceNow, it kind of reminds me of that you know, a lot of passion, applause, applause at the new features which is is always an interesting one, so a really, really good day. >> And well, you talked about those three customers that we had on today, we had GE Renewable Energy which was our last guest, a woman from Sodexo, Sodexo is a massive, massive company and then we had a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal. These are three massive companies and the interesting theme from each of them is that these were groundswell opportunities for Smartsheet to really go viral within these organizations and make massive business impact and it's interesting that it really, even from a sales perspective, when we talked to the V.P. of Strategic Accounts, this is not a top down sale, this is bottoms up. Even PayPal found it on their own and learned how to use Smartsheet from YouTube videos. >> I love that. >> That was fantastic. >> So I love, you know, everyone talks about the new way to work but what about the new workers, right? And both of those examples are really good. The PayPal one as great, office of the CIO and yet to figure it out they just watched YouTube videos which is how people learn things today, and they implemented it from that experience. They didn't call Smartsheet, they just put it in and it worked and then we just had GE on and his comment that he wanted something lightweight for his workers. Lightweight. Three click rule, he said he had a three click rule after we turned the cameras off and if he can't get it down to three clicks you got to go back to work and make the process a little bit simpler, so you know, these are real examples of real big companies implementing kind of at the departmental level where this is getting traction, and executing to drive differentiation. And that's pretty exciting regardless if you get confused about the messaging or this or that, those are real life examples. >> And there's nothing that's more validating, right? Than the voice of a customer who has used it and especially the voice of a customer who is not a developer, doesn't know what an API is or need to in their daily jobs. This is technology that was built from the ground up, back 12 years ago on the construct of a spreadsheet which so many people understand and they've really parlayed that you're comfortable here with these tools, there's going to be like, you were talking a lot about today very smart that you brought up, I've got so many apps open and I think Forrester said between 13 and 30 apps people have open every day, so you can't really compete for that mind share so in terms of differentiation we've heard from Smartsheet themselves that they collaborate with companies that you'd think would be their competition. >> Right. >> But they understand that how this is starting from this groundswell, they have to be able to collaborate, to integrate, to connect with Slack, Microsoft teams, Office365, CRM systems from Microsoft, Salesforce, because that's how the worker needs to see their information, and they're also giving users the ability to configure, I want to see this, my team might want to see something completely different, and we can do that while sharing the same information. >> Right, right. I think the thing that struck me as really the big competitive differentiator in this kind of, work-group management is the going outside your four walls. If you use Salesforce, if you use even G-Suite, every time I send you an email it says, Lisa's not in your G-Suite are you sure? Are you sure? Like, red flag, I'm doing something wrong, the fact that the Smartsheet licensing structure is set up that if I set up a project I can share it to people outside of my organization. They can participate in that project. A, it just makes a lot of sense 'cause more and more projects right? You've got contractors, you've got partners, you've got all these things. It's not just an isolated instance anymore but then, more importantly, for Smartsheet, it just gives exposure to the tool to a new group of people. So, I think that's a really key part of the story here, that again maybe count as under the covers in terms as some of the messaging, but a real key differentiator, we've seen this type of viral growth before. I used to work for an Atlassian Service Provider and Atlassian had a great, kind of, seed strategy. $10 for 10 licenses and the $10 goes for schools in Africa. Brilliant. Who doesn't want to pay 10 bucks to help such a worthy cause, and then to seed it in. And then people that had success with the tool, it goes with them. You know, we heard that here the last gentleman from GE used it at a prior company, brought it over, wanted a lightweight tool not a big ERP tool implemented, and now he's running, he said $100 million in assets more effectively than he could before. >> Exactly, but will you talk about in terms of that big differentiator, their ability to, if I'm a Smartsheet user and you're not, I can share something with you and we can collaborate. They've got, I think I read over the weekend, 650,000 active individual users, but they have about 3,000,000 people that are collaborators. And I think it was Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning, that shared with us. That's 40% of their business. They have a massive pipeline by just enabling this collaboration and the ability for a user who's paying license to share with a colleague that isn't. >> Right. And then this is always the small conferences, 2,000 people, still new, people are super passionate, it's not a big vendor show, it's not a big expo hall show, but people are super engaged and sharing information and you get that in kind of the early days of these conferences, which is a really neat thing to see and there's no substitute for passionate customers, at the end of the day that's all they can really hope for, and that's the validation you need to move forward. >> Absolutely and they had, I think, almost 50 customer speakers today and I know how incredibly difficult it is for a marketing team to find 10 customers. >> Yeah, you know that right? >> Right. To speak. >> To speak. >> Let alone what multiplier you need to have to get 50, four x? Maybe not here. It seems like these people that are users, PayPal, and Cisco, and Sodexo, and GE Renewable Energy, have found this on their own and are really kind of creating this virality that is, it was very infectious, contagious. >> Yeah. >> By the day. >> Which is amazing to me because there's, again, there's so many applications out there, and they don't all do the same thing and they all have pros and cons. But, to be able to find it to be able to deliver success and again another important piece at any rate in with those existing systems that already are in play. Mark was very clear, we're not expecting you to throw out the apps that you have, you may or may not be able to display some with Smartsheet, but we really want to work with them, right. We want to play together, not necessarily play separate. And again, you have to do that to be successful in 2018. >> And they're listening to their customers. They have to do that to be successful, that's driven by the customers, it's clear that, there's a push pull effect and it's going to vary based on the enterprise and their overall objectives, but their collaboration with customers to develop and prioritize all of the enhancements that people have been asking for for the last year since the first Engage was really, you felt that, you heard it. There was a lot of applause during the product announcement session this morning. They are listening, they're taking that feedback in and ultimately, what their VP of customer success talked about is they're driving change management and that is extremely difficult, culturally, to be able to do. >> It's people, right? I mean, they said it right out the top. Empower everyone to improve how they work, connect, innovate, and execute. I've said it time and time again, we do a lot of shows, I think that's a pretty straightforward path to give more people more data, the tools to manipulate the data and get the answers, and then most importantly, the authority and power to execute those decisions, especially when you're close to the customer. That's where good things happen. That's where the organization moves forward and you can't be centralized command and control everything 'cause it's moving way too fast. >> Right, right. >> Way too fast. >> Well, Jeff, I had a blast hosting with you all day today. Learned a lot, my perspective is really opened up about Smartsheet and what it is and how it can really drive a lot of transformation and accelerate digital transformation. >> I can't help but again go back to the line from Google Cloud, right? People want to move to judgment, less drudgery more judgment. That's what they're enabling here at Smartsheet and we're excited to be here and cover it and can't wait until next year. >> Awesome, thanks Jeff. Again, Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick. Thanks for watching our coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018, from Bellevue Washington, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've had a great day talking with Smartsheet executives, analysts, users, and we're excited to welcome to theCube for the first time, Gurmeet Mangat, the site manager Wind Power Generation at GE Renewable Energy. Gurmeet, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, thank you Jeff. I'm really happy to be here. >> So you're a user of Smartsheet, but you're also a renegade. So before we get into your renegade status, tell us a little bit about GE Renewable Energy and your role. You got a big role as site manager. What, 75 turbines across multiple locations? So let's talk about GE Renewable Energy and your role as site manager. >> Sure, no problem. So GE Renewable Energy. One of our missions statements is to unleash limitless energy. How we do that, we harness the power of the sun, the water, and the wind. So try to produce clean efficient energy to power countries, homes, businesses, whatever needs that powered energy. As a manager I manage, like you said three wind farms, three different customers. A very complex role to have. I'm coming right from not just operations, human resources, financials. So everything's required of someone like me to manage that business end to end. It's a challenge, at the same time I seek opportunity in a lot of what's going on and leveraging Smartsheet as one of the tools. It's something I've been using over the past year to optimize the business and run those turbines. >> So it's so funny because I would say GE turbine farms and GE engines are the most quoted, often referenced IOT devices in this next gen conversation about IOT and data and how much data they throw off of any other kind of product out there, and you're sitting right in the middle of it actually managing the real machines and managing the real data. >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean the, the machines themselves are highly automated. They're spinning out a lot of data and we've got great systems in place to manage that information. Make it transferrable, viewable to a lot of the people that need it. The opportunity is not necessarily in the equipment that GE manufactures but the back-end business that drives that manufacturing, that drives those services. That's where, again we leveraged Smartsheet over the last year to close a lot of data quality issues. We're ruling out and canceling a lot of the human error of the process steps that we're seeing in a lot of businesses today. We're really taking the initiative of managing our data, bringing us, making us actually competitive in the fourth industrial revolution. I mean I've had a strong believe that if you're not managing your data correctly today, you'll market yourself out of the business, you won't stay ahead of the game. So I think, like I was saying before the biggest opportunity right now is the back-end of the business. Smart GE does a great job at manufacturing and producing high quality products. I think there's huge opportunity in saving the back end and optimizing the process that runs that. >> When you say the back end, there's always a lot of conversation about you know going from reactive to predictive to prescriptive. Analytics, again everybody likes to talk about keeping the turbine up. Are you talking about those types of processes or is it more, you know how that energy is fed into the grid and more kind of the connection to the broader ecosystem, when you say back end? >> Let's talk about the proactive and reactive situation, 'cause that's really what we're trying to drive. >> Okay. >> There can be particular cases where a turbine could fail in the middle of winter, a high-wind season and the visibility's not great. So what we've done is we've taken Smartsheet. We've given our technicians a mobile application tool to collect data as they visit turbines. We're taking information within Smartsheet, we aggregate it, we quantify it, and now we're able to predict turbine behavior based on this information. A little bit faster than some of the tools that GE provides today. A perfect example is about a month ago we determined that a turbine needed a quarter of a million dollar repair before any GE tool told us that. That was simply because of giving our technicians a tool, which is a Smartsheet webform and telling us what happens everyday you visit that turbine. That goes into the background. We take the information, aggregate it into a dashboard viewings. That gives us a great visual control and visual aid of our business. >> That visibility-- >> I was going to say, is he collecting different data, or are you processing it in a different way with the tooling that you set up with Smartsheet that gives you that visibility? >> They are, so we are collecting different data. So GE gives us a lot of data on our turbine health efficiency, how it's operating. It might quantify the number of faults per megawatt hour and per (mumbles) it for us for example. But what we're creating with Smartsheet is we're creating our own organic KPIs I'll call them, some metrics that we are creating ourselves to try to drive different behavior. So when the techs go in, we talk about parts consumptions, for example. So if this part's been consumed 20 times over the last month, you've got to ask why. You know, why do you keep visiting this turbine to do that. So that visibility drives a different discussion now, so now we can engage with engineers with different type, different information. They might be able to say, "Okay, "you know what, you guys got some good data here. "We think you're right. "We should execute this repair." >> So, that example that you gave and give me the number again that working with Smartsheets your team was able to find a, what did you say, a $250 million? >> $250,000 repair. >> Thousand dollar repair. >> That's the cost of the repair, but it's a proactive repair versus reactive so now we're not facing a long wait time, finding a crane, bringing a crane on site, getting the paperwork in place to get the job done 'cause it's not an easy repair. >> But there's a very impressive snowball effect of the benefits back to the business. You've found it faster. You were able to get, you know the parts needed faster, repair it faster. Clearly that goes all the way back up the chain from a revenue perspective. >> Absolutely. >> But you, when I alluded to you earlier, this renegade status, you brought Smartsheet in from your previous job and you've said, "This has enabled us "to find something faster than "our brand of technology's product would have been "able to do." Talk to us about this conviction that you brought in and is it kind of becoming viral within GE Renewable Energy yet? >> Good question. It's becoming viral, a lot of people are listening now. So we've talked to GE digital VPs. I've talked to the ERP providers in Europe, what they're doing with GE. So we've essentially, I call it a success story. They're not going to adopt Smartsheet. They want to build their own enterprise solution but, the reason why I call it a success story is because I've changed the way that they are thinking today. >> That's huge. Cultural change? >> I've presented a solution to them. I've essentially told them, you need to give us something that works for us faster. If you do this, it gives managers capacity to improve your business, really develop people that are working underneath you, engage them, empower them, and move the business forward not on a typical five year plan that most businesses have in place. But it's a step change. >> Right, right. >> It takes you year over year and you're stepping every year to something new, and I think in today's day and age with how fast things are moving, you need that. >> And I'm curious to unpack a little bit on this example where you said you know, it's this failing part that was giving you a leading indicator that there was a bigger problem. So that was just kind of a different way to look at the solution, right? You're identifying kind of a stupid consumption pattern on a spare part that shouldn't happen as opposed to the core data that's coming off that machine and that's what gave you kind of the unique insights. Does that come from you? Does that come techs who are in the field and have kind of a sense of, "Maybe we should be looking at this, "maybe we should be looking at that." How do you start to empower people or where do some of these different kind of points of view that then can be backed up with data in the Smartsheet process come from? >> So, it's all techs. (clears throat) Coming into the job last year, I asked one of the techs, I said, "Why are you going to this turbine?" And the question why is such a powerful question to ask. They said, "We're going to fix this." So what happened last time? They had no idea. So I said, "There's no "information to support your visit today? "And you don't understand why you're going today." They said, "As a result of something that was not "done correctly before." So we fixed that part first. We started giving them the information upfront. We gave them a tool to collect the data. So now they are empowered to provide very direct feedback to myself as a manager and even to an engineering team, like in New York for example. Something technicians never felt empowered to do before. They are the driving factors for those data collection, the decision making. I definitely appreciate that by giving them feedback on a daily basis, that what you guys are doing is changing the way that we manage the business. It's a very driven culture change by the front line. It's not something that I'm pushing down. I'm asking them to help me push it upwards to the senior level. >> And they've got to love it. They've got to love thinking that they've actually got input as opposed to just being called to go out and fix things when it breaks. >> Exactly. They're driving their day. They can go to work in the morning. They can look at the whole personality of a turbine, what's outstanding, what was done last time and the conversations are very quick in the morning. It used to be a 7 o'clock startup. They're not driving out 'til eight, 8:30, nine o'clock by the time they get their stuff together. I mean we're averaging a seven am to about 7:30 departure now. >> So each person is saving 60 to 90 minutes everyday. >> Every day now departure. >> That's a big roll up. In fact, I was looking at some of the productivity stats that Smartsheet talks about on their website and they say an average per, individual user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours a year. An organization can save up to 60,000 hours a year. >> I believe that. That's believable. I mean there's, just a technical aspect of managing a turbine. If we even talk about you know issuing a purchase order. Managing contractor labor, invoices. The tool that we're using today is a complete end to end P & L management tool. So it takes invoicing from subcontractors, labor. We are inventory tracking, we are tracking any health and safety issues. Everything from end to end, so it's really done a great job for us. >> That's all built within your Smartsheet? >> Correct. >> Wow. >> And it's all mobile, so. I mean I'm not at my site this week, but on a daily basis I have visibility to my business. You're talking about 70, 80 plus machines, that's over you know about a hundred million dollars in assets that have to be managed effectively, efficiently, and correctly. >> You have visibility into everyday from wherever you are? >> Exactly, yes. >> That's a huge transformation. So we talked about you being a renegade and other groups within GE on divisions that are curious about this. I'm curious, have you heard anything today that they have announced that excites you, or maybe was any of this part of a feedback that you provided, as we've heard all day Jeff that they're very responsive to customer feedback in terms of product innovation. Anything you're going to go back to the office and be excited, like the next generation or what's coming available soon? Is it going to enable me to do X-Y-Z now? >> That's a good question. So GE is a very tough company to change. There will be a lot of takeaways from this trip and when I go head back. After the last conversation I had with GE digital and the team, they are going to hire a new resource and set budget aside to help close the gaps that we've identified. So I think after this visit and some of the things I've learned throughout the conference and when I head back I'll only be able to identify a few more gaps that they need to fill, and I'll push that up to them probably in the next week when I get back there and hopefully they can appreciate that candid feedback and take that and run with it. >> But you were able to fund your existing project just out of your own discretionary funds? >> Exactly. I mean that's one of the benefits of Smartsheet. It costs really nothing to create something, and my job is to manage wind farms, so I've taken initiative to create, I call it a mini-ERP system using Smartsheet with an associate of mine, and it's an organic creation. It didn't take us, I mean to run three wind farms, I started last April, it probably took us less than six months to create a working system. That's awesome feedback for Smartsheet, their tools are very user-friendly. It's lightweight, it takes away the fear of coding that Excel gives to some people. If you're a new user of any application you can kind of walk into it and run with it. That's one of the reasons why we took it from nothing to something in such a short period of time. >> Wow. >> That's a ground swell in action that has some significant results. But you'd better be careful. I'm imagining your success is going to go so viral, you're going to have way more than 75 turbines and three wind farms >> That's possible. >> to manage. (laughs) >> There's been a recent acquisition and there's other sites around me that my boss is, or my directors said, "Hey, what are you doing next week?" >> Oh! (laughs) >> "Let's go visit this site for a few minutes." Okay, I know what you're getting at. >> Kind of a good problem to have, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what you're doing as a renegade. It seems pretty contagious. >> Appreciate it, thank you for having me. >> Thanks. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be back to wrap up the show in just a minute. (digital music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE covering SmartSheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by SmartSheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage live from Bellevue, Washington. We're at SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. I'm with Jeff Frick here. This is the second annual ENGAGE event. Huge, doubled from last year. We've had a great day so far, Jeff, of execs from ShartSheet, customers. We're now excited to welcome an analyst from the 451 Group, Chris Marsh, the Research Director for WorkFresh Productivity and Compliance; welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you very much. >> So we have, as I was saying, this is the second annual event, some of the stats that Mark Mader, our CEO, shared in the keynote this morning, there are over 1100 companies represented here at the event, a couple thousand people, 20 countries. We've had some very enthusiastic SmartSheet customers, SmartSheeters themselves talking about this tool that's designed for the business user, that's not designed for the citizen developer, people that don't even need to know what API stands for. So talk to us about your role at 451, but then we'll kind of get into project management, program management, and some of the trends and the changes that you're seeing there. >> Sure, yeah, so, so I've had the workforce productivity compliance research practice in 451, so as a team of analysts, we cover, essentially, productivity software, right? So the different tools that members of the workforce are using to get work done. So in addition to work management companies like SmartSheet, we also look at collaboration tools, digital workspaces, we cover the content management landscape, and we cover content creation, asset creation tools as well, so, really the focus for my team is to give perspectives on how the future of work is evolving, but really what those technology and dependings of that are. >> Such a busy space. You've picked a good area to specialize in. So how should people think of it? How should they categorize it, because from the outside looking in, a lot of the tools are very similar, you know, there's some overlap, some not overlap, there's some places where they can work together. Ya know, how should leaders be thinking about approaching this opportunity, 'cos you talk a lot about, you know, that's a great place to find untapped competitive advantage, but it seems to be very, kind of, confusing to the outsider. >> Yeah, it's a super interesting space, and it's probably more interesting than it's ever been. I think for many of us, it was, to be frank, kind of not interesting, right? There's lots of kind of legacy tools that people were struggling to figure out how to do new kinds of work with. >> Beyond email! (chuckles) >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Was there anything beyond email 10 years ago? Yikes! >> Exactly, I mean we as a, I think, a research team find ourselves looking as much of intersections of those five areas that we cover as much as we go deep in them, for the very fact that, you know, it's a space that's going through a lot of innovation, a lot of disruption, and vendors and segments are learning from one another. Then, of course, we have, you know, broad, kind of transversal trends brought by technologies like AI and machine learning. Beginning to have more conversations around things like Block Chain, people beginning to talk about what may be some of the use cases are around AR, VR, and the kind of mixed-reality type technologies. So, you know, lots of innovation, lots of disruption. Um, in terms of what business leaders should be looking for, it obviously depends on what they're trying to do in their workforce. I think one of the big shifts that we're seeing is, um, you know, the sort of decentralization of ownership over more complex types of work to business users, right, whereas, I think, in a lot of companies, traditionally there are centralized teams of process specialists or project management folks, and, you know, tools have kind of mediated the relationship between those centralized, you know, teams and business users; where increasingly those tools are appealing to those business users. So in the panel moderation I did this morning, I showed some statistics around, you know, users of tools like SmartSheet, and it's not the type of people we would have seen using this type of tool four or five years ago. It's leaders were then legal teams, finance teams, HR teams, marketing teams, operations teams-- so that's sort of reflective of a broad shift in productivity software of, you know, virality in terms of how these tools enter businesses, right? Lots of organic adoption and it kind of runs contrary to how a lot of enterprise technology gets sold into enterprises, which is gone a little bit more top down or into specific buying centers. Increasingly, it's going in sort of the grass roots. People are finding new use cases for technology, and it sort of spreads from there, so, yeah, it's a super hot space right now. >> So one of the things we talk about is every place we go, right? Digital transformation and innovation, everybody wants more. And it seems pretty simple to say, but hard to do, that if you get more people more data, the tools to process it, and then the power to do something, that that just can unlock a tremendous amount of untapped innovation and execution and efficiency out of a company. That said, that's easier said sitting here than done. So are you seeing, you know, kind of a continual trend towards, you know, pushing down the data, pushing down the tools, and pushing down the authority to execute decisions? >> Yeah, I think so. And actually, the work management space is a very good example of that, right? So, um, you know, for some companies culturally that's not going to come very easy, because they just culturally may have a more sort of top-down kind of culture. But I think digital transformation for everyone, essentially means more agility, more speed, you know, more quickness in how work is executed and how it's designed. And that almost inevitably means that those closest to the delivery of the work are the ones that actually have the power to design the work in the first place and can, rather than sort of relying on IT for everything and/or central teams somewhere. So, it is a broad shift, but again, it comes, to your point, it comes more easily for some companies and some industries than others. >> And we talked about that with a number of the people from SmartSheet as well as users, that this is a massive cultural shift. I think Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning was telling us a quick anecdote of a 125-year-old oil and gas company, >> Yeah. >> That is, talk about, you know, probably really married to a lot of legacy processes and ways of thinking, not just tools, and how SmartSheet probably started in, you know, one function within the organization, probably, you know, quite low, and it started, to your point before, go viral, and we started, we started to hear a number of stories from PayPal, Sodexo, how this virality that you talk about is really kind of transforming from the bottom up. But that cultural change is essential. >> The cultural change is essential, I mean, in some cases it's just being led by the fact that that's happening anyway, right? Because, you know, gone are the days when IT chooses the tools, provisions them, and, you know, there's an awareness of what's going on in the environment. There are, and it's not just the work management space, we also look at sort of, workflow automation tools. A lot of these tools are, you know, going into a company grass roots, there are then potentially hundreds if not thousands of work processes or workflows that are created on these tools before IT even figures that out, right? Which is not necessarily an ideal scenario, but it's increasingly, you know, one of the patterns that we're seeing in enterprises, so. It's a big cultural shift, but um, there's a certain amount of push and pull here. Some companies that realize that are looking proactively to give effect to it. Other people are going to be pulled, to be frank, to the fact that there are tools that enable new kind of work patterns, new styles to happen, and they almost have to get on board with that, so. So obviously you want to strike a balance, I think, somewhere in between of being the catalyst for those kind of new things to happen whilst making sure there is still the kind of centralized oversight that's required for you to maintain control over your overall technology estate, but also so that you can make sure the technologies are aligning to your strategic goals. So it's a delicate balance. >> And there's these pretty big forces at play here. There's a term that 451 Group has recently coined called a liquid enterprise. >> That's right, yeah. >> Liquid; I think of fluidity, you mentioned agility, we've heard nimbleness today, um, talk to us. What, by definition, is the liquid enterprise, and how are you helping customers to embrace it and maybe not fight the force, because the forces of pull are stronger and better; but what does that mean? >> Yeah, so liquid enterprise, I mean, you've encapsulated it very well, right? So it's all about, you know, when we speak of digital transformation, you almost always end up to about business agility. So in some ways, liquid enterprise is just our way of giving a little bit more flavor to what business agility looks like in the kind of digital age. So our kind of view is that, you know, a lot of the companies that we kind of laud now as those really interesting companies like the AirBnB's and the Uber's, those with kind of, massively scalable infrastructure and then a very simple UI. We think that whole pattern of what the, kind of, digital enterprise will look like is one that's much more able to fluidly marshal it's different resources in a way that allows them to respond much more rapidly to changes in their own market conditions, right? Because one of the things, obviously, that digital is doing is changing user behavior to user requirement. So your ability, as a company, to respond very quickly to that is becoming, you know, a primacy in most companies, and a big part of how we think about the liquid enterprise is the fact that companies will actually be able to change their own organizational structure. Not just what they offer to a market, not just the tools that enable them to do that, but actually, they'll begin to sort of re-tesselate their own organizational design, to enable that to happen. So, you know, we see early indicators of technologies that are beginning to allow companies to think in that way. I think for most companies, liquid enterprise is aspirational right now, but I think, certainly, it's a pattern a lot of companies are trying to tact towards. >> So, I'm just curious, you talk about culture as a competitive advantage. And how much of these tools are culture enablers to make that possible? How much of it are just critical, because if you don't have that culture you're going to lose? How much of it is tied to, kind of, the consumerization of IT, where again, your workforce has an expectation of the way apps work based on their interaction with Amazon and their interaction with Google and those types of things? >> Very much driven by the consumerization of IT trend. I mean, often, increasingly what we see happen in the consumer realm ends up happening in some kind of expression in the enterprise realm sooner or later. So, yeah, that's very much it. One of the other things we talk about in our research is the kind of hierarchy of employee motivation, right? So we kind of have this way of thinking about, you know, what companies need to do and what technologies need to enable to really satisfy that end user experience. I think in the productivity software space, you know, it's probably not hyperbolic to say that most tools really only satisfy end users, right? We have lots of tools, including lots of modern SAAS tools, that actually, you know, may have good usability, but aren't particularly flexible. There sort of better, more scalable versions of a lot of legacy tools. So we see this kind of passage towards tools actually doing things like, you know, decentralizing the ability to create workflows, so that, you know, business users, including non-managerial folks, can actually design work, and how that work actually happens, right? So there's a big element there in terms of motivation in your role, you know, actually making an impact, having that recognized and all of those kinds of things, which is driving a more, sort of, engaged relationship between people and technology, so we only see that continuing. And, the work management space in SmartSheet's very good examples of that. There's lots of conversations you can hear and engage where people are discussing, you know, what they're doing with their tool that they created themselves, some kind of local business team that has redesigned a certain process that is allowed better business value to be created; and they're the ones that are going to take credit for that. I think that trend is only going to accelerate. So again, from an enterprise perspective, embracing that, helping catalyze that, but again, having the ability to have central oversight over that kind of local team-based execution, it is obviously very important. >> What about just kind of the competition from my desktop? You know, what apps are open while I'm working all day, and you know, we all wish if you're driving an app company that it's your app that is on top, but the reality is many, many apps open all the time. So do you see that evolving, do you see that aggregating, do you see a couple of kind of uber apps over the top of these integrations that you'll be doing your primary workplace, or is it just kind of horses for courses depending on the types of things that you do in your day-to-day job? >> Really good question, I mean, I think one of the background trends we've seen, especially with SAAS, is just the growth and the overall enterprise application estate. Right, so just more apps. And obviously catalyzed also by end users having positive experiences in consumer apps, and then being used to choosing the way that they do things, like that, that is transitioning into the enterprise environment, as well, so. I don't envisage that the total number of apps is going to decrease, but very good question as to, you know, whether we get consolidation. Time will tell, but I think, you know, to my point earlier, we spend a lot of time looking at intersections that cross existing segments, because, each segment is really transforming. And you see lots of examples of customers here at ENGAGE using SmartSheet as a displacement tool for other ones that they previously were using. They find the automation of SmartSheet a way to sort of disintermediate other tools that they were using. We're certainly seeing some of that, whether that means the total number of applications decreases, I don't know, because we're still yet to see play out lots of cool, new, innovative technologies that will obviously give rise to new kinds of applications. Question is out as to whether it will mean further apps, but we certainly seeing a changing in the, in the sort of preference for tools based on what new ones we're enabling. >> And I would imagine in very short order, the application of AI and machine learning behind the scenes in all these apps, is also going to change the UI experience dramatically, as more and more and more of the processes are automated on the back-end, there's more kind of smart suggestions as to what to do or completely automated processes. So even the face of the most popular apps today, I would imagine you see significant change with the application of AI and machine learning. >> Yeah, I would think so. One of the, sort of, big trends here, listening to customers and listening to some of the key notes, is, you know, the shift that comes with companies trying to make from low value work to high value work, so all of that kind of granular and manual work we're having to do is so most existing applications; people just want to abstract their way. They don't want to be doing that anymore, they want to be focusing on, um, sort of resource management, team coordination, creative ideation, they want to focus on strategy execution, they want to focus on things like, you know, risks to the business, actions that they need to take, decisions that they need to make, they don't want to be doing the whole, um, who did this, when did they do it, what do I need to do now, they don't want to be sort of manually moving information from applications, they don't want to be doing sort of manual reconciliations of data, and that kind of thing. >> Right. >> So um, heh, so yeah, the kind of low value to high value work is only going to be accelerated by AI and ML, to the point where we're beginning to see much more contextual work. So the ML is the basis on which work can be surfaced contextually to end users. So that is sort of automating the abstraction of that low value work, and that's hugely exciting, because that offers a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications, what that end user experience is. Imagine, you know, sort of going into your office loading up your computer, opening up an application, and it surfaces to you what you need to focus on that day. >> Right. >> That's where a lot of productivity application vendors are trying to get to. >> That's the dream, right there. >> Not here is the application, you decide where you need to focus, it's the kind of, these are the things you really need to put your time in. I mean, that's pretty exciting. And that's what a lot of the companies would want. >> Well even, a certain CRN company that's got a large tower in San Francisco, why do I have to put the city and the state and the zip code, I mean, we have so far to go, can't I just put the zip code in and it fills in the city and the state, and those little, you know, simple things that take a lot of time and these are the kind of data entry tasks that just drive people bananas, and discount the value, the fundamental value of the tool, because you just get stuck in a data entry mode, or a double entry mode. It's this crazy opportunity that we still have in front of us to make improvements. >> Yeah, I think, huge opportunity, obviously. But it's not quite so easy as that, I think, really it's kind of how I would talk about it. You know, AI and ML will inevitably have a transformative impact on enterprise software; I don't think anybody would dispute that. But it does rely on large data sects, against which you have to train your algorithms and your models, and that takes time for individual companies to build that data sect. They need enough work in there, they need enough people, enough workflows in there, to generate those data sects so that they will actually be useful, right? So, it's going to take a bit of time to play out. But yeah, it's going to be very impactful in the longer term. >> Well Chris, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights on this new, emerging term of the liquid enterprise, we appreciate that. >> Pleasure, thanks very much. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin, sitting here in Bellevue, Washington with a couple of Smart Sheeters. Next to me is Ben Canning, the VP of Product Management. >> Hey Ben. >> Hey. >> And Ignacio Martinez, the VP of Security, Risk and Compliance. Guys, thank you so much for carving out time in a very packed event agenda to come and chat with us on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Happy to be here. >> So, this is a really interesting event, couple of things that really stood out to me, this morning in the key note, as I was telling you, we cover a lot of events here on theCUBE, of all sizes, and it was really interesting how your CEO Mark Mader, who was on the program earlier this morning, went out into the audience and talked about ENGAGED in action. I thought that was fantastic. And asked customers, randomly, three customers I think, how are you being empowered by Smartsheet? And how these customers were able to get up and articulately talk about the value that Smartsheet is delivering to their business. I thought that customer connection was really quite memorable. And then additionally, product management, when Jean Thoreau came out, and to a round of applause, a number of times, during announcements of the enhancements and features and what that really. >> Multi assign too. >> Yes, what that really, sort of, said to me, is you guys deliver software that is a facilitator of collaboration that is essential to drive businesses, digital transformation, et cetera, but you're collaborating with them because clearly they were very happy to hear about a number of these announcements today. >> Yeah we have very, very passionate customers and it's one of the great things about working here and working with these customers. We're super focused on what do those customers need and how do we enable them to get those things done. We don't typically get imposed from the top down by IT. You're using Smartsheet because you chose to use it. It's the thing that makes your life easier. And we never forget that and we never forget that we need to keep that close connection with our customers and I think you see it here, at the conference today. >> You do, you got 50 customers plus speaking in breakout sessions, which for an event that's got about 2000 people, it's huge percentage. >> Yeah. >> Some great announcements. Before we get into some of the risk and compliance stuff Ignacio, Ben walk us through maybe a high level of some of the key enhancements that were announced this morning. >> Well, so we talked about a lot of things today. I think we had over 23 total announcements. Things from the range of multiple, being able to sign multiple people in the grid, to Dynamic View, which we're incredibly excited about, that allows you to have custom views on a sheet and control who gets access to which view. Really opens up tremendous new possibilities for Smartsheet. Some of the things that I get super excited about, I work a lot in the platform and administrative space. We've announced a number of things this week that are all about helping IT administrators and system admins, manage Smartsheet much more effectively when it gets to large scale. And I'll highlight a couple of them. One is the directory integration capability that we've done. We hear a lot from our customers that managing individual Smartsheet users gets kind of hard once you get over a number and I want to be able to see all the people in my organization and be able to share with them and assign tasks with them, even if they're not yet Smartsheet users. So what we announced today was a way to integrate active directory with Smartsheet so that the company directory of all the users in the company is automatically synchronized into Smartsheet so that those users can be, you can assign things to them, you can @ mention them, they'll show up in the grid with their faces and all their departmental information. It makes it much easier to manage users inside your organization. So when 100 people join the team, they automatically show up in Smartsheet. When someone leaves the organization, they get de-provisioned. And it makes it much easier to collaborate with folks throughout your organization than it ever has been before. So we're really excited to announce that as a product for our enterprise customers, starting a little bit later this year. >> Excellent. You've got customers, I was reading, doing my prep for the show, over 75,000 customers in 190 countries, of all industries. >> Yes. And I imagine, some of the things that we've heard guys from your customers on the program today that they're really benefiting from are the visibility, the configurability of the technology, the ability to have accountability, to not only improve workforce productivity, but to be able to eliminate duplicate tasks, give project owners and initiative owners full visibility, whereas they did not have that full visibility before. Ignacio, another big announcement that came out today, was what you guys are doing in the federal space. So tell us a little bit about FedRAMP, what that is and how you are working with them. >> Sure so without boring you to death on FedRAMP, I'll give you a quick overview. FedRAMP is a requirement of the federal government. It's a program developed by the government to essentially certify or authorize cloud service providers like Smartsheet to be meeting a certain security level of compliance, to be deployed in the federal agency space. So the federal government, every agency, is required to abide by it. So they should be selecting providers that have gone through FedRAMP authorization. So it is essentially security compliance program that companies voluntarily put themselves through to enable themselves to do work in the federal space. And very happy to announce, this morning, that we were not only announcing our intent to develop a program and a product to enter the federal space, to have been selected by the FedRAMP program to go through what they call FedRAMP Connect. That's an accelerated process where the FedRAMP office selects cloud service providers that they feel, based on application, have a high level of demand in the federal agency space. So they select those providers and work very closely with us to go through that compliance exercise and get authorized to be FedRAMP authorized in the FedRAMP program. So the reason the government does that is they have a strong desire to get products like Smartsheet deployed quickly among the federal agencies, because those people, think of them as an enterprise, they want all those great features that Ben talked about that we bring to enterprises in the public sector, they want them in the government agency sector as well. So we are very pleased that we were selected to go through this program and get a product to the market place in the federal space to help them improve how they work as well. >> So this isn't an entry into federal, 'cause Smartsheet has great presence and traction in federal, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Administration. I also saw from your website, you've got customers using Smartsheet in city governments and state governments but this FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it as an accelerator, but I think I heard you say that this was from demand from users, so this is that validation coming from the best place it can, right? >> Yeah it's essentially demand in the federal market place. So we're going to go through on an accelerated basis and what that does, you're right, we are currently deployed in a large number of federal agencies, state and local government, but in those cases, we'll get deployed on a limited basis, because we don't have FedRAMP authorization and they will be careful about where we're deployed. Achieving FedRAMP authorizations gives those federal government agency CIOs and CISOs the ability to say, Smartsheet can be deployed agency wide because it's now authorized under the FedRAMP Program. >> So let's talk about that from a product, maybe innovation standpoint. One of the things that's very clear from today, is how collaborative Smartsheet is with its customers and how influential they are in product innovation. From a federal perspective, you mentioned, Ignacio, that a lot of times they have the same requirements as enterprises and other organizations in the private sector, but how are you guys working together? Are there tweaks and enhancements that you need to make to the technology as part of the FedRAMP Connect Program? >> Yeah for sure. So one of the, FedRAMP institutes a very strict regime of compliance, audit, security controls, onto the product. And it ensures that we're really operating at the highest level of rigor and delivering a service that is highly reliable, highly scalable, fully audited and secure. So that requires us to invest in all of those areas. And the nice thing about FedRAMP, for even the non-federal customers, is that we make those investments consistently across the service. So while FedRAMP is an isolated instance of Smartsheet, all of Smartsheet can take advantage of the practices and procedures. We don't want to have to do things two different ways for two different parts of the service, so we impose a lot of those same practices and procedures and hardening of the service, across the board. And so that helps us to meet our promise to our customers that are not federal customers, that we're delivering a true enterprise grade fully scaled and reliable solution that they can depend on. >> And the flip side is true. Everything that Ben's team is working on, as you said, the customers cheer when we announce something, it was on our roadmap because they wanted it. So our federal customers, they would want and desire the same things that Ben's team has been developing, automation, any of those tools, because they want to work efficiently and effectively and collaborate the same way all of the private sectors do. >> Exactly. >> Yeah that's right. I mean you saw that this morning, in the keynote, right, where we heard from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. This is a federal agency that's using the power of Smartsheet to build a solution in mere days, rather than having to outsource it or wait for a large scale IT spend and RFP and all of those things. We're empowering these agencies to build solutions. The people on the ground are able to put together a solution that is really saving people's lives. >> That, exactly, Hurricane Florence that just hit, that's a life and death situation. >> Yeah and it was breathtaking and sort of moment of pride to see how quickly they were able to put that together and that's the power of Smartsheet. So we're really excited to bring that to the rest of the federal government. We see a tremendous amount of desire from them for that. >> So Ignacio, in terms of the FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it's going to allow an acceleration of this process. What would it normally take if you weren't part of this Connect Program? I'm just curious how much advantage you'll get but you'll be able to pass through to your federal and non-federal customers. >> Yeah so very good point, good question. The statistics you often see thrown around about companies, cloud service providers, that want to get a product into the FedRAMP authorization space, is they'll spend on average a couple years, two years, and a million plus dollars. So it's not a small task to get FedRAMP authorized. Being part of that FedRAMP Connect accelerated program, we're working with what's called the JAB, the Joint Advisory Board, so the top three CIOs of the FedRAMP Program, they work along side us if we're wiling to invest the time and the dollars to take our product through to do it on this accelerated basis. So it is literally a joint effort, hand in hand, working with the FedRAMP office, the auditors we use for it, and our people to demonstrate that we've got the enterprise great security and that we can meet the ongoing monitoring submissions that have to be done. >> So the cost avoidance of a million dollars from two years, what are you expecting? And if you can't share that, that's okay, I'm just curious, is it going to be six months, a year? >> Well if you look at the FedRAMP Connect Program, on average, it runs approximately six months. So it's back and forth. It's a three way collaboration between the cloud service provider, the FedRAMP office and the auditors, but that program, their goal is to get it into approximately a six month timeline. So we were announced last week, so I think we said, our goal is to work with them on that timeline and early in calendar year 2019, is the timeline end that we all have on our radar. >> That's like Back to the Future acceleration, no wonder you're excited about that. >> We are and we're going to try to go faster than that, if we can manage it on the product side, but we'll see how quickly it goes. >> Well that's one of the things, that not only is that validation from the users within the federal government that they want this. But Ben, as you were saying we're not developing things in isolation or certain features for this market and this market can't use it, this is all going to be accelerating, I imagine, what Smartsheet is innovating to deliver to all segments globally. >> Yeah I think that's right. We see an increasing need for manageability and security capabilities within the platform. And our customers are asking for this across the board. Great example, another feature we announced today, is what we call the event monitoring service. So enterprise IT wants to understand who is doing what on the system. They want to be able to impose business rules, make sure that highly confidential information isn't being shared inappropriately. So we've invested in a system that we announced today that basically keeps track of all events that happen within the system, anything that's shared, new documents that are created and so forth, and gives the IT administrator a way to track that feed and make business decisions on the basis of it. Integrating with other CASB Solutions to drive business rules. So for example, we have customers that are using this system today to keep track of all of the attachments that are being added into their environment. When they see an attachment being added, they're able to go and look at that attachment and make sure that if it's a highly confidential thing, and that it's shared with an inappropriate set of folks, then they can take business action automatically to manage that environment. And that's the kind of security and audit control that enterprises need in order to feel comfortable deploying Smartsheet at wide scale. So we're very excited to be able to offer that to those enterprise administrators and help them foster Smartsheet adoption in the company. >> So some of the things that we've talked about today are this is technology that was designed for the business user, I've used it. I think I read a quote from Mark Mader that may have been from the press release for the IPO a few months ago, that said, in the beginning in the early days, 12 years ago, there were critics that said, why are you guys building this on a spreadsheet construct, and his answer and Smartsheet's answer, at a very small company, at that time, was 500 million people are familiar with this, so building something for business users, lines of business, finance, IT, sales, for example, tools that I as a marketing person don't need to be an IT expert. I don't need to even know what an API is or what it stands for, right. But you're also now, as you were saying, some of the new enhancements to facilitate IT, so what's that, kind of, yin and yang with designing a tool that is for the average user and ensuring that the IT folks who weren't probably involved in the first place, are able to manage this successfully? >> Yeah well it's definitely a balance that we have to maintain. We can never lose sight of the fact that the end user is at the center of what we do. And that we have to design for solutions that end users can implement themselves and that's at the heart of what Smartsheet does. At the same time, we look at IT administrators as partners. We know that the users love what the product does. They're desperate for it. And in general, I find that IT administrators are not trying to get in the way of what their users want. They want to be the hero and they want to be able to say, yes. So part of my job is to make sure that I give them the tools to enable them to get to a yes. That I can show them that we are secure enough, reliable enough and scalable enough, that we meet their strategic enterprise needs, that we integrate with the other systems that they have so that they're not building an island that they're going to have to deal with and doesn't connect with the rest of their estate and that they've got the tools to manage at scale, so that I'm not asking them to go one by one adding a thousand users, that's just not nice and fair. So I think we keep the end user, the business user, at the center and we look at IT as a partner and we try to find ways to help them get to yes with the product. And I don't think those two things are really in conflict. >> It's interesting, dealing with CIOs of our customers, they'll tell you, it's very strange, and it goes back to what you said earlier, value. So CIOs are tasked with delivering the most value for their organization, doing more for less, efficiently. And that often means selection of tools that then they have to go and force into an organization and deal with users that might be less than happy. I've had CIOs tell me on the phone, I have people putting together petitions to make Smartsheet the tool that we use across the organization. And so he said, that makes my life easy. I just need to work with you guys to make sure you've got the security, you've got all the tools I need as a CIO to protect the enterprise, but I don't have to worry about user acceptance. That's unique spot and we love it when the CIOs say, this makes my life easier with everything we're doing with Smartsheet. >> Oh that's music to your ears. >> Yeah it totally is. I mean, I met with a tech CIO recently as part of our enlist, talking to him about, oh well are you going to come to ENGAGE? And oh well you know, we're busy and we don't have a thing, and I said, oh you know actually there's eight people from your company, business users that are attending. >> Nice. That are attending the conference on their own dime and you can see the light bulb go off in his eyes and he's like, okay if eight people from our business groups are paying their own money to go to a tech conference, that's something I need to be paying attention to. How can you help me get my arms wrapped around this and help our users so it's a nice position to be in. >> It absolutely is. Well congratulations on being in the FedRAMP Connect Program and we're excited to hear next year all the great things coming out of that. And Ben, Ignacio, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thanks for having us. >> It's busier than ensuring with us what's going on from your perspectives. >> Thanks a lot, thanks for having us. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Smartsheet ENGAGED, 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around. I'll be right back with Jeff Frick and our next guest.

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've been here all day at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. We have had lots of great conversations, Jeff, with some of the executive team at Smartsheet, some analysts, and now we're excited to welcome a customer of Smartsheet to the show. We've got Latonia Lewis, the senior director of program management at Sodexo. Latonia, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you all for having me. >> So, Sodexo, I'm familiar with it as, you know, being in the tech world, and I go to a client's cafe, and I will usually see branding on boxes or maybe on the chef's gear. But this is a much bigger company than I thought, 437,000 employees globally. But, for those who might not know what Sodexo is, give us a little bit of an overview. >> Sure, Sodexo is a global company. Pretty much we focus on providing quality of life services. And you might ask yourself, "What does that mean?" So, Sodexo really recognizes people as being important and feel that, in a company as well as in the environment, that people should be the main focus. And, in doing that, we focus on providing services that enhance the quality of life for people. For us, the people could be our clients, they could be our consumers, or they could be our employees. So, we pretty much center that around the services that we offer. We have our on-site services that focus on facilities management. So that's basically providing a healthy environment for people to work in, or live in, or operate in. It could be across our food services platform where we're providing healthy meals or a healthy way of living. In addition to that, we provide support for rewards and recognition programs. And, in addition to that, we also provide personal and home healthcare services. >> That's far more diverse than I ever thought. >> Yes. >> Yeah, it is diverse, and we operate across a lot of different industries. We support corporate. We support energy, education that includes both schools as well as universities, seniors, and then sports and leisure. >> Wow. >> So what's your area of focus? That's a broad scope of services. Hopefully you're not delivering all of those to every customer in the United States. >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay, good. (laughter) >> I do work in the North America, and I work for the North American service operations organization, and, pretty much, we are the internal organization that provides support across all of our different segments. We're charged with providing synergies and centers of excellence in the servicing that we do, pretty much to try to bring out the best that Sodexo has to offer its customers and its clients, as well as its employees. >> So your customers are the Sodexo folks that are delivering the services to the end customer. Is that accurate? >> That is accurate. We are internally-faced organization, pretty much focused on making sure that we're providing a safe environment for people to work in. We're enhancing our services and our service offerings in facilities management, as well as across our food service platform, and then also focusing on our growth and support. >> So you are, obviously, a Smartsheet user. That's why you're here. I imagine, though, with as cross-functional as the services you deliver are, you have a lot of stakeholders, a lot of projects, a lot of programs to manage. Tell us a little bit about, prior to your Smartsheet implementation, how were you managing projects, programs, collaborating with stakeholders. Tell us about the before scenario. >> Okay, well, pretty much, I joined Sodexo to, basically, stand up a project management office for the North American service operations organization. When I came into the role, did a little bit of analysis, did a little bit of investigation, and pretty much found that people were doing things a myriad of different ways, right? From a project management maturity perspective, there was not a lot of, what I'll call standardized process and procedures, so I was faced with really figuring out how to, basically, get our arms around the work and the projects that we were doing across our service operations organization. So, Smartsheet was being used in-house already. They had used it in the prior year, basically to try to get their arms around the work that was being done, but that ended up being an exhaustive list. So I looked at how we could leverage Smartsheet and how we could use it more effectively to track the initiative or project work we were doing across service operations. So, in doing that, I found a way to be able to harness standardization in the way that we collect data to be able to do the reporting across the portfolio. And started using dashboards, which was something new. And, of course, you know, using digital transformation from a reporting standpoint is something new. It invokes change. So it was driving a lot of transformational type of, you know, activities that were going on, but it did enable us to be able to get a strategic view of the work that was taking place in service operations, which was something that was needed in order to be able to figure out how to best utilize the resources. >> You sound so calm. It must've been a rat's nest when you walked in, between so many offerings across so many types of facilities as a global company with 400,000 people. You're still calm. I can't believe it. You can laugh. It must've been bananas. I mean, where did you start? Where do you start? Is it the data collection? Is it the reporting? I mean, where did you start? >> I think the first thing that we really had to do was, I hate to say it, go back to basics. And we had to figure out what was our roadmap and how we were going to grow from a project management maturity perspective, and then align that growth with how we were going to, basically, identify a tool to use, and how we were going to, basically, scale that tool. So we started out very, very simple. It was like, "Guys, we need to get our arms around "the key initiatives that are helping us move forward and, "basically, that are aligned with our regional priorities "at the time." So we took that approach and, in FY 18, we pretty much focused on, "Let's get the key initiatives into a format "where we can do reporting on "and we can actually create a reporting cadence "that takes place every month "to be able to bring visibility to leadership "about the projects and the work "that was going on to help them "more effectively make decisions." As we looked at the planning for FY 19, I said, "Well, okay. "I spent a lot of time standing this up, "doing a lot of manual work, you know. "It's becoming unbearable, unmanageable." So we looked at Smartsheet control center, and I kind of, like, jumped, shouted, you know, did my little happy dance, but privately. But, then, made a business case to say why I felt that, you know, we strongly needed this to be able to, not only become more effective and stop doing so many things repetitively, but also to help us foster better project management practices through the use of the standardized, what I call project assets or project templates. >> So what were some of the KPIs that you could immediately grab onto, measure, report, to show, you know, the success and why this is such an important project strategically? >> Strategically, I think the first thing was, one, just being able to get our arms around what were the key projects in the portfolio, and then being able to report out to our internal customers, which were the market segments, what was the work that we were jointly doing to help them meet their strategic objectives. So that was, basically, transparency that they did not have before, and we really weren't reporting at that level. So, if I'm a market segment, I can pretty much say, "You're going to have seven projects "that are impacting you, "and here's the status of those projects. "Here's the health of the projects. "Here's where we need your support." So that was what I call phase one. This year, fast forward, we have control center. We have more visibility. We now have dashboards pretty much at the project level, and we can roll up data a lot more dimensionally. I can do it at the project level. I can do it at our S-O professional family level. I, in turn, can now give segments more detailed at their level, and then I can roll it up at a regional level. >> So you've got, you mentioned, sorry, Jeff, you mentioned, you know, reporting. Sounds like starting small with a focus on what are all the initiatives. I imagine leveraging a tool like Smartsheet to then stack, rank, and prioritize those. You talked about visibility, and that's key. We've heard that all day. Everybody needs visibility within organizations. Were you able to give these program, these initiative teams visibility where before they had none? Was this like a dramatic opening of the curtain whereas they've got 100% visibility into all of the core components of these initiatives that they're involved in? >> That's what's happening this year in FY 19. And, to your point, yes, we are opening up the curtains. And the projects teams, which, primarily, a lot of them are actually driven by service operations, but we have to do them in conjunction with our segments who are really responsible for the actual deployment within their different lines. It's opening up the curtains. It's allowing them to have visibility at a very detailed level than they, they haven't had that before, right? We're using standardized project schedules. We're using resource allocation sheets. We're using, what we call CCT, which is change management, communication, and training plans. So bringing that visibility at a much granular level, but at the same time being able to roll it up to the appropriate stakeholder. So I'm excited about FY 19 for what control center is going to provide for us. >> And so what happened when that happens in terms of, I mean, I'm sure the individual project people around a particular project have, probably, pretty good knowledge about what they're working on. But when you open it up to the senior teams, and now they've got this portfolio of projects and now, suddenly, they have this visibility. How did it change the way they look at things? How did it change the way that, suddenly, they make decisions and they allocate additional resources once you, basically, like you said, kind of opened the curtain and showed them what's going on? >> I think, last year when we started out, when I had just started, it was more retroactive type of reporting whereas, as we started in this new year and planning for FY 19, we had more visibility into the projects, what the projects were about, what was their financial benefit, if applicable, as well as their impact in terms of the scope and the number of units that were going to be involved. So, we do a lot of our planning on an annual basis, what we call during our budgeting or planning cycle, and, this year, there was a lot more visibility into the work that's being planned for FY 19 at a much granular level, down to what we call the unit level. So, being able to share that information and have the teams realize that we're able to track that this year, was very surprising. People like the transparency. I think it's driving a lot of collaboration between the service operations and the market segments, so I think people are going to be very happy. If I come back next year, I can really tell you how the fiscal year went and what we really saw with the turnaround in leadership, but I think they're looking forward to it. >> You're giving a talk tomorrow. What's your talk on? Give us a little preview. >> Preview. I'm going to be talking about control center and, actually, the experience with implementing control center, what was the thought process for, basically, implementing control center, how I went about it, doing a little bit visualization with seeing some of the dashboards that have been created, and then just giving some lessons learned on the implementation itself. >> That's always helpful, you know. Especially with a technology like Smartsheet where, often, like, you kind of found it osmotically through your organization. I know people love to hear how did you do this, what worked. I am curious, though. You mentioned FY 19 a couple of times. Has this technology enabled you to get to planning FY 19 faster, more effectively? What's been the impact there? >> I think it's being, it's having more data up front than we had last year, understanding what it's really going to take to implement these initiatives, being able to have an understanding of the resources from a human resources that's required, as well as understanding, "Okay, if we're going to implement "these initiatives, this is what the impact is going to be." Because every project that we work on doesn't necessarily have a financial benefit. Some of the projects are required. We have to do it, and this is why we must participate in on it. I think it's opened up the door for a lot more collaboration between leaderships and understanding, "You know what, guys? "We definitely have to put more prioritization." Because what may be a priority to one segment may not be a priority to the other, and we're working with the segments in being able to do that prioritization, if possible. >> And the configurability of Smartsheet tool enables you to move projects around in terms of priority much faster, much more easily. >> Oh, you can, it's, how shall I say it? It's a very nimble tool. It's a very agile tool. You can move things around. You know, if a project, we may think that it's going to be what we deem to be a traditional project, but after discussions we're like, "No, it's not really a traditional project "in the sense that it has a defined start and end cycle. "It's more of what we've done, "and we're tracking that as a business as usual." We have the flexibility to change that on a dime. We have the flexibility to change what our key KPIs are, and still be able to incorporate that into the reporting. So it's been great having that flexibility. It's been great not having to do and create dashboards manually. Everything is based off of standardized templates and it is wonderful. I mean, literally, I've been able to create the portfolio, delete the portfolio, and re-implement it just because of some changes that we did, and that took less than a couple of days to do. >> And before it used to take how long? >> Oh, I gave way too many personal hours to stand it up, but I had a passion about it because I loved the tool I could see the ease of use with the tool, so I just gave a lot of hours to initially doing it. But now that I'm working with a lot of the project teams, making a lot of progress. And Smartsheet, it's infectious. I mean, I think one of, I was just speaking with one of your counterparts and I was explaining to him about the fact that I just worked with one of our VPs who's been there for over 20 years, and actually taking the way that he was reporting in one system and transferring it into Smartsheet, working with him. And he's able to realize now that he can do a lot more reporting. He can get more KPIs. He's excited. I've, you know, thrown up sample dashboards of how he can track in FY 19. He's got his team on board. They're looking at it, and, every time I turn around, the Smartsheet is now growing. But it's such a success story, because there is that resistance to, sort of, like, changing the way that you do things. >> Especially for an organization as large as Sodexo is. >> Absolutely >> And, I imagine, as historical it is as well, right? >> Absolutely, and to see him embrace the tool and he's like, "I get it. "I love it." His team is off running with it. Those are the types of things that, you know, really, really make me happy. >> It's funny, because you just, you basically answered the question I just wanted to ask you, which is, you know, in the keynote there's a lot of talk about empowering everyone to do their job better. >> Yes. >> And you're a trained professional project manager. It's what you came in for. You know the tools. You're a sophisticated power person in this space. But I'm curious, have you seen, you know, kind of, project management, kind of, capabilities that flows out to the no-code, low-code, everybody with the Smartsheet, kind of, implementation and, kind of, proliferation within the organization? And how has that, you know, kind of, taken what used to be, kind of, a side load, super professional specialty into a broader, you know, kind of, use-case to take advantage of this thing? >> I think the more people see Smartsheet and start to understand its capabilities and that it's not just a project management tool, right. It's a facilitator of project management. So, in the case that I was just talking about, they're tracking a whole process that's really around facilities management. So it's not necessarily tracking your traditional type of project, but he's able to leverage that to save time. The administrative burden that, you know, he used to have to deal with, with reporting in a different system, bringing information into another system, then creating reporting. Now it's all in one system. He's like, "Latonia, I'm going to use dashboards. "That's how we're going to do our reporting." So he's getting back time. Not only him, but his team is getting back time so they can really focus and go out and do the work where they had the expertise. And that's the beauty of it. It's about people, as you said, being empowered to do what they were hired to do, understanding that you still have a responsibility and are accountable for doing the reporting. But it's giving them that level of empowerment and them seeing that, "You know what, "I can actually design what I need to see "in this application. "It's not Latonia, project management, "or it's not IT, or it's not somebody else. "It's me defining what I need to see in this tool "to get what I need to get out of it to service my clients." >> So I can imagine, as Jeff was saying, you have a lot of experience in program management. Sounds like this is, I don't want to say this is making your job easier, because I think that would be unfair, but it sounds like it's really helping make it much more efficient. >> I would definitely say it's definitely doing that. I think it's helping people, also, understand what project management is all about. You say project management, most people cringe because they think of paper. They think of, "I've go to do this." >> Gantt charts. >> Gantt charts, all of this other stuff. But when you think about it, it's really just a holistic approach to the way that you execute something. And that something could be a standard project, whether it's an IT project. It could be a process that you're rolling out. It could be you planning your wedding or your next family vacation. It's just all about managing work and the execution of work. And I think, once people realize that, they're starting to step back and say, "Oh, it's not as bad as we thought." Which, I'm happy as a project management professional that Smartsheet enables that type of empowerment and it's helping to facilitate that type of knowledge. >> Did you see that quote in the keynote this morning? It was an anonymous user. I'm getting this vibe where, one of the users told Smartsheet that Smartsheet made her the queen of the world. >> Yes. >> I'm getting a vibe here, Latonia. (laughter) >> You could be the anonymous-- >> Potentially. >> No, no. >> I won't put that on you, but that empowerment-- >> Top secret. >> Is impressive what you guys have been able to achieve. We want to thank you so much-- >> Thank you. >> Latonia, for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Great luck in your presentation tomorrow. I'm sure a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of the lessons learned and the best practices that you can offer. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, bye bye. >> For Jeff Frick, I am Lisa Martin. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around. Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18, brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're in Bellevue, Washington, and pleased to welcome one of the many customers of Smartsheet to the program, we have the office of the CIO, Jeff Kelly from PayPal. Welcome Jeff, I've got a sandwich of Jeffs here. (laughing) Jeff sandwich, so Jeff, tell us a little bit. Everybody knows PayPal, I was doing some studying over the weekend. 244 million active users, I'm sure that grows by the minute, 200 markets globally served, and you're doing transactions in over 100 currencies. Everybody has been using this for a while now. It's a household term, even my mom knows PayPal, and she can use it. So, tell us about the office of the CIO at PayPal and your role. >> Sure, so my role, specifically I'm a program manager within that office, and my primary responsibility is to make sure that our environment is secure, that it's safe, that it's stable. That way, the other parts of the company, product, can focus on being more strategic. What that really involves is things like hardening our infrastructure, hardening the network, making sure that we can identify all of our assets accurately, so a number of things there just to keep the environment, like I said, stable and secure. >> And, the office of the CIO, I imagine, responsible for communicating regularly with the executive management team, needing to provide visibility? >> Exactly, I mean, our leadership, Brad Strock is the CIO, we work hand-in-hand with the other leaders of the company. But in addition to some of the things I just called out, the CIO, that office is actually responsible for a lot of the enterprise application, so it's basically the software that drives the company, so that's customer, that's our employee facing applications. >> So you're obviously a Smartsheet user which is why you're here and we're grateful for that. Tell us about the pre-Smartsheet era. How were you managing programs and projects? >> I think I've heard this story quite a bit here. So, between spreadsheets, Microsoft Project, Trello, a number of other tools, and we're still in a distributed model, but the good thing is that within the CIO we're able, at this point, in this particular area, right, to come in with a single tool, to serve as a single system of record, to really facilitate bringing the entire portfolio together. So yeah, I'd say before, very distributed, now, it's really consolidated into Smartsheet being our single system, which has really worked well. >> So they showed a video of your case-study during the keynote, and you had a real specific use case, it sounds like, for your initial Smartsheet deployment, which sounds like something that many of us struggle with each and every week, which is to roll up the data to report upstairs. So, I wonder if you can give a little bit of color on what did you have to roll up, what was the scale of effort, and why you decided, this just isn't really working very well-- >> Sure, absolutely, so we set off, around three years ago, we had a three-year program ahead of us, and I'd say at the end of year one, we realized, just, due to the magnitude, the number of people involved, the data involved, and the overall portfolio, we needed a tool to come in and really help us be able to effectively and quickly roll up that information, so that we could present and take that information to our C-suite each week. Yeah, just for effective decision-making, making sure that they're in-tune, they have a line of sight to what's critical, what's not, working on the right things, doing the right thing. So, we considered a number of tools. Again, Microsoft Project, what-not, we landed with Smartsheet, and it was really just word-of-mouth within the company. So we took a look at a handful of tools and really just tried to figure out what fit the bill for what we needed, and a couple of Smartsheet videos on YouTube, we kind of quickly came to the decision, hey, this is certainly a flexible tool, it's easy to ramp, if you know spreadsheets, you pretty much know this, if you're a project manager you know how to build a plan, quite easy. So the ramp time was very minimal. So we made a decision, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, probably spent a month doing that, myself and the team. With the tool being intuitive and those videos, we built a solution basically from the ground up. >> So this is without even having an enga-- this is PayPal, without even having an engagement with an account executive, you were able to find this, like you said, word of mouth, implement this on your own and really enable quite a bit of transformation within the executive team and what they need to see. >> Absolutely, I think, when we look back at the end of year one we made that decision, we realized, hey, we've got some high-price consultants in, and we're probably using half of their time at that point just in relating that data, so you're talking about some heavy dollars that are being spent there, just in administrative-type work. If we can cut that layer out, and go straight to the source, we're saving ourselves a ton, we can redirect those funds to other areas where we actually get some work done. >> So Jeff, how big was the initial deploy, in terms of the team size, because you said you didn't engage Smartsheet directly, you're watching some YouTube videos, and you did see enough there that you wanted to jump in. Did you jump all in from the beginning, did you do kind of a POC, how did you get started, what was kind of the scope? >> Yeah, kind of took a couple demos, straw-man that we just put together on the fly, shared with some of our key stakeholders, you know, "Does this look right? Does it feel right? Are you seeing the information that you think we need?". And the fact that we were able to come up with that so quickly just sold itself, and so yeah vetted it, socialized it a little bit, but it was a pretty easy sell from that point. It was just building it out, and I'd say right from the get go we had already had about 14 programs as part of this portfolio in place at that point in time, so each program having between, I'd say between five and 15 projects within that, so the number of players was quite large, probably about 150 direct players in the program, probably a couple hundred more indirect that want line-of-sight to what we're doing. >> So line-of-sight accountability, how was that embraced by those teams? And we talk a lot about digital transformation, Jeff, at every event, and how cultural transformation is a necessity for that. How have you been able to leverage this tool to kind of evolve that culture within the office of the CIO? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think, with us being able to cut out that middle-man, when I say middle-man I'm talking PowerPoint slides. If we can get away from that, because a number of things happen there, but predominantly, I mean, you can finger of a PowerPoint slide and all of a sudden, 100 turns to 200 or 1000, something like that, so, hey, if we can just go straight to our system of a record, I mean, each project within this portfolio should have a project plan, they should have a risk and issues tracker, so we really decided, here's the baseline for what we need to have in terms of our data model. If we can have that, then we can produce the dashboards that just read directly from those systems of record, from an accountability perspective, right? That means, there's no tweaking a PowerPoint slide, right, you're reading directly from the project plan, so it is what it is. But, it's reality, and that's what we need to deal with, and we ultimately step in front of the C-suite, right? You need to have, here's where we are, and it needs to be an accurate and timely reflection. I mean, that's another thing, is that timeliness, I mean, this is real-time data that we're talking, so, if something changes 10 minutes before, it's there on the dashboard, we're ready to talk to it. >> Yeah, I don't think there's enough talk about the timeliness, because it is connected directly to the database. It's not something that somebody's reporting on, and so often you get these multiple layers of people extracting data, transcribing it, putting it in to whatever reporting tool they want and just, it just gets further and further from the truth with each passing minute and each passing iteration. >> Absolutely, and we've talked about speed so much here, and so that's obviously a critical factor in decision making, especially, so we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest there. >> So just curious of your experience from a project manager point of view. You're a professional project manager. I'm sure you know all of the big heavy-lifting tools. When you see something like this, which is more of a no-code, kind of low-code, kind of cross platform integration, what type of skills does that open up within the teams, within the data sources, within the ability to do something a lot less, I want to say more nimble, you know, less heavy, than kind of a traditional project management-- >> Sure, I think minimal's a great word to describe it there, because it really, it really is a tool that just is, that you can build from, more of like a grass-roots effort, as opposed to a enterprise, kind of top-down. I'm sure it works well in that use case as well, but, for us, it was something that was able to kind of fill needs that were distributed across the portfolio. Once you start building it up, filling in those gaps, then you realize, hey, we've got kind of an end-to-end tool here that really works well. >> And I'm just curious, interest as other people have engaged with your output, in the organization, in terms of, "Hey, Jeff, can you give us, can you share the PowerPoint links with us?". (mumbling) YouTube links. >> Yeah, I joke because it feels like at this point I'm doing about one demo a week to somebody else in the company, which is a great thing, leveraging best practices, and sharing that information, so, there's certainly a growing user-base within PayPal, of Smartsheet, so I try to keep up with the other teams that are using it so that we are taking our best practices from one another, that we're sharing, and then I think ENGAGE is really helping me connect to those other PayPal users, believe it or not, it's like, there's probably a bit more here than I have back home, so this is great. >> One of the things that was funny that popped up during the keynote this morning, Jeff, was a couple of customer quotes. These were anonymous, but this, what you were saying, kind of, Jeff, it sounds like, and you probably wouldn't say this about yourself so I'll say it for you, is that, this one woman who was a user of Smartsheet in her organization said that Smartsheet made her queen of the world. Sounds like there's some status elevation. But, I'm curious, so you started, you found this organically, yourself, this technology, as Jeff was saying, this is built for business users. You didn't have to have, even though you're in the office of the CIO, you didn't have to have IT's involvement here. But here you are one of the evangelists now for Smartsheet out there, even. Tell us about that engagement, pun intended, that you got with Smartsheet to be able to start, maybe, pay a thumb isn't organically, do you have a sales account exec now, if so are you having conversations with them, are you helping to influence new features and things? >> Sure, I think our admin for Smartsheet at PayPal got tired of me giving them calls, so he said, "Hey, you do know Terren Finstra's your rep, right?". So I reached out to Terren, at this point we've conversed quite a bit and she's brought a number of other kind of ideas and forward thinking to the table that we're considering for next steps, what we can do, but the engagement has been great. They've been very responsive, helped us out when we kind of hit a rock in the road and we need some help, so yeah it's been a great relationship. >> Any way to quantify the benefits, one of the things I was reading on the smartsheet website the other day was some pretty big stats on how they're helping companies save time, which in different ways translates to saving dollars. I think I read the average user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours per year, that's a lot of time, and the average organization will save over 60,000 hours a year. What's the impact been on the weekly roll-ups that you're able to do, any way to sort of quantify how much that speed has improved? >> Yeah, I mean, if I go back to kind of the original business case, say we're spending probably half the time of two very high-price consultants doing this, I'd say it's way up there, and we were able to save, I'm sure, a couple hundred thousand dollars at least, at the minimum. So, that in itself was a big win. If we look today, kind of where we are and the time that we're able to save using the tool, given the fact that there is that middle layer's just really not there, we don't spend a lot of time on producing content at all. Instead, we can take that time and we can focus it on, okay, where are our trouble areas, where do we need to double down, where do we need to help in making sure that we're actually getting material work done in the areas that we should be rather than just administrative content-- >> Big productivity gains, well Jeff, thank you so much for joining Jeff Frick and I on the cube and sharing what you guys are doing with Smartsheet in the office of the CIO at PayPal. >> Glad to be here, thank you so much. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Jeff and Jeff, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018, stick around. This Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018 from Bellevue, Washington, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm sitting here with a couple of Smartsheeters. We've got Steven Branstetter, the VP of customer and partner success. And, Mike Andrews, you are the VP of strategic accounts. Guys, welcome! >> Thanks for having us. >> You're Smartsheeters! >> That's right. >> We are. >> I have to say, I was very scared to say that on the air, and I did it twice now, and I'm going to stop, 'cause I didn't mess it up. So, Steven, running customer and partner success. I want to start there, because customer success as a term can mean different things to different companies. Something that I read that you wrote recently was customers' feedback saying, "Guys at Smartsheet, you need to be operating a different playbook for customer success." So, first question: How do you define and deliver customer success at Smartsheet? >> Right, so, first of all, customer success is often looked at as a single department, and it's not. It is a whole company effort. You've talked with our product folks, talking with sales, everyone in the organization is part of that customer success. What they're telling us, what the customers are telling us is customer success primarily is about change management. We're going through a transformation that has a lot to do with your product, not everything to do with your product. But, we need help with that transformation. And, what you saw on the keynote was you saw three folks standing up who said, "I, at my organization, signed up "to do this really hard thing." And, we didn't have a playbook as to how to do that thing. What we try to do as a customer success organization, as a company, is make sure we're standing behind that person. So, when that person comes out and says, I can accomplish that thing, that unsolvable thing for our organization, and I can do that on Smartsheet, we want to make sure that person is successful. And so, sometimes, that's the customer success team. Sometimes, that's the training team. Sometimes, that's our consulting team. Sometimes, it's elements of product helping to come alongside them, showing them what's possible. So, customer success at Smartsheet is holistic. It's not meant to be a single department. This is a company effort, so that when folks do raise that hand and take on that impossible task, that we're with them to make sure they can accomplish that. And, that creates the stories that you heard earlier today. >> And, what Steven's talking about is, during the general session this morning, the CEO, Mark Mader, actually went down to the audience and just randomly asked several, maybe three customers to talk about how Smartsheet is empowering them. And, it was really interesting how articulate they were, being put on the spot. But, how they were able to speak so eloquently to how they are facilitating this transformation. You mentioned change management. That's a hard thing to do. >> It is. When you're looking at an enterprise that has a ton of applications, and, Mike, you know this well, being a sales leader, they're comfortable with certain applications, yet companies grow organically by acquisition, and there's a lot of different tools that some groups are married to. Other groups are, eh, I'm not so sure. To transform digitally, cultural transformation is probably step one. So, how are you seeing, and, this is the second part question to you, Mike. How have you evolved CS in Smartsheet to be facilitators of that change management, not only for customers, but for you guys as well? >> So, one of the things we thought early on was, we tried this new thing, it was called Office Hours, and we did it at one of our largest customers, and it was a huge success. Literally, the first day we do it, 400 people show up on this webcast, and it was fantastic. And so, I talk with Mike, and we talked with organizations saying, we have this new thing, Ii's going to be amazing. The feedback was fantastic. We go to that next organization to roll out the same thing, and four people show up instead of 400. >> Wow. >> And so, one of the things that's been really important for us is understanding not all organizations are the same, especially in the enterprise. That, as we create that playbook, there's certain elements that absolutely resonate at, maybe, our tech customers, that don't resonate at all in the manufacturing space or organizations, and that each of those organizations are different. So, we've built a lot of that playbook with an understanding that different elements of it are going to be applicable at different organizations. And, that's the way we've approached it, which has been really successful, where we know there are elements that have to happen. We know there are elements where we need to have scalable programs. Not everything can be one-on-one. But, at most organizations, there has to be some level of one-on-one connection as well. And, whether that's a big Smartsheet day which we'll run, which folks will fly their own folks into, it's almost like a mini ENGAGE conference at their own organization. Or, whether that's all over the Web. So, we'll go to some customers. We'll show up in person, and there's a big meeting room, there's only four people there. And, they tell us, well, there's actually 200 people watching this. And so, it's figuring out that motion, at least at the enterprise, that's different for every organization. But, as you also know, we have a long tail through our organization as well. So, while we have those really large customers, we also have this long tail where we need to meet those customers at scale. We need to provide programs. So, our Center of Excellence is a good example of that. Our Webinar series is good example of that, where we provide these motions that at a scaled element, so even our smallest customer can take advantage of it. >> Awesome, so, Mike, transitioning over to you. So, I love stats. Geeky, very geeky, but I admit it freely. I was looking at Smartsheet, 75000 customers. Here, you have about 1100 companies represented over 20 countries. You guys have presence in half the Fortune 500, 90% of the Fortune 100, lot of customers, pan industry. Some of the things that they were hearing from you guys, or, rather, you're hearing from them is, we want you to build for scale, as you were talking about, Steven. We want you to teach us how to phish. And, they want you, also, to help them do it right and do it fast. How are you helping customers do it right and do it fast? Can you do both at the same time? >> Absolutely, we're proving that. And, I think, something that's really unique about how we go to market, and really the basis of our ethos as a business, is we're obsessed with keeping the software easy to use. And, as we add functionality to not get it heavy and put friction in place. So, when we think about engaging with the biggest companies in the world, we have the benefit of starting from organic adoption, where individuals and teams are using the software. They're experiencing value, they're sharing. They're collaborating. And what we see happen, the dynamic we see happening is, as individuals share and go to directors or VPs, we start from sort of work execution, project management, task tracking, and the next step is often these line of business solutions, whether MNA or product planning or employee engagement. Literally every function in the business can benefit from the ability to configure the software. And, keep in mind, we've already taken off the table the biggest issue. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years. I've sat with a lot of CIOs who've written seven figure checks. And, when they're honest with me, the biggest thing they worry about is: Is this software going to get used? We take that issue off the table. We turn it on its head. And, that ability to have that basis of adoption, to have raving fans who love using the software, and then the added benefit of being able to go higher in an organization with senior leaders who want transparency. They want speed. They want accountability. That configurability to solve bigger and bigger, more complex, more strategic flows is a huge advantage for us. It's, frankly, what fuels us, sort of our passion around serving our customers, because we get such great feedback. >> That configurability that you mentioned, Mike, kind of seems to be how customer success is set up. To be configurable, sort of modular, to be able to adjust it with the agility that's needed to deliver what these customers are needing. So, sounds like, maybe, land and expand. I know we've got a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal who's going to be on shortly with us, really helping the C-Suite at PayPal, which everyone uses to be able to see things more clearly, have that transparency in terms of managing projects. >> Absolutely. >> So, I know Cisco's a customer as well. So, is it pretty typical to start with a function within marketing, for example, where there's a team that, hey, this is innovative. This is going to integrate with Jira and Slack, and all these things. Is that kind of a common sales conversation? >> Absolutely. We practice the principles of the challenge your sale and challenge your customer. And, one of the key elements of the challenge your customer is this idea of a mobilizer. And, the mobilizer does two things. They drive change, and they build consensus. And, what we find is those individuals who are change agents often times love our software, because they can do things that they wouldn't otherwise, they'd have to depend on a consultant or IT. So, we find those individuals and we work with them, and they coach us up on: what are the priorities, who are the key players?" And, that becomes a common play we run to get higher in the organization. The other thing that's happening now, I'm seeing it, really, over the past year, is organizations are starting to choose to sort of play offense with us. So, we'll continue to have that bottoms-up organic growth. But now, we're seeing VPs of marketing or CMOs, or CFOs or COOs realize, hey, you know what? I love the fact I have this base of users who love the software, and I can do things, I can enable priorities or initiatives that span the organization, get away from side-load apps, and have the kind of visibility and speed that's been unheard of. And, we're starting to see that our customers wanting to play offense with us. >> That speed to value element has just been critical. So, you heard in the stories this morning, we have MOD Pizza. Their first solution, the gentleman probably built that in a day. And, that was just to roll out one store, and then they rolled out eight the next year. And, I'm sure they made some modifications there. And then, they need to go from eight to around 200 in a year. And, they were able to do that very quickly. They were able to take an existing solution and make the modifications, add in one more element, which is control center for us, to make it that much more scalable. So, when you talk about the land and expand motion, it's both within the customer as a whole, but on a solution as well, where we have story after story where someone starts a new initiative. They don't know whether it's going to work out. It works out really well, and that effort they put into the initial solution isn't lost. They don't have to switch over to a different application, because it's now gotten too big, or some element like that. The software and the application is able to grow with their growth as a business, which eliminates a lot of those things that often happens in business, where you have to pause something that's growing to replace a software. >> Right, so, in terms of the feedback loop, you obviously, as you were describing, Steven, the customer success program you're running here is very cross-functional, very collaborative. It's product management. It's marketing, it's sales, it's IT. It's all these groups that need to come together. What is the process like, maybe from both of your perspectives, Steven, starting with you, of getting customer feedback when they're engaging with their customer success manager, for example, and they want a feature that is not quite there yet, How do you take that feedback from the customers, from the field, and start to really prioritize that internally? >> So, let me start. So, one of the things we've introduced this year is, as we've grown the field organization, is we're using our own software, and we've built these territory hubs. So, the account exec, the SC, the CSM, the SSR, the internal team, everyone is on the same page, as it relates to what we're doing in the account. And, we run weekly meetings. We check off on priorities and to-dos. So, you have that visibility by use of our own platform. So, everybody's on the same page. And, that idea of signal that we talk about, that Gina Mark talked about, it starts with that team that is right there with the customer, and then we feed it. Often times, I'll let Steven take the hand off. So, we have that signal. We have the pulse right with the customer with these field teams, and then that gets fed. And, I'll let Steven talk about how we drive it here sort of in Bellevue. >> Yeah, so, there's two elements of getting that signal, and I'm sure there's more, if you think about it. But, one is from the internal team, and one is the feedback from the customer. And, we, not surprisingly, have used the Smartsheet application to do that. But, any time we're getting a customer signal. That could be from our community, that could be coming in from a support ticket, that could be a conversation with a customer success manager, could be from any site. That feedback then goes into a Smartsheet form, and that goes directly to the product management team. And, anyone who has submitted that from a support rep perspective, for example, gets visibility to where that stands in the progress. So, is it something we're looking into? Is it in progress? If there's a date to it, what does that look like? So, we get all that. And then, the other element is we are huge users of Smartsheet internally. And, Mark likes to talk about that he is the biggest user of the mobile application across our whole customer base, and he probably is. But, we absolutely eat our own dog food there, or drink our own champagne. >> I like that one better. >> Probably a better one. And, that motion really helps us understand how to use the application, so Dynamic View, which was launched this week. We're going to be one of the biggest users of that right out of the gate. For the example that I just brought up, what Dynamic View allows us to do is it allows us to provide a view of all of those submissions of request, and the right view to the right company, or the right internal stakeholders, so they know exactly what that status is. So, those are two ways that we get that feedback back into our producting. >> Mike, you said you've been in sales for a long time. How helpful in a sales situation is the fact that you do drink your own champagne? >> Huge, it's huge. >> On Smartsheet, I imagine, a lot of companies don't show that. >> It's a really big deal; anybody who's, really anybody in the company. Anybody's who's touching the customer, When I hire people, the ability to have that confidence and understand how to use and speak from personal experience that fuels passion, it fuels credibility, and it's authentic, which is one of our core values. And then, so much of it is the art of the possible on the whiteboard with the customer. This ability to move from an idea, we've literally mapped out processes, and within 30 minutes, the essay's in there, and we've prototyped a solution. And, not only is it a quality solution, but the customer's blown away by the speed with which we've done it. But, that starts with that deep understanding of the platform and all the functionality, and what you can do with it. >> Right, I'm sure that breeds that authenticity that Gene actually talked about. Well, we're almost out of time, but I want to quickly, Steven, talk about the Partner Success Program. You guys partner with Amazon, Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce, Slack, Google, I'm probably leaving out a few. Talk to us a little bit about the partner evolution as you compete with some of these partners as well. >> Well, I'm going to switch that a little. So, we have two elements of partners. So, we have those technology partners that you're speaking to. And then, we have the solution provider partners and resellers; that's more in my world. But, what's been really exciting about those folks and, we had a big partner day yesterday, so I'm kind of coming off the high of talking with all these folks. And, one of the things that we hear over and over again is whatever their focus is. So, sometimes, that's a geography focus. Sometimes, that's an industry focus. They tell us how much we're missing already. So, they'll say, if I'm focused on the accounting industry, they'll say, you guys don't even know how great your off the shelf application is in the accounting world. And, what they're so excited about is being able to configure it, being able to build the applications on top of Smartsheet. That then, they can bring to that world, so that, from a scale perspective, we don't have to be experts in accounting. We don't have to be experts in any of those different verticals or in those geographies. We can leverage those partners, their expertise, their relationships, in order to bring that to market in each of those areas. >> Any feedback, I know we're out of time. But, any feedback on some of the announcements that came out today from some of your key partners, besides two thumbs way up? >> They were extremely excited about Dynamic View and seeing what's possible from a new solution perspective. They were just like the rest of the customers. So, when there was the final slide showing all the new features we're bringing, all the phones came out to take pictures. It was a great scene, and they were definitely in that mix. >> Excellent, well, Steven and Mike, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us how you're transforming, how the customers are able to evolve and transform with your technology. We know you have a lot of meetings to get to, so we'll let you go to that. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (techno music)

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018, I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick in Bellevue, Washington, our first time here. Second annual Smartsheet Engage and we're very please to be joined, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mark Mader, the CEO of Smartsheet. Mark, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you, good to be with you. >> Great job on the keynote. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> So, you can see the buzz behind us, we just got out of the keynote, where, you guys kicked it up, there was a coupla things Jeff and I were talking about that were unique, that I haven't seen very much of at all, in all the keynotes that we go to. One, you started off with an explorer who had a very empowering, enlightening message, all about communication. And then, something that you did that I thought was really cool, that I don't think I've ever seen, is you actually, during your keynote, went into the audience, where you have about 2000 customers here, representing 1100 companies, across 20 countries, and just ad-libbed, hey guys, tell me about your company, how is Smartsheet empowering you, and as you said, that was all natural. >> I think part of it making it real for somebody, is giving you somebody that's relatable. So, we started off the conversation, as you said, with Ed Viesturs, arguably the most famous accomplished climber in the world, today, and he talked about the importance of communication and preparation, and teamwork, and clear decision making, in a context that was spectacularly visual, right, this mountain and those climbing shots, so, people relate to that, and then when you introduces those conducts in the business setting, it's like, oh, yeah, this applies to me, it applies to all of us. So, the notion of getting into the crowd, in a non-rehearsed way, is to really get people comfortable with, hey, I can share something, I can share an experience, and there's no one right answer, it's my experience. >> And that's why you're here, as you said in your keynote, and we know this as well, if companies aren't designing technology for the users, what's the point? >> Yeah, you're right and, one of the things I tried to highlight was, when you say for the user, it's not just for the user, the end user, like developed by a few people, spread to everybody, but it's empowering each and every person to say, hey I want to do something more transformational. I want to manage, automate, scale it, I don't want to be given that solution by someone, I want to do it. And there are hundreds of millions of people, who have the appetite and the interest, and the need for it. So, that's what we're trying to sell into. >> You know, Mark, we got to, so many shows, right, and everyone's chasing innovation. How do we get more innovative? Especially big companies, right? And you did show two really interesting messages, one, was your kind of core message, empowering everyone to improve, how they work, so, like you said, not just the top level decision makers, not down in the developer weave, but everybody up and down this stack. And then you shared a statement covey quote, really talking about how do people, keep 'em engaged and the way people are engaged is that they feel they're empowered to do something for their clients and their customers. So it's such an importannt piece and I think it's easy to talk about, harder to execute, but what is the answer to innovation? Giving more people the data, the tools and the power to take all that and do something for their customers, and thereby unlock all this tremendous value that you already have in your four doors. >> Absolutely, and I think the point of unlocking, so we have, you have 100% of your workforce. If you empower only 4.3% of them, for instance, the developers in your group, you're leaving so much opportunity on the table. And again, you don't get that unlock or that innovative spirit by just using something. You have to live with it, you have to work with it, you have to wrestle with it, And through that, innovation occurs. Ideas get generated. So, if you can get that ideation happening at the midpoint of your company, not the top 5%, huge opportunity. >> I think you were even quoted in the press release, maybe around the IPO that happened a few months ago, congratulations, >> Thank you. >> In saying that, maybe naysayers in the beginning, when you were a company of six, as you were talking about in your keynote, people thought, you're going to build this on a spreadsheet construct? And you said, but four hundred to five hundred million people know that construct. >> Right, right So you're going into an audience if knowledge workers, of which there's a massive percentage, designing something for lines of business, IT, finance, marketing, sales, who actually need to work with that, we're not talking about API's and developer and code speak, you're building this for a very large percentage of the population. >> We are, and I think when we talk about serving a large population, it's tempting to say, well, they can't handle much, let's go with the most common denominator. Let's give them something super, super simple. The problem is, with simple, you don't always get value. So how do you combine relevance and comfort and understanding, with capability. And the product's changed a lot since the early days, it's no longer just a grid, we have dashboards, we have forms, we have card view, we have all these elements that are now being brought forward, but one thing that we've always respected from the beginning is, don't throw away what somebody understands, and is comfortable with. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best, but they know it. And people are very nervous about just jettisoning the things they know, so like, embrace it. And then, what we had talked about earlier, was, how do you really listen to that customer's signal, and say okay, I'm comfortable, I like this, but I want more. And that ability to respond to that request, I think has really helped define who Smartsheet is today. You know, 12 years later. >> The other piece you talked on is kind of sideways off of that, is people have systems already in place, they have tools that they use every day. Right, there's this competition for the top layer of the desktop, but the reality is that we have many, many applications that we have to interact with every day. You guys are really taking a coopation approach with all these existing, >> Absolutely >> where it fits, where it's working, to your point, they're already using it and make it work. Integrate with. Don't try to rip and replace all these other systems that're in there. >> Yeah, and I think, you know you come across so many people in life, who want everything. I need total, complete, presence. And you're really discounting what people appreciate. And I think when you take the view of, I'm going to listen to my client, I'm going to listen to what they love and understand, and I'm going to let them articulate how they want it to work, we are in a very diverse, multi-app world today. If you actually march in somewhere and say, yeah all those decisions you made, those were the wrong decisions, you should trust me on everything, you'll be walked out of the building in about 4.2 seconds. So, we're really living that philosophy, and I think in great partnerships with Google, Microsoft and Slack, and Tableau, and others, we're actually able to demonstrate that. >> Yeah, and then to take it from the concept to reality, a great demo, I'm sure you didn't have this planned a couple of weeks ago, was, you talked about the state of North Carolina, and the preparation and the response to Hurricane Florence, and that they were very quickly able to build a super informative dashboard, to let everybody know who needed to know, what they needed to know. >> Correct. >> And how long did that take to put together? Amazing. >> That was under 24 hours. >> 24 hours? >> And the difference here is the difference between building or developing something, and configuring something. So, the difference there is when you actually build something from scratch, we have bare dirt, we need to put a foundation, we need to build a house, we need to shingle it, we need to insulate, that takes you a long time. So how about, we go to a house that exists, let's change the colors of the blinds, let's put in a certain sofa, let's furnish it. And the configuration element, versus construction, that gives people velocity. Now, what they also want is, they want to actually put their own texture to it, they want to make it their own, so the Department of Transportation dashboard that they produced for FEMA and the Coast Guard and the state governor's office, it didn't look like anybody else's dashboard. It was tailored, but it was so quick to build. And the great thing there was, so many people who accessed that site for information on on runway status and power and fuel, they could focus on the citizens as opposed to what the heck is going on, on the ground. >> Right. >> That provides a lot of purpose to our team, when we see our product used that way. >> You talked about speed just a minute ago, and speed, obviously, every enterprise of whatever size, needs to move and quite a bit quickly, to gain competitive advantage, to increase revenues, et cetera, you guys have some really very eye-catching statistics. That you're enabling customers to achieve. I read, enabling an average business leader to save 300 hours a year, 60,000 hours a year saved across on average organization. That's a big impact. How is speed a factor there? >> Yeah, I think speed I look at in a couple dimensions, One is, is it time saved, but there's also an element which is speed of experimentation So we go into an initiative, we say we have this amazing idea and we're going to have all these returns, we think. (chuckling) Well, not all the bets you place actually makes it. Or actually yields, so if you can empower a team to more quickly experiment, configure, try things, see what works and then double down behind those, if you can run five times as many plays as your competitor, you have five times as many chances to find that next winner. And so when we talk about speed, it's again, velocity of decision making, saving time, but also, organizationally, how can you unlock those possibilities? >> Part of that also is enabling cultural change. Which is not easy, it's essential for digital transformation, we talk about that at every event, and it's true, but how do you put that in action? You and I were chatting off camera about one of your customers that is an 125 year old oil and gas company. How do you enable them to kind of absorb and digest a culture of experimentation so that they can really move their business forward as quickly as they need to? >> Well, I think there's a great quote that one of my mentors early gave me. And it was, "All hat, no cattle." And the "All hat, no cattle" refers to the person who talks about how big their ranch is and how big their... Where's your herd? So you can talk a lot, but you have to demonstrate it. So when they go in, and there was another gentleman who talked about this idea of transforming their implementations across 300 project managers, and the quote was, we're going to get you up and running in two to three weeks, and he goes, "Never. No chance." Now, he ended up working with us, and we proved it to him and when you get a win like that, and you can demonstrate speed and impact, those things carry a lot of weight in organizations, but you have to show evidence. And when you talk about why we're landing and expanding in some of the world's largest brands, it's not because we're just talkin' a big game, it's because you're able to demonstrate those wins, and those lead to further growth. >> Right. And then you topped it off with a bit about the catalysts. But even more, I liked the concept of the point guard. Good point guards make everybody else on the team better. They do a little bit on their own, they hit a couple key shots, but they make everybody else better. And you're seeing that in terms of the expansion, and just in the way your go to market is, you don't come in usually as a big enterprise sale, I don't think, you come in small, you come in a group level, and then let the catalyst let those point guards, built successful in their own team, and then branch it out to a broader audience. >> Yeah, and I'm a big believer, and I don't think people can be classified into catalysts and non-catalysts. That's a very sort of blunt force approach. I view it as, you've catalysts, you've catalysts that haven't been unlocked, and then you have people that aren't catalysts. But very often that point guard, is going to activate the power forward, the center and holy smokes, where did that come from? And what we see is, when we see this growth happening in companies, those players around that point guard, get lit, get sparked, and once they're sparked, it's on. And then we see that growth happen for a long, long time. >> We saw some of that quotes, quotes >> We did. (all speaking at once) >> Queen of the world? >> Queen of the world. That's a big statement. >> That's empowerment, right there. >> It is empowerment. >> And the one where, I tweeted this, one of the quotes, I won't share this product name, but it can actually seem smart, she can help reduce work place anxiety. >> Anxiety! >> Which everybody needs. So, it's been six months since the IPO, you have doubled your attendance in your second year only, at Engage, up here in Bellevue, Washington, What are some of the exciting things that you anounced this morning, that have been fueled by the momentum of the IPO has as I imagine, ignited? >> Yeah, couple big things, is we, at every tech conference, you're going to hear about new capabilities. Here are the new bells and whistles and features and capabilities we have. But what we're hearing from customers, they also want us to frame those capabilites and things that are consumable. So, not everybody wants to configure or build as we talked about earlier today, they say I have a need, it's specific to this area, and do you have something for me. More turnkey, like that gentleman I said, two to three weeks to turn and sold him my implementation team. So those are being referred to as accelerators. So we announced a few new accelerators today in the sales realm, in terms of being able to better manage engagement plans with prospects and clients and on sophisticated deals it's a very common thing. And the other piece that I think is really important is, not just talking about business users, which is a huge focus for us, but also how do we better support IT and their needs to regulate, control, have visibility and to how Smartsheet is used. So, those were a couple of highlights, and then the ability to give people more controls over how they share their data. There've been some issues in the news recently, where people have shared too broadly, they've said that's the issue, so we're hearing from our customers, give us some more fine gated controls and confidence over how our corporate information is shared with others. Well, Mark Mader, I wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE, and chatting with Jeff and me. >> Great to see you. >> Great momentum, we look forward to a number of your execs and customers and analysts on the program tonight. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you, good to see you. >> Thanks, Mark, good to see you again. >> We just want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live from Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Our first time here, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. Jeff, it's great to be paired back up with you again. >> Yeah, it's been a little while, great to see you, Lisa. >> It has, you too. So this is the second annual Smartsheet Engage. There's about a couple thousand people here. Double last year and they shared. We just got in from the keynote and they shared some interesting things. First of all, they IPOed just about four or five months ago. I think April 2018. They have presence in 190 countries. They have 75,000 customers. They've got users in half the Fortune 500. 90% of the Fortune 100. And a lot of momentum. What are some of the things that you're excited to learn about Smartsheet today? >> You know, I think it's kind of an interesting story. There's so many components of a lot of different work applications and we go to so many shows. We hear about a new way to work from IBM. One of my favorite lines of the year was actually from Google Cloud where you want to empower people to actually be, as you wrote it down, make judgements instead of drudgery. And these guys are all about that, but it's a little bit confusing 'cause they integrate with a lot of the other type of applications that people interact with at work. The big mentions of the Microsoft Suite, of 365, of Slack and some of those other tools. So what Smartsheet's tryin' to do is really roll those all up under kind of a unified view, parts of project management, parts of task management, a lot of pieces to really add that top level management. So I think it's a little bit of an interesting message. It's a lot of bits and pieces. We're used to that with theCUBE. We have three brands, so I kind of get it. So I'm lookin' forward to learning more about really how they kind of parse that out. >> I am as well 'cause you mention a number of other solutions who they both compete with, Microsoft Teams, JIRA under Atlassian. They also partner with them. And I'm curios to see an example and we've got three customers of theirs on the show today, Jeff. I'm interested to see that in action. If I am at an enterprise, and I am running a marketing project and I want to use Smartsheets, but I also need Slack for messaging, email for communication. I've got maybe another team I'm collaborating with that's using a different workflow automation platform. How does it actually work together? One of the interesting things, when CEO Mark Mader who's our first guest today, was with you in the studio in Palo Alto just a couple months ago, he was talking about the genesis of Smartsheet. And I also saw him say this in a press release when their IPO occurred back in April and said a lot of people, critics, in the very beginning 12 years ago said, you guys are nuts to go base this new technology, this new SaaS platform off of a spreadsheet model. But something interesting that he said is that, that's a construct that 400-500 million people understand. So this is another interesting element to me is that this is technology that's not, you don't have to know how to code or even what an API is. This is for the business users, the lines of business, IT, marketing, engineering, the facilities management. So it's really, it's got a broad spectrum of use cases that I'm also interested in hearing about today. >> It's funny on the worksheet as kind of a construct because we hear that all the time. Especially at all of our big data shows, right? Worksheets in Excel is still used by a lot of people for a significant amount of work. So people are familiar with it and they know how it works. I think they'll have to change that a little bit as they grow a little bit beyond that. Still a lot of conversation about rows and it sounded very spreadsheet centric in the keynote. And I think that'll evolve, but I think what's the most important thing, what I'm excited about, I say this time and time again. We go to so many shows, right? Everyone is struggling to find innovation. To me the answer is, one of the answers is kind of simple. You get more people, more access to more data with more tools to manipulate that data. And then most importantly, the power to do something about it. This was all about empowerment, empowerment, empowerment. Letting people, give 'em the information and then let them actually do something with it. That is so significant and it's kind of interesting. They had a Stephen Covey quote up on their as well that's kind of a similar thing. Taking it to the next step which is that's how you keep people happy, that's how you keep people engaged. Again, less drudgery, more judgment. Let them feel like they can actually make a difference versus just pushin' buttons and movin' paper along. >> Yeah, another theme that we heard a lot on the keynote this morning, Jeff, is about collaboration. And it really seems to me to be this message of symbiotic collaboration. They, Gene Farrell, who's going to be on the show with Jeff and I just in a few minutes or so, talked about, hey, customers we've heard you. You want more, and he actually got the crowd to chant, we want more, it was great. But when he was starting to talk about some of the new enhancements to the features. And yes, you're right, they're still talking about some, I don't want to say antiquated row structures and things like that, there were a number of times where the audience today broke into applause. So, not only are they delivering this SaaS platform to facilitate collaboration between teams at small organizations to big enterprises, they are also collaborating with their customers to continually innovate and improve their product. And I thought, something that I've never seen and we see a lot of keynotes, is that their CEO, Mark Mader, actually went into the audience during his session this morning and asked customers to stand up and talk about how Smartsheet is empowering them. And there were at least three different customers that stood up-- >> Right. >> and quite articulately spoke about how mostly qualitatively, but how their businesses or their team or their productivity is being improved. So this bidirectional collaboration, I thought was very palpable this morning. >> Right, which again I think is one of the huge benefits of the SaaS business model that is way underreported, not by us, we talk about it all the time. Is that if you have a recurring revenue model with your customer it forces you to be engaged. It forces you to deliver value. It forces you to innovate on an ongoing basis. It's not a ship and dump and then release. We'll come back in a year for our 15% maintenance. It's a very different way to go. Other really interesting things, they talked about recent events, Hurricane Florence in North Carolina. Happened to be a customer there able to aggregate and pull together a lot of information into these dashboards and that's something we hear about all the time. We'll hear about it more in the PayPal example. It was referenced in the keynote which is when you have to pull that data together for your weekly executive briefing, this promise of all these dashboards has always been there. Smartsheets is a little bit different because they want to be the primary way, but they want to integrate with all these other applications and other SaaS applications as well, so that you can create that user specific dashboard for the objective and you don't have to reassemble all that data every week for your weekly to roll up to the C-Suite. >> Yeah, and one of the things, speaking of customers, they had over 50 customers speaking at the event this week which is a lot. I was very impressed by that. >> Yeah, out of 2,000 registrants that's a big percentage. >> That is a big number. I think also some of the stats that Mark Mader showed were 1,100 companies are represented here from 20 countries. In fact, I also saw online that nearly a third of their revenue comes from outside the US and they actually don't have much presence outside the US at all. Outside of Converse.AI that they acquired based in Edinburgh, back in I think January of this year. But in terms of customers, the voice of the customer and that customer collaboration, we're also going to be talking to a gentleman who runs their customer success and partner success program. As you mentioned, the SaaS model being different, this isn't just check in every year and dial up the increase in subscription costs. So I'm curious what their new playbook is for customer success that they are developing and implementing or executing, that going to be their word, right? >> Right, right. >> Execution. Based on this new model and how customers want to be engaging with vendors. Ultimately they want things as simple as possible, so I'm curious to hear about how that customer success playbook here might be a differentiator against Atlassian, JIRA, Microsoft Team, and some of the other competitors. And also, how does it facilitate this breadth of collaboration? How does it enable them to collaborate with sales force and Amazon and Microsoft and Slack, for example? A lot of interesting points here and I'm hoping today what we're able to do is help put that together and sort of integrate this message. >> Should be a good day, looking forward to it. >> I think so. >> Our first time here. >> It is our first time. So stick around, Jeff and I are going to be live all day. We are again in Bellevue, Washington at the second annual Smartsheet Engage 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. Stick around, we're going to be right back with the CEO in just a minute. (high tech music)