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Category: EnterpriseCustomer

EnterpriseCustomer

  • Amazon Web Services Will Open Data Centers In Spain

    Amazon Web Services Will Open Data Centers In Spain

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it is planning on opening data centers in Spain, making it AWS’ seventh infrastructure region in Europe.

    Having a local infrastructure region will be a boon to Spanish companies, giving them the ability to address data residency issues and keep complete control over sensitive data. Similarly, the new data centers will provide customers creating applications that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) another EU-based, secure infrastructure region.

    “Cloud computing is already powering innovation within businesses, educational institutions, public administrations, and government agencies across Spain, and with this AWS infrastructure region, we look forward to helping accelerate this transformation,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “Opening an AWS Region in Spain will drive more technology jobs and businesses, boosting the local economy, while enabling organizations across all industries to lower costs, increase security, and improve agility. We’re excited to have AWS contribute to the future growth of Spain.”

    The announcement follows years of AWS investing in Spain, with their first in-country presence dating back to 2012. In the intervening years, AWS has continued to build its presence in the country, reflecting the growth it has experienced in the region.

    The announcement was welcomed as great news for the country by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. “This investment from AWS will allow Spain to fully adapt to the digital transformation and develop as an international center of innovation and technology. Cloud computing, in addition to promoting technological progress in the private sector, will enable the Public Administration to improve the services it provides to citizens. A secure cloud is an essential tool for the development of our economy, as well as for the generation of jobs in our country. We highly value AWS’s commitment to the technological development of Spain and the upskilling of our citizens.”

  • Google Hires Former VP of Microsoft’s Office Product Group

    Google Hires Former VP of Microsoft’s Office Product Group

    Business Insider is reporting that Google has hired Javier Soltero, a former head of strategy for Microsoft Office. Soltero had left Microsoft in late 2018 amid internal reorganization.

    In his new role with Google, Soltero will take over as Vice President of G Suite. Google’s suite of programs includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drive and more. The company has made inroads in the productivity market dominated by Microsoft. While G Suite is available for free, a more robust version is offered to business customers for a monthly subscription. As of Q4 2018, Google reported having some five million paying G Suite customers.

    Soltero brings much to the table for Google. After several years at VMware, he joined Microsoft when the company bought his startup Acompli, turning it into Outlook Mobile. He spent his first year at Microsoft as Corporate Vice President of Outlook, followed by two years as Corporate Vice President of the Office Product Group. His final role was as Corporate Vice President of Cortana.

    Google has been hiring a string of executives as it tries to compete with Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud industry. At Google, Soltero will report directly to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

  • Cisco CEO Says 5G Networks Could Be Active In 2 to 3 Years

    Cisco CEO Says 5G Networks Could Be Active In 2 to 3 Years

    “The carriers today are building the consumer 5G networks, and they don’t require a massive backbone upgrade when you just increase bandwidth to lots of mobile phones.”

    Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins stopped by Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria to discuss 5G, intellectual property and reports of China bullying companies.

    “When they begin to build out enterprise 5G services, then that will require them to build a dedicated, next generation, high-performance backbone because of all the traffic that will be generated and…that will be over the next two to three years. So right now, they are focused on the radios needed for the consumer side.

    “If you think about the speeds that are going to be supported at the edge, and the number of those connections, it’s only logical that you’re going to have to update…your infrastructure to accommodate all the bandwidth that’s going to be…given out around the world. So we would expect to ultimately be a beneficiary of that when it happens.”

    Mr. Robbins goes on to discuss the challenges the world is facing economically, emphasizing his belief that the economic slowdown is a global one, not isolated to the U.S.

    While highlighting that intellectual property theft is by no means unique to the Chinese market, Mr. Robbins was adamant that respect for intellectual property needs to be a fundamental aspect of doing business.

    “The lack of theft should be a core principle in every country around the world….I think that’s a broad issue that should just be a basic premise of doing business around the world, is that your intellectual property should be respected.”

    He also discussed recent reports of companies being bullied by the Chinese government. While he said Cisco has never been able to reach the level of business they would like to within the country, they had never felt bullied by China.

    https://video.foxbusiness.com/v/6094650754001/

  • Intel Acquires Pivot’s Smart Edge Platform: Eyes 5G Edge Computing Leadership

    Intel Acquires Pivot’s Smart Edge Platform: Eyes 5G Edge Computing Leadership

    Intel announced it has acquired the Smart Edge platform from Pivot Technology Solutions, Inc., a “cloud-native, scalable and secure platform for multi-access edge computing (MEC).”

    Edge computing allows data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be processed and analyzed closer to the point of collection, rather than being sent to far-away data centers. This gives organizations the ability to process critical data in near real-time. With the growth of the IoT, edge computing is predicted to reach $22.45 billion by 2024. The Smart Edge acquisition positions Intel to be a dominant player in the market as it grows.

    “This transaction enhances our ability to address the 5G network transformation with a leading position in edge computing,” says Dan Rodriguez, Intel vice president in the Data Center Group and general manager of the Network Compute Division. “We plan to take full advantage of our combined technologies and teams to accelerate the development of the edge computing market while creating a compelling solution for customers.”

    As part of the agreement, Intel and Pivot will sign a Preferred Partner Agreement, making Pivot an authorized Smart Edge reseller, as well as Intel’s non-exclusive Preferred Systems Integrator for systems based on the Smart Edge platform.

    “Intel is the right company and brand to advance and scale Smart Edge’s software solution,” said Kevin Shank, CEO of Pivot. “Our partnership with Intel will leverage Pivot’s core strengths as a technology integrator and service provider with Intel’s advanced technology solutions to drive the adoption of the Smart Edge platform. We look forward to collaborating with Intel to develop and take to market many new edge computing use cases.”

  • Alteryx Acquires Feature Labs, An MIT-Born Machine Learning Startup

    Alteryx Acquires Feature Labs, An MIT-Born Machine Learning Startup

    Data science is one of the fastest growing segments of the tech industry, and Alteryx, Inc. is front and center in the data revolution. The Alteryx Platform provides a collaborative, governed platform to quickly and efficiently search, analyze and use pertinent data.

    To continue accelerating innovation, Alteryx announced it has purchased a startup with roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Feature Labs “automates feature engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.”

    Combining the two companies’ platforms and engineering will result in faster time-to-insight and time-to-value for data scientists and analysts. Feature Labs’ algorithms are designed to “optimize the manual, time-consuming and error-prone process required to build machine learning models.”

    Feature Labs makes its open-source libraries available to data scientists around the world. In what is no doubt welcome news, Alteryx has already committed to continued support of the open-source community.

    From the Press Release:

    “Feature Labs’ vision to help both data scientists and business analysts easily gain insight and understand the factors driving their business matches the Alteryx DNA. Together, we are helping customers address the skills gap by putting more powerful advanced analytic capabilities directly into the hands of those responsible for making faster decisions and accelerating results. We are excited to welcome the Feature Labs team and to add an engineering hub in Boston,” said Dean Stoecker, co-founder and CEO of Alteryx.

    “Alteryx maintains its leadership in the market by continuing to evolve its best-in-class, code-free and code-friendly platform to anticipate and meet the demands of the 54 million data workers worldwide2. With the addition of our unique capabilities, we expect to empower more businesses to build machine learning algorithms faster and operationalize data science,” said Max Kanter, co-founder and CEO of Feature Labs. “Feature engineering is often a time-consuming and manual process and we help companies automate this process and deploy impactful machine learning models.”

  • Government Officials Urge Facebook to Create Encryption Backdoor

    Government Officials Urge Facebook to Create Encryption Backdoor

    In most cases, two plus two equals four. It’s simple math. The same is true of encryption. Devices and services are either protected by strong encryption or they’re not. There is no in-between.

    In spite of that, the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, joined U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton in an open letter urging Facebook to essentially create a backdoor in their end-to-end encryption.

    On the one hand, the government officials offer lip service to the need for strong encryption:

    “We support strong encryption, which is used by billions of people every day for services such as banking, commerce, and communications. We also respect promises made by technology companies to protect users’ data. Law abiding citizens have a legitimate expectation that their privacy will be protected.”

    However, those statements are undermined by what follows:

    “Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content, even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes.”

    Unfortunately these statements, and others like them, demonstrate a dangerous lack of understanding about how encryption works or, for that matter, how basic math—the foundation of all encryption—works. Experts the world over have warned about the catastrophic dangers of creating backdoors in encryption here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here and here (PDF).

    The last one was an open letter to the White House by civil organizations, companies, trade associations and a myriad of security and policy experts. These are individuals from such varied backgrounds that they rarely agree on anything. Yet the one thing they all agree on is that there is simply no way to create backdoors in encryption without fundamentally weakening said encryption. It simply can’t be done. There is no way to create a backdoor for the “good guys” to get into the phones, computers and tablets of the “bad guys” without the “bad guys” using those same backdoors to get into the devices of the “good guys.”

    At this point in the debate, people who want backdoors usually fall back to complaining about how strong encryption is making it possible for bad actors to “go dark,” using encryption to protect their activities from prying eyes. Therefore, the argument goes, the tech companies should be forced to make a backdoor in the interest of the greater good.

    By that logic, however, safe makers should be required to create a backdoor to every safe they manufacture in the event that whoever purchases it tries using it for nefarious purposes. Similarly, paper shredder makers should be forced to make shredders that can take the strips of shredded paper and recombine them into their original form. Otherwise, someone might use a shredder to destroy documents to cover illegal activity.

    What’s interesting about both of those examples is that, even without the manufacturers’ assistance, it’s possible to crack into a safe, as well as sort through strips of shredded paper and reconstruct documents. Is it a pleasant experience? No—but it’s possible.

    Similarly, even without backdoors in encryption, with enough computing power it is possible to break encryption or find ways to circumvent it. In the wake of the San Bernardino case, after the FBI tried to force Apple to unlock the perpetrator’s iPhone, the FBI was able to find a company that succeeded in unlocking the phone. Was it pleasant? No—but it was possible.

    Sometimes convenience for a few—in this case law enforcement—must take a back seat to the safety of the many. In other words, two plus two must equal four, unless a person doesn’t believe in basic math principles. Then two plus two equals five, or 13, or 127,309 or…

  • Infosys & SAP Announce Alliance to Accelerate Clients’ Enterprise Digital Transformation

    Infosys & SAP Announce Alliance to Accelerate Clients’ Enterprise Digital Transformation

    SAP SE announced a collaboration program with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019. The project, named “Embrace” will also include global strategic service partners (GSSP).

    At the same time, Infosys—“a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting”—has announced Innov8, a new program designed to help “clients transform their business model to one based on predictable OPEX-based costs.”

    According to a press release Infosys issued Tuesday, the two companies are planning a collaborative alliance, to bring the benefits of Embrace and Innov8 to customers “and offer flexible points of entry to the SAP environment for both existing and new cloud users, all within one comprehensive end-to-end business solution.”

    With more than 70 ready-to-deploy artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, analytics and Internet of Things use cases, Innov8 provides a way for companies to invest, innovate and build intelligent enterprises.

    From the Infosys Press Release:

    Dinesh Rao, Executive Vice President, Infosys, said, “Navigating the cloud ecosystem requires a structured strategy that provides a consolidated view into a company’s overall transformation journey. Through Innov8, we are focused on leveraging our industry knowledge and experience to accelerate the delivery of business solutions. Through this collaboration, we are focusing on ensuring that our clients are able to rapidly adopt tomorrow’s business models today.”

    David Robinson, Senior Vice President, SAP Cloud Business Group and Global Lead, Embrace program at SAP said, “SAP is excited about its plans to partner with Infosys to help clients invest in purposeful innovation to build their intelligent enterprise. Innov8 for Embrace leverages Infosys’ industry knowledge and expertise on SAP and cloud technologies. This is a platform that is delivered on a cloud hyperscale environment with SAP digital solutions delivering end-to-end business outcomes at accelerated pace. We couldn’t be more excited.”

    David McIntire, IT Services Research Director at NelsonHall, said “The value of SAP S/4HANA adoption extends beyond IT and into transforming how businesses operate. Innov8 for Embrace has the potential to combine industry-tailored intelligence, applications and processes with simplified OPEX pricing and cloud hosting into an integrated offering aimed at helping companies maximize the business value of adopting SAP S/4HANA.”

  • Adobe CEO Focused On Delivering Innovation

    Adobe CEO Focused On Delivering Innovation

    “We’re in rarefied atmosphere,” says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. “We’re focused on delivering an incredible innovation roadmap across all three of our clouds. We look forward to sharing more about our forward-looking strategy at the analyst meeting at MAX. We do look forward to the FA meeting. That’s when we lay out the growth opportunities that are ahead of us. We talked last year about how we had a greater than a $100 billion addressable market opportunity.”

    Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, discusses how the company’s incredible innovation is driving its growth and how Adobe Sensei AI is embedded into every one of their products. Narayen was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Every Enterprise Must Engage Digitally With Customers

    We actually experienced growth across all three of our segments. When you look at Creative Cloud and the net new ARR that we got in that segment of the business, that was a record for a Q3. Many years after the introduction of the product Document Cloud had an exceedingly strong quarter and we’re seeing tremendous adoption of our paper to digital initiatives. On the Experience Cloud again 34 percent revenue growth. 

    Every single enterprise needs to understand how you can engage digitally with customers. I think what’s unique about Adobe is that every customer from a K-12 student to an individual freelancer all the way to the largest enterprises in the world, the breadth of our offerings and our customers is truly fueling this success.

    It’s About Getting These Customers Young

    We’ve always talked about the fact that instead of just a focus on STEM we love STEAM because the world without arts would be an exceedingly boring place. One of the things we actually did this quarter was introduce a new ambassador network in educational institutions. We’re targeting over a hundred colleges. These students are actually being the evangelists for explaining why creative needs to be part of the curricula. Getting that younger generation excited about expressing themselves we certainly believe that’s going to fuel our growth. 

    In addition to that, as we come up on MAX, which is the largest creativity conference in the world in November, I think what you’re going to see from our innovation roadmap across new areas like immersive content, what’s happening with gaming, what’s happening across devices that now have styluses, we announced a new product called Fresco for art and illustration, so the breadth of our products is amazing. It’s about getting these customers young and enabling them to tell their story.

    Focused On Delivering Innovation Across All Three Of Our Clouds

    What is really unique right now about our digital experience solutions is that we have the first mile. The first mile is content management, it’s the web infrastructure, it’s mobile applications that people use to engage with enterprises. We also have the last mile in commerce. That’s the Magento acquisition that we did a while ago which enables you to make every experience shoppable. Magento had a great quarter. We grew their bookings 40 percent year-over-year in Q3. When you talk about the rule of 40, we’re blowing that away when you think about our growth rates as well as our margin.

    We do look forward to the FA meeting. That’s when we lay out the growth opportunities that are ahead of us. We talked last year about how we had a greater than a $100 billion addressable market opportunity. Were growing the top-line at 20 percent. Our Q4 targets show that revenue growth will be north of 20 percent with EPS growth accelerating even above that. We’re in rarefied atmosphere. We’re focused on delivering an incredible innovation roadmap across all three of our clouds. We look forward to sharing more about our forward-looking strategy at the analyst meeting at MAX. 

    The AI of Adobe Sensei Is A Fabric Of All Our Innovation

    Our artificial intelligence framework is called Adobe Sensei and it’s embedded across every one of our products. It’s when you look at a piece of content and say, how did they do that? There’s probably an aspect of Adobe Sensei in that. We have hundreds of trillions of transactions that we’re processing on behalf of high enterprise customers and we can predict in real-time. Our Adobe Digital Index which talks about shopping patterns globally, that’s coming from Adobe Sensei. It’s a part and it’s a fabric of all of our innovation and we’re excited to unveil new innovation soon.

    Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen Focused On Delivering Innovation
  • Microsoft Patches Serious Flaw In Internet Explorer

    Microsoft Patches Serious Flaw In Internet Explorer

    Microsoft has released an emergency fix for Windows 10, following the discovery of a serious flaw in Internet Explorer. The flaw is a remote code vulnerability—one of the most dangerous types of security flaws, as it opens the way for a hacker to remotely take control of an affected system.

    At the root of the flaw is how Internet Explorer’s scripting engine handles objects in memory, leading to memory corruption that could allow a hacker to run arbitrary code in place of the user. This would allow the attacker to gain the same rights and authority as the current user, effectively letting them take control of the system.

    The vulnerability is serious enough that even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued their own advisory, with the agency and Microsoft both urging users to update immediately.

    Windows users should be able to update via Windows Update. Microsoft also released a security advisory that includes links to a manual update.

  • PwC’s Mark Chalfen: Cloud ERP Is All Around Simplification

    PwC’s Mark Chalfen: Cloud ERP Is All Around Simplification

    “Cloud ERP is a very new principle in the market,” says Mark Chalfen, director at PwC. “The way that I see cloud is all round simplification—simple and standard. It’s a lot more easy than it was five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago.”

    Mark Chalfen, director at PwC, talks about how cloud ERP software can help companies drive innovation, standardization and cost savings.

    Speed is not a problem. Speed for the organization is the speed to consume the change. The speed is understanding your roadmap, building that roadmap, understanding what the future holds and then planning that back in.

    Overcoming Preconceptions About ERP Software

    A true ERP, a SaaS ERP, is an asset. There’s a number of clients I will work with and start to talk with and they see it as a liability. We take them on a journey and the realization changes that actually cloud ERP is an asset. The speed, the innovation, the standardization—all the things that people previously thought an ERP was, the ability to write lots of custom code, those benefits are removed when they see the power of the cloud ERP and the future direction of SAP in cloud ERP.

    Now, all of our engagements are with the c-suite—a CFO, a CEO—who understands the power of cloud ERP, understands the power of SaaS. That means that the programs we work on are business-led, truly business-led. They understand the benefit that it provides: standardization, simplification, speed and the cost benefit. Now you have standard process. You get some efficiency and you’ll get some cost savings.

    There’s three key areas. Break everything off into small consumable chunks. Build that confidence within the business. ‘Look, we deployed within three months. We deployed within six months.’ You then build that confidence. We then need to focus on the change appetite. You need to plan the change engagement. Followed around that, the actual governance and the ownership of the program—you need strong stakeholder management all the way through.

    The Tool Is Not the Issue

    The tool is there to help you. The tool is mature, the tool is ready, the tool is not the issue. It’s people and data and change. If you can control all of those three, your program will be successful.

     

  • The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud, Says DocuSign CEO

    The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud, Says DocuSign CEO

    “The new cloud opportunity that we see is in the Agreement Cloud,” says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer. “It is going to be the next big cloud because we think this is about bringing multiple clouds together. We work strongly with ERP and strongly with CRM. We’re actually finding opportunities increasingly every day to make the other cloud investments that people are making have more value before them by bringing them together. What connects them is the agreements those companies do.”

    Dan Springer, CEO of DocuSign, discusses their launch of the Agreement Cloud and how it will transform companies to more easily work together and “be more agreeable.” Springer was interviewed on CNBC:

    DocuSign Helping Companies Be “More Agreeable”

    We’re super excited about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. We realize that our customers have said e-signature is a fantastic foundation for their business. But they have a broader set of needs around the way they not only sign agreements but the way they prepare them and the way they manage them after they’ve been signed. So we’ve built out a broader suite of products and that’s what we’re bringing to market today. 

    I think it’s key, the connectedness that Slack is seeing and pushing for is very similar to what we see as well. Companies want to be, in our terminology, more agreeable. Those are the communications they want to have within their companies or their back-office functions that they’ve tried to digitally transform, but also for the front office. They really want to have a customer experience that is what the customers expect so they will be easy to do business with. We see that the Slack moves are very similar to what we’re seeing in the Agreement Cloud.

    The DocuSign Agreement Cloud Explained

    We Like To Talk About How DocuSign Is Unusual

    We’re super excited about the core e-signature business. While we talk about the Agreement Cloud, we think that’s the broader opportunity to really make this one of the most significant cloud opportunities. We don’t in any way want to move away from the excitement we have over the course e-signature business. It’s sort of what brought us to the dance. If you think about the roughly billion dollars of revenue that we will deliver this year the bulk of it will still come from e-signature. The growth opportunities are very broad. 

    We like to talk about the fact that DocuSign is unusual. We serve from the smallest business to the largest enterprise and across all verticals. We are excited to talk about federal. We had our first million-dollar ACVD deal that we just announced in the quarter. So it’s not just that segment, it really is very broad. We think financial services will continue to be a driver for us and as I mentioned federal will be exciting. You’re going to see us continue to expand internationally and domestically. It really is a broad-based opportunity.

    The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud

    If you think about the overall TAM, e-signature is a $25 billion dollar market. With the broader Agreement Cloud that gets into a magnitude of many billions more, maybe doubling the overall opportunity. When you think about the competitive set it’s so early. We’re only about four or five percent penetrated in the core signature business and less on the broader ones. When we actually talk about competition, we talk about paper and manual processes. This business is so early days. We’re in the early innings. We believe that our biggest competition really is paper and manual processes. We like to say it’s a great competitive set to have because they don’t fight back very hard. It’s just a matter of time before we really are going to be able to replace and modernize those systems.

    When you think about the infrastructure side, it’s a huge part of where the cloud is going. We’ve been much more focused on the application and thinking about that end-user value. But on the infrastructure side, I think it’s a hugely competitive space. It used to be looking like a two-horse race with Microsoft and Amazon. Now looking at some of the other players, such as what Google’s doing, I think you’re going to see more and more competition in that space. I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily bad for those players because it’s a really large expanding market. 

    On the application side, the new cloud opportunity that we see is in the Agreement Cloud. It is going to be the next big cloud because we think this is about bringing multiple clouds together. We work strongly with ERP and strongly with CRM. We’re actually finding opportunities increasingly every day to make the other cloud investments that people are making have more value before them by bringing them together. What connects them is the agreements those companies do.

    The Agreement Cloud Is Going To Be The Next Big Cloud, Says DocuSign CEO Dan Springer
  • AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO

    “T-Mobile literally pulled the hold technology out,” says LivePerson CEO Robert Locascio. “Millions of customer at T-Mobile don’t have to be put on hold. There’s no press one or press two. They go straight to a person. You are messaging them. You are doing what’s natural to you. That’s really what we see as changing the game. We made a big pivot two years ago and launched a whole new platform. There’s a bigger future in bots and AI than there was in chat.”

    Robert Locascio, CEO of LivePerson, discusses how AI-powered conversational bots are being deployed and literally “changing the game” for customers of thousands of businesses using their Maven technology in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game

    We made a big pivot two years ago and launched a whole new platform and I said, “There’s a bigger future in bots and AI than there was in chat that I invented many years ago.” We went for it and as you can see the performance has been really great. I brought Alex Spinelli in about a year ago and he was running the core development team for Alexa. We brought in a lot of people from that group. The difference between us and Alexa is that we have thousands of brands (for our team) to work on. The Delta’s of the world and the T-Mobile’s of the world, instead of just one brand with Amazon.

    We do human interactions also, but we know a lot of those interactions can be automated. Just look at Delta. In a couple of weeks, instead of your flights late and you make a call on the phone and get put on hold, you are going to be able to message a contact center and talk to a bot in real-time to get what you want and change your flight. All of that will happen without you being on hold. That’s really why these brands are gravitating toward us. We are messaging with our friends and family. We are not calling people anymore. So why call a brand?

    T-Mobile literally pulled the hold technology out. Millions of customer at T-Mobile don’t have to be put on hold. There’s no press one or press two. They go straight to a person. You are messaging them. You are doing what’s natural to you. That’s really what we see as changing the game. Right now, Apple just opened up iMessages to businesses. Every business in the world is going to have to be on iMessage through our platform. Facebook Messenger too.

    Maven, LivePerson’s Conversational Engine

    We now have this thing called Brew to You, where right from your seat (in a stadium) you can have a bear and a hot dog delivered to you. But now we have something really cool which is out of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. There is a bot called Rose when you check in. She tells you everything about the hotel. She can help you cut the line at Marquee which is their cool club. This is all about people engaging with the brand and talking to this bot that’s just there for you. And after people leave the hotel they keep talking to Rose!

    What we are finding is that we take our technology which is called Maven, we enable the contact center reps to create the bots, deploy them, and own the bots. For example, we have a contact center down in the Dominican Republic and there’s a woman there named Laura that created a bot for GrillMaster, which is one of our customers. They deployed it and sold millions of dollars worth of grills. She was empowered to basically create that bot, deploy it, and change her life. She doubled her salary. That’s the power of this thing.

    AI Has Got to be Democratized

    EqualAI is a nonprofit we set up a couple of months ago. I started to realize that AI has got to be out there in the hands of many. It’s got to be democratized. It can’t just be with the big tech companies. What we want to do is take all the technology that we have (and make it available). It started with watching my two-year-old watching me command Alexa. Alexa turn on the lights. Alexa play music. She’s seen me command this AI and it’s a woman’s voice. I think what we are seeing now is that children are being affected by this. They are going to school, making demands, and following this.

    We have to change the way that we deploy AI and how we manage it. I wanted to bring the best practices into a nonprofit. We now have other people and brands who are joining us and taking part in this. One of the best practices that we are looking at is why do we have a woman’s voice with Alexa? It could be any voice. It could be a man. We have to think about these things before we deploy them to millions of people and we affect their lives.

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO Robert Locascio

    Also read:

    Deepak Chopra Delivering Reflections on Alexa via LivePerson

  • Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation, Says Salesforce CEO

    Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation, Says Salesforce CEO

    “There’s a huge wave of digital transformation,” says Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. “A lot of these different technologies are coming together. I have the opportunity and Mark has the opportunity to go around the world and talk to a lot of other CEOs. There’s just this huge imperative around digital transformation. Everybody needs to get closer to the customer. Everybody’s trying to improve that customer experience. That’s where Salesforce really brings value to the table.”

    Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses the company’s blowout earnings announcement and how their growth is powered by a huge wave of digital transformation happening worldwide. Block was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    There’s A Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation

    We are so very excited. We’ve had great execution and lots of customer success. A lot of this is really powered by this wave of digital transformation that we’re seeing all over the world. There’s a huge wave of digital transformation. A lot of these different technologies are coming together. I have the opportunity and Mark has the opportunity to go around the world and talk to a lot of other CEOs. There’s just this huge imperative around digital transformation. Everybody needs to get closer to the customer. Everybody’s trying to improve that customer experience. That’s where Salesforce really brings value to the table.

    There’s a huge TAM for CRM. We’re creating that TAM and we’re executing incredibly well and that’s really driven by customer success. There is this thing referred to as the 360-degree view of the customer. That is all about the walls of sales and service and marketing coming down. That is what our 360-degree platform is all about and our customers are looking for that. They’re looking for growth strategies. That’s why you see these great results.

    It’s About Bringing Companies Closer To Their Customers

    We have been recognized widely as one of the most innovative companies in the world. That takes two forms. One is obviously organic innovation and there’s been plenty of that in our history. That’s why we’ve been so successful and our customers keep coming back. But we also have acquisitions. We’ve got a fantastic history of execution. Whether it is the ExactTarget acquisition, or most recently, a year ago, the MuleSoft acquisition, those have all been wildly successful for our customers.

    I had the opportunity to go to Milan to meet with the CEO of Unicredit (in Italy). We’re glad to welcome them to the Salesforce family. They’re going through a transformation that every financial services institution is really going through. It’s all about improving the customer experience. It’s all about reinventing the business model. It’s all about transformation in the retail bank. Unicredit gets it and we’re thrilled to welcome them to the family. They’re doing some of the things that you see being done at Barclays Bank or Citibank or many of the other great financial services institutions. It’s about digital transformation. It’s about bringing companies closer to their customers and that’s what Salesforce is doing.

    Companies Are Investing In Their Growth

    FedEx is a storied brand. It’s a 50-year-old company, they revolutionized the package industry. Fred Smith is an iconic visionary CEO and now they’re taking it to the next level through customer experience. They’re leveraging Einstein to have predictions and make a better customer experience around knowledge. For example, if you had a challenge in some particular way, and FedEx is high quality, but if there were a challenge an agent can help you by bringing relevant information recommended by Einstein to drive a better experience. There were a million use cases of Einstein just like that in many many industries.

    What we’re seeing all over the world is this wave of digital transformation. That digital transformation begins and ends with a customer. We’re seeing CEOs invest. They’re investing in their future. They’re investing in their growth. They’re investing in customer experience across all industries, all geographies, and all segments. It has never been more important. That’s why you’re seeing this growth and you’re seeing these results (with Salesforce). We’re just co-innovating and co-creating with these customers, these companies. That’s why we’re having so much success on their behalf.

    There Is A Huge Wave Of Digital Transformation, Says Salesforce CEO Keith Block
  • Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO

    “We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience,” says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch. “Instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.”

    Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia, discusses the company’s IPO and how the company uses machine learning to react to customer signals in real-time rather than after they leave an experience in an interview on CNBC:

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers

    We’re a Silicon Valley tech company. We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience. So instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.

    Anything is a signal to us, a survey, an IOT signal, a transaction, somebody buys something, they have a bad experience at the pool, or they’re on an airline and they don’t quite like the service that they’re getting, they can feed that back immediately instead of waiting until the experience is finished. We’re all about platform and signal. We’re very different from the survey companies, the feedback companies, which are the old experience economy companies. It’s the application of deep Silicon Valley technology to the problem.

    The Customer Is At the Center of Every Digital Transformation

    Customer experience has become really a major theme for every big brand in the world today. I also think that our technology is innovative and very different. The application of machine learning and the platform and just the operationalization of a private Silicon Valley company are really what I’ve done in the past. Just bringing basic blocking and tackling to go to market and marketing and building up the salesforce. So very simple and taking the story out to a bigger market.

    We actually just signed a revenue share partnership with Salesforce. We have a partnership for Marketing Cloud with Adobe. They’re great alliances for us. We can present our machine learning, our unstructured data, into their Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud. That’s brand new for us this year. It’s great to go to market with leaders like that. Both Adobe and Salesforce completely understand the customer is at the center of every digital transformation and we are at the center of that.

    It’s Not For the Faint-Hearted, But We Invested a Ton In It

    We spent more than a half a billion dollars building this plot platform. That sets us apart from the traditional simple survey vendor. We’ve spent a ton of money on the privacy layer and on the security layer. We’ve worked already for a decade with some of the biggest brands in the world whose customer information is precious. We’re HIPAA certified for healthcare as well. So we take that very seriously. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but we invested a ton in it and it’s worth it.

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch
  • The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    “What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world,” says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.”

    Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, discusses how both B2b and B2C subscription businesses are booming because they are better for the customer in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World

    I just heard about the deal (Salesforce buying Tableau Software for $15 billion) this morning. It just felt perfect for both sides. Tableau is one of the most respected companies in general and Salesforce has proven that they can buy companies and put them through their distribution channel. I think both customers are very committed to customer success.

    I think it just keeps accelerating. If you look at it overall there is a Subscription Economy Index that Zuora puts out and it shows that companies that are in subscription businesses are growing five times faster than the average S&P traded peer company. What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.

    Subscriptions Are Great For Consumers

    Subscriptions are great for consumers. We get to choose what we want, we get to turn it on, and in most cases, we can turn it off. Sometimes we have to make a phone call to make that happen. The phone call is annoying but we have choice. In the business world that’s happening now. They have choice. Before they used to buy things, install them, and have no ability to switch. You were just stuck with what you got.

    In this new world customers have choice and therefore all the vendors, whether it’s a Salesforce or a Tableau or a Slack, have to proactively make sure that you are using all the stuff you buy and getting more value. Also, not just getting more value, that you are getting more value than any other alternative out there.

    There Is A Huge Megatrend That Is Happening

    Slack is a very special company. It’s sort of this triple threat. Customers love it, we run our whole business on Slack. The numbers are amazing in terms of growth rate, in terms of efficiency and net retention. Their existing customers keep spending more money with more than 140 percent net retention. They are also a great culture. I think Slack is one of those businesses that is built for the long term. They can go public in any market.

    There is a huge megatrend that is happening. We have almost this dissonance where technology in some ways is coming more into our lives and taking away more and more of humanity and the people in business. But on the flip side, all of us are longing for a more personal and human connection to the businesses that we work with. We are not ready to turn the whole world over to AI and machine learning. We need that human connection. What’s happening is companies are saying I need to treat my customers more like human beings. I need to be more proactively focused on customer success and make sure that they are getting value.

    They’re also saying I need to treat my employees more like human beings. I need to give them great technology like Slack, like Zoom, and like other great technologies that are going public this year that are helping employees be more successful. There’s this big approach, we call it human first business, which is really changing the way people think about work.

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta
  • Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    “We have something brand-new we call the Commerce Page Designer,” says Mike Micucci, CommerceCloud CEO at Salesforce. “It allows you to create experiences with clicks not code. You can literally drag and drop things around on the page and just put them right where you want to. You don’t need to be a programmer or a data scientist to do it. Your marketers and your merchandisers can build those experiences super fast to respond to different market changes.”

    Mike Micucci, CEO of CommerceCloud at Salesforce, announces new enhancements to Salesforce Commerce Cloud in a discussion at Connections 2019:

    You Have To Really Put the Customer Right At the Center

    In today’s industry, it’s not just about showing up and having a pretty picture you have to really put the customer right at the center. When they are there experiencing your brand you’re not delivering just the premium experience but you’re personalizing it to them. It’s not just on the shopping site it’s everywhere they go, from how you engage with them on social all the way through on customer service.

    Putting the customer at the center to deliver a premium, a personalized experience, that’s a differentiator today. That’s what the customers are expecting everywhere they go. That’s is the key.

    Commerce Page Designer Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code

    Our team has been working all year to get ready for Connections. We’ve got some great news that we’re going to showcase. First and foremost, we have something brand-new we call the Commerce Page Designer. It allows you to create experiences with clicks not code. You can literally drag and drop things around on the page and just put them right where you want to. You don’t need to be a programmer or a data scientist to do it. Your marketers and your merchandisers can build those experiences super fast to respond to different market changes. That’s one of the biggest things that we’re producing.

    The second thing is we also have a lot of new tech for developers. We’re connecting Heroku Solution kit and Commerce together in a whole new way. With this new Heroku Solution Kit, which includes templates to help you build mobile apps, shopping apps, and service cloud apps. They are all right there in front of you so they developers can be super productive with this great environment with Heroku where you can manage and build apps.

    Thirdly is MuleSoft. It takes on average about 39 different systems to pull off a commerce scenario. Those are back-end systems like ERP, your order system, and inventory. What we’ve done with MuleSoft is we made it a lot easier to connect commerce through MuleSoft to all those legacy systems through one unified layer. So today, we’re announcing this new MuleSoft For Commerce Cloud Accelerator so that developers have a whole set of preset of APIs so they can jump-start that process.

    Those are three great innovations. One for all your marketing and merchandisers. Then there are two great innovations for the developers that make them much more productive. Our goal is to help you not only deliver premium experiences but do it really fast.

    Einstein and AI Are Really Reshaping Commerce

    So what is next on the horizon? First and foremost, we always listen to our customers tell us here are the things that they need to drive their business. But what you should be looking for is how Einstein and AI are really reshaping commerce. You’ll see that in how Einstein is not just doing product recommendations but reshaping the entire customer experience.

    Einstein takes away of a lot of those things that you used to do manually, let’s say like visual search where you can shop by pictures, where Einstein will figure out, hey, what’s in that picture and make it really easy to add it to the cart. It can take a lot of the guesswork out of it and just really make the shopping experience delightful. So stay tuned for a lot more AI and a lot more Einstein.

    https://youtu.be/Wpu7zVQTZ-Q
    Salesforce Commerce Page Designer – Creates Experiences With Clicks Not Code – Mike Micucci
  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    “At Amazon, we still take risks all the time,” says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.”

    Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, discusses how to be a successful entrepreneur by being customer obsessed in a conversation at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    The Most Important Thing Is To Be Customer Obsessed

    If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer obsessed. Don’t satisfy your customers, figure out how to absolutely delight them. That is the number one thing whoever your customers are. Passion. You have got to have some passion for the arena that you are going to develop and work in. Otherwise, you are going to be competing against people who do have compassion for that. They are going to build better products and services.

    You can’t be a mercenary. You have to be a missionary. Missionaries build better products and services. They always win. The mercenaries are just trying to make money. Paradoxically, the missionaries always end up making more money.

    We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures

    You have to pick something that you actually have a genuine passion for. You have to take risks. You have to be willing to take risks. If you aren’t going to take risks, if you come up with a business idea where there are no risks there, those ideas are probably already being done. There being done well by many many people. So have to have something that might not work. You have to accept that your business is going to be in many ways an experiment. It might fail. That’s okay. That’s what risk is.

    At Amazon, we still take risks all the time. We encourage it. We talk about failure. We should be failing. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we are going to be moving the needle. We need to have billion dollar scale failures. If we are not, we are not swinging hard enough.

    Disagree and Commit

    If I have a new idea and I want to see it pursued I do have to build support for it. You need very smart people to embrace the idea and move it forward. We have a framework at Amazon, it’s one of our leadership principals, it’s called disagree and commit. That is extremely useful. After you discussed an idea, you do need to make a decision and move forward. The whole team needs to really commit to that. When I really feel strongly about something and the team disagrees with me I have a helpful phrase that I look to use which is, “I want you to gamble with me on this.”

    The truth is when you are in a position like that nobody knows what the right answer is.  You’re not saying I’m right on this. Go do this. You’re saying I want you to gamble with me on this because I don’t know if it is right either. I disagree and commit all the time. I promise the people when I do it, I’m very clear in saying, “I don’t agree with this. I think it is probably not going to work. But I will never say I told you so and I’m going to be on your team. I will do everything I can to make it work.”

    Broadband Access Is Going To Be a Fundamental Human Need

    A recent big bet (we’ve taken at Amazon) would be Project Kuiper. This is our LEO satellite constellation. The goal here is broadband everywhere. One of the things this does, it’s just the way the systems work, you have equal broadband all over the surfaces of the earth. Not exactly equal, it tends to be a little bit more concentrated toward the poles, unfortunately. You end up servicing the whole world.

    It’s really good because by definition you end up accessing people who are under bandwidth including rural and remote areas. I think you can see going forward that access to broadband is going to be very close to being a fundamental human need as we move forward.

    Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: We Need To Have Billion Dollar Scale Failures
  • The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO

    “The most important thing for us and the reason we exist is that all the power is going to all of us, the buyers and consumers,” says Drift CEO David Cancel. “It’s going from companies to consumer buyers. We (as consumers) dictate everything now so every company in the world has to modify how they sell and service to make us happy. This is good news for us but it is a radical shift especially in B2B.”

    David Cancel, CEO of Drift, discusses their new partnership with Adobe and the launch of their joint product called Conversational ABM in an interview with Jeff Barrett:

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers

    We’ve been working a while now with Marketo and now that Adobe and Marketo have come together it’s going to the next level. We announced a joint product today called Conversational ABM which is the next step we are taking. We’ve been working mainly with the Marketo side which is B2B and now we are going to start to work with the B2C side with Adobe. We will be working with consumer companies and business companies. We will be doing both.

    The most important thing for us and the reason we exist is that all the power is going to all of us, the buyers and consumers. It’s going from companies to consumer buyers. We (as consumers) dictate everything now so every company in the world has to modify how they sell and service to make us happy. This is good news for us but it is a radical shift especially in B2B. We are not going to put up with it anymore. We have infinite choice. We have lots of options. We just want to deal with companies that are going to make us feel better and have amazing experiences.

    Removing Things That Prevent Real Conversations

    We do a lot of stuff with bots and AI. What’s exciting there to me is not just that part but removing the friction and removing the things that prevent real conversations and real relationships from happening. We’ve been spending so much time putting things into Excel spreadsheets and databases that we have lost sight that business is human to human. It’s you and me. Bots are not buying from each other. So until the bots buy from each other and the world is over it’s all about all of us.

    Right now we are moving and prioritizing. We are going back to basics. We are going back to how selling, marketing, and how business has operated for all of time. We’ve just been in a weird 10-20 year bubble where we’ve extracted that away. We’ve removed the humanity out of it. Now we are now going back to what it was before.

    You Just Have To Be a Normal Human

    It’s kind of funny because you just have to be a normal human. You’ve got to take away the business hat. You’ve got to take away the things we did before which is what adds so much complexity in the tool space. What is the most authentic relationship that we are going to have? How would I want to be treated? When you start to do that it becomes obvious and the tools are not that complicated. We overcomplicate it because we are used to selling to people in a way that makes it this kind of world.

    But guess what, an entirely new generation is coming online now who doesn’t think this is normal. There are entirely new generations coming online globally around the world who don’t think this is normal. So we have to wake up. They think that personally buying is normal. To think that on the business side of things you can only buy from 9-5 when there isn’t a holiday when there is someone available and when they want to talk to you. It made sense to a certain generation. It is now the thing that is going away.

    The Power is Going From Companies To Consumers, Says Drift CEO David Cancel
  • If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive, Says Zendesk CEO

    If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive, Says Zendesk CEO

    “We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences,” says Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane. “That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience.”

    Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk, discusses how the company has helped change the world of customer expectations in an interview on CNBC:

    Setting a New Bar For Customer Expectations

    We are a software company. We build software solutions for better customer engagement, better customer service, and better customer experiences. We have more than 100,000 brands using our software. We are 3,000 people headquartered here in San Francisco. My broken English is because of my background from Denmark, but we’ve been in San Francisco for ten years and it’s been amazing. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that customer expectations have changed like crazy.

    We’ve had the opportunity to work and have had the privilege to work with a lot of the companies here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley that have changed the world and changed the world of customer expectations. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, all these companies completely changed how we use services. We have worked with all of these guys and it has helped shape us as a company. It has set a new bar for how people are expecting the customer service and the customer engagements from the products and the services they’re using today.

    If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive

    We definitely help companies provide great customer experiences. That is the new currency of today. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have the greatest service in the world, but if you don’t provide a great customer experience you’re not going to survive. We started very much in the world of traditional inbound customer service. But in the world of CRM (customer relationship management) all the disciplines within that touches the customer whether that be on the sales side, the shopping side, the service side, the marketing side, all of these things seamlessly flow together.

    From the customer perspective, it’s just one big experience. You don’t want to know if you are talking to sales or marketing or support, you just want to have one experience. That’s why it’s important for us to help power all of these experiences and bring them together.

    Competition is great. Customers go with Zendesk and customers come to us because they want to keep up with customer expectations. That’s not just about digital transformation. It’s really about staying agile, staying quick, and keeping up with the constant change of customer expectations. That’s the world we are in today. What is working today, what is fantastic today, is going to be mundane tomorrow. It’s a generational thing too. Different generations have different expectations. My kids are going to be ruthless.

    Empowering Businesses To Provide a Much Better Customer Experience

    What we have done most recently is that we’ve launched a new platform concept that is built on AWS called Zendesk Sunshine. It’s open, it’s super scalable. and it’s very developer friendly. It allows you as a business to tie all the different things together. Amazon Web Services is a huge free platform. Every business is moving more and more of the infrastructure to AWS. It’s because it’s an architectural change. It’s a new way of being able to tie everything together without necessarily having to rely on formal partnerships between these businesses. That’s very much what we believe in.

    Our customers are serving about a billion consumers and customers every single year. It’s really like helping our customers in keeping up with the massive demand and the massive expectations of businesses today. I think we are in a magical place really being part of this revolution that is empowering customers and empowering businesses to provide a much better customer experience. We really enjoy it.

    If You Don’t Provide a Great Customer Experience You Won’t Survive, Says Zendesk CEO
  • We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO

    “We’re enabling what we call this new era of hospitality,” says Toast CEO Chris Comparato. “We’re investing heavily in R&D. This is a massive opportunity and the restaurant community is a massive market. The market is untapped and we’re in the early days of a major transformation across the entire industry. For us in many ways, we’re still getting started because we’re making massive investments in R&D across the whole spectrum.”

    Chris Comparato, CEO of Toast, discusses how the company is continuing to invest in R&D and innovate as they disrupt the hospitality industry in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality

    We’re going to do a lot with the money. It’s a nice capital raise ($250 million). We’ve been busy over the course of the past two years really trying to affect a lot of change across the restaurant community. We’re enabling what we call this new era of hospitality. We’re investing heavily in R&D. We look at all of the stakeholders, we look at the guests, we look at the employees, and we look at the owner-manager-operator. This is a massive opportunity and the restaurant community is a massive market. The market is untapped and we’re in the early days of a major transformation across the entire industry. For us in many ways, we’re still getting started because we’re making massive investments in R&D across the whole spectrum.

    A good example of what we are doing is how do you get orders into the restaurant? In today’s consumer, personalization, and convenience environment, how does the restaurant get orders? Whether it’s a tool like Toast TakeOut which we piloted in Boston, which allows you to do mobile order ahead with your phone. Or possibly a kiosk or online ordering or a device called Toast Go which we released last year that allows the waitstaff to take orders at the table and turn tables faster. Toast brings (to restaurants)  two things. It’s all about more revenue in the door and then operational efficiency.

    Toast Growing North of 100 Percent Year-Over-Year

    First and foremost we’re happy being private and putting investments to pilots and R&D and really breaking fruit to the future for the restaurant community. I’ve had a lot of friends who have gone public recently and we’re in no rush. I think it’s a milestone. We’re after building long-term shareholder value. When we look at the opportunity for us it’s to build a pillar company in Boston for the restaurant community that builds long-term investor value.

    We’re growing north of a hundred percent year-over-year in terms of the customer base (and revenue). We’ve got over 1,500 employees. We’ve probably added a thousand employees in the past couple of years. We have an engineering center in Dublin but we’re still US-based in terms of the restaurants that we serve. We serve restaurants across the United States, whether it’s an enterprise like Jamba Juice or nationally acclaimed restaurant operators like Danny Meyer and Jose Andres. We’re all over the US in 30 markets but it’s still the early days.

    Innovating Across the Entire Restaurant Value Chain

    We look at the entire restaurant value chain and we’re trying to make their lives better. It’s hard to run a restaurant. This week we announced Toast Payroll and Team Management. A lot of restaurant operators are spending hours doing payroll every Friday. If we can give them their Friday’s back and streamline payroll so that they can get hours back on efficiency to spend more time with guests that’s what we’re doing. We launched that this week which is an exciting new venture for us. We’re going to continue to innovate across the entire restaurant value chain. This includes the back-office, front office, supply chain, whatever it is.

    There are areas where we built and there are areas where we partner. I think it’s a space that’s dynamically changing. At the end of the day, we want to help transform the community and move the community forward. The Boston Market (where Toast is headquartered) is tremendous. There is sort of two sides to the market. You’ve got this amazing supply chain of talent with MIT, BU, UMass, and Harvard. There is plenty of talent. Then you’ve got on the other side of the market these companies that are transforming industries like Wayfair, CarGurus, HubSpot, and Toast. It’s an amazing market for us to thrive in and it’s an awesome restaurant community.

    We feel like we’re enabling the community to thrive. A lot of the restaurants that are running Toast are adding workforce. Because we’re making their jobs easier they can spend more time with guests, more time cooking, and more time managing the operations. We see a lot of restaurants that are thriving and adding labor and we’re trying to make it easier for them.

    We’re Enabling a New Era of Hospitality, Says Toast CEO Chris Comparato