 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio today. The COVID thing is continuing to go and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world, those things have all been canceled or made virtual. And everyone's still trying to figure out what does the virtual event look like? What are the characteristics of it? And we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us. Keith jumped in with both feet, like right when this thing went down and said, I'm gonna have my own CTO advisor virtual conference. So first off, Keith, I miss you. Great to see you. You know, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time. So great to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you. If it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. And so tell us about, you know, kind of your decision to jump in with both feet and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. So I talked about this a little bit on a random just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from virtual in-person events. And plus my brand, the CTO advisors tie to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content kind of on the ground, gorilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution from most things. One, we feed off the energy of the community. So we need to be on the ground as much as possible so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions. And two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problem. So we jumped in, head in to say, let's do a virtual event. I don't know if I would have done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. So before we jump into the kind of the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug. When is it, where should people go? Registration, I assume is still open. Why don't you just get that out there for the folks? So even if you see this after registration closes, quote-unquote closes, it's April 21st, 1030 a.m. central to 330 p.m. central, that's U.S. time. You can register at ctoadvisorvirtualconference.com. Excellent. So let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things, as you said, in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space. And there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event almost by definition is now you've broken up kind of the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date, the actual display or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you kind of worked with kind of this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world and how are you finding it in terms of actually day-to-day execution? So you guys done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in the Cube studio, you have commercial internet. It's fairly reliable. When you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference center, but it's still enterprise class, internet access. So you can do real-time video on the Cube fine. We can go to cube.tv, cube.net and see what you guys are doing real-time. And it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in remote to you while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace one, two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event. So in the background, you'll see that we're in Keith Towns' basement. The other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content because there's not much value in it being live if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about the Cube is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground. They're watching it live, they're interacting with it live. We're tweeting about it. So how do you reproduce if not that exact filling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content? And that's what we've focused on. Creating high quality video content that you can consume kind of as a watch party. So on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time so that you can enjoy the community and the speakers who are presenting. You can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running and they're able to interact with you. So we've embraced kind of the medium and then after the fact, of course, we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact. Because the majority of the people will watch it after the video's done. Right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have approximately? So we have, I think, 21 sessions. 21 sessions. And a five-hour period. So we're running three separate tracks, two super techy geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself. And we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. Right. You know, it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent size venue. It'd be expensive. And then you would have to pick, you know, kind of your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing. So it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions is really a function of what you can manage or what the community can kind of self-organize. You're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Santa's Convention Center. And the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss, is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event because they're actually presenting. So, you know, we had a guy on the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about, you know, a car is not a mechanical horse. It's not the same. Digital is not the same as physical and there's some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of cut off by the idea, wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? How will I interact with, you know, webinar style? And I think this is the other end of the spectrum. Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too. It's not a in-person event and it's also not a webinar. So don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned phony questions that some people have behind the scenes. It is a real authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service. I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left. I was watching the service and the ministers delivering his sermon. And in the Zoom meeting, there he is playing with his little two-year-old daughter while he's giving the talk. And I'm like, yeah, I just open-chatted him. And next thing you know, there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand. So it is a really unique experience. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. It's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not? And it can't be a webinar. And when we were first going through this kind of shake-up and we were really trying to identify some of those things and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar. Because what's a webinar? It's generally a one-way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there. And they only open it up to Q&A at the very end. And it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in and you don't know how they're picking and it only goes to the host. So really having kind of an open live engagement around an engaged group of people with a piece of content is kind of the coalescing of those people really is, it's not a webinar. It's a very different kind of experience. And so I was like, you're really embracing that. Yeah, it will never replace a live event. You know, live has, again, we talked about the energy, the, you know, people like, do you really want to smell the sands, Keith? You know what? It's all part of the energies. It's instant reminders to, oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here and you have these instant cues that we as humans love. We don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it will augment. I love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment the cube once we return to physical events. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think this behavior that we have now been forced to engage in in terms of, you know, increase working from home and, you know, kind of increase use of video conferencing and that is a different communication mode. I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually. I think, you know, if you look at what a conference is, you know, there's a couple of different tracks, as you said, there's an expression going around kind of the rally moment, right? The keynote, you know, we want, we have a strong message that the CEO wants to get something out. And I think that's of tremendous value. But then you look at all the breakout sessions and the, you know, kind of information flow and the kind of the community engagement. Those, quite frankly, can be done online much more efficiently and much less, with much less cost. So, you know, will the new, you know, conference be kind of this, the celebration and, you know, basically a customer appreciation event and they want to have a party. But really that, it, I don't think it will be quite the information flow. Because why should product group A wait until the conference date if they're ready to release their information and wait for product group B or C or D. So this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas. I don't think it makes any sense. You know, it's waterfall versus DevOps. And if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why, why hold the information back? It really doesn't make sense. Indeed, couple, you know, kind of the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will. And education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter, 2021. You know, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel, product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it. I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams, super interesting as both like theCUBE, the CTO advisor, we were able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it that our partners will come and embrace. Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder as you've been collecting your content for your show next week, is that the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall surrounded by 10,000 people in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world at Alt-Tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have is a distraction, you know, it's really incumbent on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver or else you're going to lose the audience. And I think it's going to be really interesting people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning. And, you know, some of these tips and tricks aren't going to carry the weight because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp. It's got to be powerful and it's got to be engaging or people are just going to step away. And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how when I take a break at a conference I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference and I might go back out to take a call, et cetera but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get them to come back? They don't have to come back that day or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal. So we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event. This is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event. You know, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event. The virtual event, you know what? You got a third of your audience that first day, the third of the audience the next week and then the rest of the audience creeps in, you know over the next three or four weeks and how do you engage them? How do you get them to come back? And ultimately consume your content and your message. It's something that, you know, I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. Yeah, but I think we have, right? In the way, how do you consume video today? How do you find information, right? You go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right? And you know, right now the biggest phenomenon in pop media is the Tiger King, right? So when do people watch the Tiger King? How do they hear about the Tiger King? When do they actually sit down and watch it? Has nothing to do with, when I watch it has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages and I say, hey, you know, Keith, have you seen the new episode? So, you know, when you look at consumption patterns to me, it's really interesting. It's kind of bifurcated. You either binge watch and just really get into something that you're into and you just go, go, go for hours and hours and hours or you're getting snippets, right? You're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits. And I think it's this kind of ugly middle where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out. And I think it's really going to, you know, kind of bifurcate and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways and piece parts and you don't have to necessarily, you know, kind of sit through kind of a straight rote consumption as a captive audience. So I think the opportunity is really, really good. If the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things, of course, as well. So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot. And one of the, our co-host on theCUBE and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn. And he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say, you know what, we're going to, I'm going to live tweet this session from three months ago. And that refreshes the, again, the conversation is not about when the content was created. It's about the conversation as long as it's relevant and finding mediums to help amplify that message. Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity. You know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right? And Live Nation around concerts, right? They had that particular event when you go to the show and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right? Extending the glow after and also kind of building the excitement before and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played. And I think, you know, we've got the same opportunity here. That's why, again, if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs. You know, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up and you can get it back out there again. And then again, you know, hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community and you talked about Quinnipig at Quinnipig, I think it's Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration. And I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet. I know you do a lot of that. So, you know, working with other influencers, if you will, or other people in the communities and introducing each other's community to one another. I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities. And if there's some overlap there, then they both have kind of a win-win. And again, I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once. It really opens up this opportunity for much more, you know, kind of win-win, let's work together and build community together across leverage versus it's either yours or mine. And it's really more of a competitive thing. And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers and you bring up a really interesting concept. You know, our friends at VMware is going to be put on VMworld in the next few months. And they usually had a U.S. conference and a European conference. We're both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So, if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit kind of the live experience to the U.S. time zone? Why can't I cater this, you know, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event. It's going to be a all-hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe and the U.S. and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone and cross-pollinating. So, that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the U.S. event or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital. So, there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. Yeah, yeah. And I'm just going to get kind of one more concept what I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it. But if you think of the value to the company, and let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there. And again, we talked about kind of this rally moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides. Now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one-way kind of communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically because there's so much kind of institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. Yeah, two points, kind of two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to kind of do a five, eight second, hey, happy, this is the Townsend family, happy Easter. And then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family at the family at the family that I recognize saying hi, happy Easter. So you have that moment and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well. They amplify end user content. There was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours. Went viral. You have these opportunities again to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day and one of my attendees and presenters said, you know what, Keith? The conference is, the virtual conference is such a democratizing event because it enables me whether I could not afford to go to a conference before or I couldn't travel or whatever reasons I could not attend a virtual conference or a conference before. The virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. Yeah, it's great. So again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts. And again, for everybody, April 21st, 2020 next week, 10 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.