 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage here in theCUBE of VMworld 2018. We've been here for quite some time. We've got a lot to go. Over 90 thought leaders are going to be working with us. I'm Peter Burris. I'm the head of research at Wikibon and we've got a great guest today. Kylian Evers is the vice president of CX and UX. Customer experience, user experience at Veritas. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, there's so much that you could talk about when you start talking about CX and UX. And a lot of technology people are starting to understand what these things are. A lot of users are starting to recognize that adoption doesn't happen if you don't make it easy for the user. What's the difference though between CX and UX? I love that you asked this question. So user experience, as you know, it's everything that goes on in terms of a human engaging with technology. Now, when you think about how you engage with your phone, for example, that's a great example of a good user experience. Now, when we apply that user experience and we move beyond it to customer experience, we're really looking at the customer's entire journey. How do you engage with Veritas? How do you find us? How do you engage with our sales? Understand our marketing? Buy a product? Get support for a product? And upgrade a product? That entire life cycle? With all of the best learnings from our user experience, that is customer experience. So if I can kind of encapsulate that, we might think of user experience as the interaction or the quality of the experience you have with a device or a piece of software or a machine, whereas customer experience is the experience you have with the brand that's ultimately delivering that. There's a sales person, there's a sales engagement good, there's a support engagement good, it's the whole immersive, the degree to which the brand is immersive in how the business operates. So, great, that's obviously, this is an important set of things. But what does the VP of UX do? Because are you evangelizing this? How is this working out? It is a bit of an evangelization role, but more importantly, I think of my job as the customer's advocate. I look at everything with a really critical eye to make sure that our customers are getting the best experience in everything that Veritas applies. Everything that we provide is to that mark that really makes their experience fantastic. And that's really my job at the end of the day. So I can be designing, I can be doing research, applying these great principles, redefining product experiences, pushing support, pushing sales, all with an eye to deliver the best for our customers. Now, as an analyst, someone who spends their time with our users helping to make decisions and getting value, one of the biggest challenges, especially as these technologies are more embedded within the business, is how can I encourage everyone in my organization that should adopt a new solution or a new way of doing things to actually adopt it? And that's much more than the quality of the interface of the software. Is that what you mean? As an advocate, you want to facilitate the process by which your customers get time. Absolutely. And yeah, let's talk about that. Because the thing is, I could make you use something, but that's not going to give you that level of adoption if you want to use something. So it's about getting to that want. Getting to what you, what's your motivation? What's your desire? It's about building that community so that you create that virtuous cycle of wanting to use the software, liking to use the software, continuing to use the product. Advocating for using the software. Advocating for using the software. You know, I'll tell you something. I've actually seen a lot of examples where the product was the right product for the solution. The IT organization did a good job of implementing and rolling it out, but ultimately because they didn't think about that journey process within their own business. That's right. Their customers, their users, ultimately abandoned. And so what you're trying to do is making sure that they don't abandon. That's exactly right. But Veritas also is very deeply embedded within a whole lot of activities within the business by virtue of what you provide. So how does Veritas' customer experience provide a glow to other Veritas partners that are embedded within the business? I love it. And that actually speaks to a couple of different ways. So one, we have a phenomenal program that we work with our customers, our partners, our end users to understand what they're facing on a day to day basis, understand what's going on in their company world. To be able to create that integration. The other thing that might surprise you considering that you would be talking about customer experience and design, let's go to the other end of the spectrum. API first. How do you create those customer interactions? How do you create great experiences? You create great interactions, great engagements, integrations. So we have an API first methodology and perspective that we bring to be able to say it's not just about the screen, but it's about how you can integrate with that experience. Between the two of those things, we can create those great experiences from end to end. So as an advocate for the customer, you're not just talking to the people that are building the product. You're talking to people who are engaging to talk about the sale, conduct the sale throughout the entire journey. Give us a couple of examples of how Veritas has become a better partner to customers as a consequence of taking on this challenge. Well, I have to talk about NetBackup and specifically our new release of NetBackup 812. This is our flagship product and we have redesigned this from the ground up. It has the API first methodology. It has all of the integrations. It has a phenomenal experience. We have simplified the ability to create backups. We have simplified the creation process of our protection plans so that everything is seamless. One, two steps, that's it. We have worked through our programs to build this and to create this overall experience by building it together. We have worked with our customers, with our end users, and partnered with them to create this experience. So that's just one example. And this is the first product coming out of the gate that has this incredible experience. And we're not going to stop there. We're continuing onward. We are thinking about upgrade. We're thinking about sales, marketing, all of those aspects together. So the notion of user experience and customer experience, it's interesting. It started in the technology world. When people started talking about personas as the user. And then when we started digitizing marketing through the web, it moved into the marketing world. And you're starting thinking about broader notions of customer engagement. At Veritas, how is that notion of design, design thinking, informing the process of building products that are easy to use, easy to top, great time to value, and are going to stick and stay inside a customer organization? And that's really part of my internal evangelization. I have really transformed the overall organization at Veritas. We now have a dedicated, centralized customer experience and user experience organization. We work directly and deeply with our engineering, our sales, our marketing partners, our product managers to infuse design thinking. We've done workshops, we teach on the go to be able to teach that perspective. It's actually something that everyone's hungry for because once you see it, then you start to know, aha, this is actually better, right? And engineer sees this is a better experience. Everybody wants to provide the best for our customers. So it's somewhat of an easy job to do the evangelization because folks are readily adopting it because it's natural, it's intuitive. And look, there's some big IT organizations out there that are adopting some of these principles as well. They start talking about Home Depot and others. Very, very successful efforts. Their failure rates have gone down dramatically from an adoption standpoint as they have adopted some of these practices. So when you think about ultimately the impact that it's going to have on Veritas's relationship with his customers, where do you want Veritas to be in three years as a brand known for superior user and customer experience? Where do you think it's going to be? How are people going to reflect that back at Veritas? So if I can put on my prediction hat, we are already the number one in net backup. We are already the number one backup provider. We're going to be the number one experience provider. That is my goal. For everything that we do. Not bad. So one more question as we think about where this is going. You've been here at VMworld for at least some period of time. Pat Gelsinger talked significantly about bridging and the new communities that have to be served and the role that technology's going to play as we move forward. Obviously for technology to become a bigger feature of people's lives, it's got to be easier. It's got to be more tied into ultimately how people live their lives. So when you think about Veritas, Silicon Valley company, been around for a long time, number one on a lot of markets as you said, how does that end up translating into better community engagement, better customer trust, all these other things that are really, really important. Is this going to create capital that you guys can use to introduce faster products, introduce more functionality, better rich partnerships? Absolutely. So I have to talk to you about our design strategy because it's really the three pillars that we are building all of our new experiences on. It has to be simple. It has to be easy for everyone to understand and this is what we were talking about earlier in the day. It has to be intuitive. It has to be based in human interactions because that just feels intuitive. Technology is not scary. It's not hard. If it's simple and if it's intuitive, you're going to be able to use it. The adoption rates are going to increase. And finally, it has to be integrated because if it's not integrated, if it's siloed, the adoption rates are going to go down. No one's going to want to continue to use it. You're not going to build that community, not going to build that market share. So really, my design strategy is based in exactly what you're talking about. It's simple, it's intuitive, and it's integrated. That makes great products. And it gets customers excited and makes them trust the solution so they themselves, there's something in the adoption world called reinvent. You got it. Customers to reinvent on Veritas and constantly push the envelope of how they're getting value because that makes you a better company. Exactly. All right. Killian Evers. Vice President, CXUX, Veritas. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. And this is Peter Burris. Once again, Chief Research Officer at Wikibon theCUBE. I want to thank you very, very much. This is our last shot of the day. We're going to be doing wall-to-wall coverage tomorrow. Stay here with theCUBE. More about what's going on in VMworld. We'll talk to you again.