 Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with you all day, covering Clickworld 23 Live from Mandalay Bay. We love talking with customers. We're going to have a great conversation next. It's making me kind of hungry because Pizza Express is here. And if you've ever had their pizza, which I have in the UK, it's pretty darn good. Please welcome from Click, Brendan Grady, the VP and General Manager, ClickCloud, and Dan Williams, Business Intelligence Manager at Pizza Express. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you. So I've been the pleasure of dining at Pizza Express a number of times in all the times I've been to the UK. But Dan, tell viewers a little bit about the chain and also, here we are at Clickworld. Some of the challenges the business was having with respect to access to real-time data. So Pizza Express was created in 1965, so we've been around for a very long time. Predominantly in the UK, in the Republic of Ireland, we're about almost 400 restaurants. So we're a small country, but we jam in the restaurants. I guess historically, we've been similar to other businesses where we have lots of data kind of flying around in Excel files. We needed a better solution for data governance, for data accessibility, security. So we evaluated tools, we chose Click, and by migrating to kind of ClickCloud, we've been able to provide really robust data sources to our restaurant managers. And we actually kind of furnished them with real-time data, so they were able to kind of upsell and everything on demand, which is really powerful for them. On demand is key, right? For all the hungry consumers out there. And for a small island, it's really packed with pizza. But talk a little bit about the journey with Click. You guys started in 2018, you expanded in 2021, I believe. Talk to us a little bit about Y-Click, because obviously there's a lot of choice out there. Y-Click and the journey that you've been on. So Y-Click, I guess, we evaluated a few other tools. We looked at the Gartner Magic Quadrants, obviously the big three, Click, Power BI, and Tableau. What we found is when we evaluated it, we wanted to democratize building dashboards as much as possible at the time. We found that Click really offered the best way of doing that. That was kind of our perception of it. We also found that we had a really great partner involved, which are Metis in the UK. And so that's kind of why we went with Click. And this week, we kind of treated it almost as a proof of concept for kind of 40 users to start with. And we were kind of our area managers of our restaurants. And then that was really successful for around 18 months. COVID hits. And as a result, the business kind of wanted more data, wanted more accessibility for restaurant managers. And then migrating to Click Cloud made the most sense for that, and it just allowed us to have a really robust architecture behind the scenes as well. So it just made complete sense. Brendan, what was your cloud journey? Because when you roll back to the sort of early days of modern viz, right? You had a situation where you guys were disrupting, you know, building cubes, it would take forever, it would take a month to get what you wanted. By the time you got the data, it was just so slow and outdated. But then you guys embarked on your own cloud journey as largely as a private company. Yeah, so I've actually been at Click for about three and a half years, right? It would be four years this summer and I was hired to actually build the cloud business from ground up. It was basically nothing when I arrived. And what we saw happening was a lot of our long-time customers like, you know, Pete's Express and others, were saying, you know, we need to be in the cloud, right? Everybody is moving into the cloud. What accelerated it for us, like every other cloud vendor out there was COVID, right? The pandemic really, really hit and all of those customers that were trying to manage things on-prem just said, look, we need to get there, we need to get there now, we need to get there yesterday, in fact. So it's been a bit of a journey between August of 2019 and an hour in 2023. Feels like I've been here for a month, but it's been four years already because the market's moving that fast. A lot of acceleration. Double-click, Brendan, on ClickCloud. That's something I would challenge anyone to say five times fast. Probably can't do it. But in terms of, Dan, you brought it up and it was really the natural progression of the Pete's Express deployment. Talk about ClickCloud as really coming in and saving the day for Pete's Express and really driving their business forward and solidifying that cloud journey. Yeah, and we'll tag team on this, I think, right? I mean, I think, you know, when Dan and I were talking about this, I come back to the pandemic, right? I mean, it really, the hospitality industry in every country across the world, they got hit pretty much the hardest, whether it be an airline or a hotel, whether it be a restaurant, whatever it may be. For us, companies like Pete's Express would just say, look, we're hurting and we're going to need to do this in an economical way. We're going to need to provide more access to information to people across our company and we can't manage the infrastructure. We just can't do that anymore. We don't have the people, we don't have the time. Frankly, we don't have the money, right? It really came down to that. And I think for you, that really sort of a, from what I recall, it was that timing that really accelerated it for you. Absolutely, that was the big enabler. So we wanted to get data professional managers but we kind of thought it was a little bit of a nice to have at the time, but COVID just kind of completely changed the game of that. So as we had to kind of keep an eye on our labor, our wastage, in a much greater lens. So yeah, that was the fact. So you weren't, I mean, some restaurants were better prepared than others. It sounds like you had a forced march to digital into the cloud. And how has your business, exiting the isolation economy, how has the business shaped up? I mean, like many companies say, well actually the digital business stayed pretty good. It's maybe higher. The traditional business is sort of back to where it was. What did you guys see? Yeah, I think it's stabilized now. I think it's taking a bit of time. I think hospitality in the UK, and I'm not sure if it's probably the same in the US, but in the UK it fluctuates a lot in terms of the how healthy I guess it is. One interesting thing we've seen is just the spike in delivery, where that was quite a reasonably small part of the business. Now that's quite a big percentage of ourselves now. Again, we thought that might kind of dip as we got through COVID, but it has sustained. So I think we're better for it almost now, but it's kind of taken a bit of time to get there. And what's the delivery like in the UK? Is it like third party services that handle the delivery? You guys vertically integrated that, right? Delivery is not your core competency. No, it's not. We have these three big players in the UK to deliver just eat and Uber Eats. There's no point doing our own thing when they already sell for it. You talked about one of the things I've been saying for years now is one of the silver linings of COVID. And that is access to real-time data before was nice to have. Now, table six. Because whoever's on the other end, whether it's a hungry family or a business that needs catering, they want to be able to do that transaction like that right now. I'd love to understand, Brendan, from your perspective, click photos as the facilitator of that real-time because it's really something like we said it's a necessity for businesses to thrive in this economy, which is quite dynamic. So there's a thought that I like to talk about is I always say there's a cost of not knowing, right? In today's world, every consumer expects you to know them. They know what they want. And more importantly, they want you to predict what they're going to want, right? And for those companies that don't know that, they won't exist. That's just the reality of the situation. And for companies like Pete's Express that really get that, if we look at that data, whether it's employee application data, whether it's across cell and up cell and emerging, they realized, and what I really like about their story is they realized that there is a cost of not knowing. And if they don't embrace this, they won't thrive and they won't expand and they could shrink. Well, for a business, you mentioned the launch of Pete's Express in 1965, the swinging 60s. For a business that's been around for what, 58 years, to be able to modernize and thrive in such challenging times is impressive. Talk a little bit about, Dan, the culture of analytics and data at Pete's Express. So I think it's a bit of a mixed bag. I think we're doing a lot better. I think some areas are more literate than others. And we're actually kind of looking at quite more of a data literacy program to improve that across the board because I think it is a bit inconsistent. However, I guess compared to a lot of our competitors, I think we're in really good shape again. I think it's so saturated with these kind of companies in the UK. We have to stand out. And I think data really helps with that. So I think, again, there's work to do, but we're in a really good place. What's your IT look like today? How has that transformed? Because you said we got to be in the cloud. Would you put everything in the cloud? You still got obviously an IT team. Yeah, we have a strategy to move as much as we can into the cloud because we're quite a lean internal team. We rely on a lot of suppliers and we just kind of want to take away that headache that comes with infrastructure and security. So what does it look like from a restaurant perspective, from the store to the cloud? Walk us through that process and who are the main beneficiaries? I imagine store managers, but I imagine the customers benefit from the secret sauce too. Yeah, absolutely. I think I guess the primary would be the restaurant managers but also they start below them. So I guess the indirect benefits is the waiters will also see the data because the dashboards are on a tablet and they share around also the chefs as well. We'll be able to see that in terms of inventory and waste data. So they are the main beneficiaries and we are launching and expanding into our head office as well. So yeah, and also international franchisees as well. We're really looking kind of to push this out, click out as far as possible. So it's interesting for me is you hear a lot of people start there in analytics journey by starting at the CEO down. Your journey's different. You started out with your store managers so the people that would actually impact your profitability actually impact your revenue growth. You started there down and then you're moving into your central office. That is a fascinating and an amazingly smart approach. You put analytics in the hands of the people that are making decisions on a daily basis. It'll fundamentally change the way your company runs and your results are there, right? That was a conscious decision as well. We felt that those are the people that bring in the revenue. We need to facilitate them with as much as possible and so they're always the priority. So what was the adoption like for them? How'd you get them to adopt? What skills did they need? How did you sort of minimize that friction? So we want to make it as simple as possible for them to access clicks. So again, the nice thing about Click Cloud is that we can use that single sign on. It's just a URL that they can go to. We then had lots of training materials. We held lots of meetings, lots of calls. They talked them through as a drop in sessions and but also we started small. I guess there was potential to kind of throw a lot of data into Click. We thought, okay, keep a few sheets to start with and then we'll expand from there. So Brandon, this is, you mentioned kind of the bottoms up approach here, which is unique but also quite powerful for those businesses that are clanging like this to on-prem and afraid of a cloud journey. What do you say to them? I got two daughters. All right, love the movie Frozen. Just let it go, right? That's all they have to do. There's an opportunity for these companies out there in all seriousness that there are cost benefits. There are risk mitigation benefits and then for those companies that are really embracing the cloud and we were speaking about this the other day, by being in the cloud, Pete's Express and other customers and prospects will have access to the latest and greatest set of capabilities and products without ever having to think about it and it will just be made available so that ultimately it's not about the technology. We can help their business, right? We can help them do better merchandising. We can help customers understand customer churn and things like that. So it really is an opportunity for companies to change the way they do things, impact their top and bottom line. Well, the cool thing that you've talked about being starting with the analytics piece, getting it in the hands of the users is that they've had, and I hope they know this, the opportunity to influence the entire business. Yeah, I agree. They were really, the early adopters, the test ground for this and it proved that it was very successful quite quickly in massively uncertain macro times. Absolutely, yeah. And I think they see that as well. They see that they're trusted with data. So yeah, this is a critical point. If you had a mulligan, I don't know if you golf, but if you had a do-over, boy. What would be the one or two or three things that you would do differently? I think we would have gone to maybe cloud a bit quicker, if I'm honest. I think there's probably the right answer for anyone's to hear. But if we're in much kind of stronger position, we've on premise we have to manage the infrastructure ourselves, that's a lot of manpower and everything. This click cloud kind of looks after that for us. So that's probably the one kind of I would think that we'd want to do if it did it again. So there's an interesting, so Brent, you said there's a cost savings, right? And you get two sides of the debate. Oh, we're cheaper than the cloud on-prem, right? Of course, you know who you get that from, the large on-prem vendors. Have you saved money going to the cloud? Yeah, absolutely. I guess there's more of the indirect savings you get from, like I said, a few hours of manpower. There's also the infrastructure costs that you have. So yeah, absolutely, you would have saved money. So the cloud bill, and maybe the expense of the ongoing expense of renting versus owning might, I don't know, down the road, it might be a crossover it might be more expensive to rent, but from a business standpoint, it's a better business model. Is that a fair way to characterize it? And it may be actually cheaper when you add up all the productivity benefits, right? So that's kind of, I'm trying to parse through the vendor rhetoric, not the quickest part of that. You guys, you're a cloud guy. I get it. I can step away if you guys want. Yeah, no. But so, I'm trying to get, right? So, this is an interesting, because I think we probably pay more for S3 than if we went out and bought a storage device from some vendor, but I would never do that because it would cost me, right? It would just be a waste of time. So I'm trying to understand how you guys think about it. I think it's in terms of, because we're quite a lean team, we don't have the luxury of having big teams that can manage the things ourselves. So then it's always, like I said, those indirect benefits and cost savings that we'll get. So I think that's why we, like I said, it's not just click, we're moving on lots of different applications to the cloud. And how about the tooling? Brendan mentioned, you know, get best of breed, best of breed security. You know, security is an interesting conversation. We'll go there, but so, are you in multiple clouds? You know, kind of one cloud? What's your cloud strategy in that regard? So it's an interesting, we only have kind of one tenant at the moment which we manage full of our restaurants. We are looking to expand to our franchisees. So we're not, because we have about 15 countries that have our franchise restaurants. Again, it's still early days where we're kind of talking about whether we go multi-tenant, whether we bring it into our own, I guess these are the conversations we would need to have. But I think we want to be as flexible as we can where we offer them the ability to have their own insight, but also kind of a bit of control centrally as well. It helps. John, the other interesting thing about your story here is that, so they're running on click cloud. We run on AWS, that's our backbone, right? That's what we do. You're an Azure shop for all intents and purposes where you're doing it. Yeah, so it's interesting. We get a lot of questions saying, oh, but we don't run on AWS. And I will cite you frequently saying, well, we have other customers who also don't run on AWS. So there's, you talked about cost savings, but there are really three things, right? Save money, that's one. Make money, clearly they're doing that. But also mitigating risk is another key thing. By being in those multiple clouds and being in the cloud, you're able to mitigate some risk there. I mean, I think that's a really interesting angle. Yeah, because there's an expected loss if you use an insurance term, right, that you deal with. And we really haven't got into the plumbing, but since I have you here, so you're running on AWS. That's your backbone. Are you taking advantage of sort of new silicon advancements? Yeah, so we are always looking at what AWS does. I mean, let's look at AWS's history and where they come from. So we're always looking at that, but we're also looking at the market too, right? And we are getting inquiries from customers to say, is there ever a chance to run an Azure or GCP? And so we will continue to look at that and we'll look at the best in breed and what we got on AWS right now. Right now our strategy is get really good on AWS, master that, and then look at expanding potentially to other clouds, but that's something that we're thinking about. I mean, there's definitely a business case for doing that from a partnership standpoint. You partner with AWS, partner with Azure, partner with Google, they're good distribution channels. Is there a, I guess there's a technical case that maybe somebody has a, maybe you love BigQuery or something or maybe your customers do, so it opens things up, but in the flip side, it does add a layer of complexity, you know? It could add a ton of tactical data, it could add a layer of complexity and frankly, having the control plane on AWS, that's really the control plane. It really gets down to as we respect customers keep their data, right? That you've heard that message here all day, so we're going to continue to do that, so it's something we're thinking about, but it's not anything that customers are screaming saying you must do this tomorrow. We won't go with you. Right, but so just thinking ahead of those sort of benefits of doing that, or if you did that, you would make it a common experience no matter where you went. You would abstract all that complexity. It's all about the user experience, right? Everybody's got a cell phone. Everyone loves it, right? Super easy to use. It's all about the experience. We'd never give anybody a different experience. It's just 2023. And that's when a hard part comes in. You got to do that abstraction and make sure it performs well. That's what we call super cloud, right? When you- I love the expression super cloud, right? Shouldn't know which cloud you're running on. It doesn't really matter. Right, that's the point. It doesn't really matter. It's not the superlative that gets people all pissed off, but it's really the supra, the above, you know, the floating above. Yeah, I mean, I'm from Boston, right? It's the wicked good cloud, right? It's the wicked good cloud. It's that one as well. So it's sort of like that. I like that. Dan, what's next from a cloud journey perspective? You talked a little bit about that, but tell us kind of what's next. So what are some of the things that you're excited to hear about from Click at Clickworld? Tomorrow is going to be a lot of touching and feeling. We've got the chief product officer coming on next. Hopefully we're going to get some teasers, but what excites you about the partnership and where it's going to be able to take Pizza Express? So I think the QCDI and Thailand's partnership is really interesting. We actually had a moment reviewing our data warehouse architecture because it's a little bit old fashioned now. We're looking to migrate to more cloud tour again. As Brennan said, we are typically a Microsoft Azure shop, but we're really keen to see how QDCI and kind of Thailand can help us with that. Because I have a great kind of idea in my head where we'd have complete end-to-end Click platform. That feels really natural. So I'd love to get there if it works. Do you have Pizza GPT? Pizza GPT, yeah. I'll write that one down, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be amazing. We were in the wrong industry, right? That's not a bad idea. No, I mean, you know, you got a lot of consumer data, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think it would be great. I know there's been talks about chat GPT and how that could be embedded into Click as well. So yeah, would love to see that more. And I know there's already the natural kind of language processing within Click, the inside advisor, which you haven't really done enough with. You will have to come to the keynote tomorrow. Fantastic, again. You'll have to come to the keynote tomorrow. Tell us, what can you tell us about the keynote tomorrow? Give us a little teaser. Neither confirm nor deny anything. There's a keynote tomorrow. And those of you that should tune in online, right? You can watch it online. Oh, Mike was very clear this morning. Like, people, be careful what you're doing tonight because you need to be here tomorrow. You need to be there to see it. There's going to be some real, James who's coming on, I'm pointing over there because he's about to come on. He'll have a great story for you tomorrow. They'll have a good story here. So I think there's a real opportunity to get some good insights into what's going to happen next. We'll have a day two product day. You get to see some new stuff. Absolutely. Show and tell. Last question for you. What can you tell us about what's next for ClickCloud in terms of innovation, helping customers in every industry really become data companies? You nailed it on every industry. So that's really the key. So as we look at our journey over the past few years, regulated industries have been a bit of a challenge for us, right? It's customers have been reticent to move their data into the cloud. Over the past year, we've become FedRAMP certified. That's a massively strong story for us. So we're able to help those federal customers. We're looking at StateRAMP helping some of those state and local customers in North America. So we really focus in there. We also just got HIPAA compliant. So we can go after the healthcare industry. So we're focusing. We are going to continue to invest, especially around compliance and certifications because protecting our customers' data is absolutely critical. So you can see some continued investment there from a technology perspective as well as compliance perspective. And then obviously we're looking at the trends in the market, right? We're listening to what our customers say. We're listening to what our prospects say. We're listening to what the market says. And there are some things that are in the augmented analytics, artificial intelligence space that we have to be thinking about, right? So you can expect to see some of those things in the future on our cloud. We've got our AutoML that was just released last year. So that's our first step in that direction. It's exciting. It's really fun to see this thing grow. And it's great to help people like People Express. Yeah. Pete's Express, sorry about that. And People Express, too. And People Express is great, too. Well, we will keep our eye on this space for sure. Brendan, Dan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. Great story. Keep up the great work. Thank you very much. And who knew data is the secret sauce of Pete's Express? You thought there was some in the sauce? It's data. Guys, thank you so much. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, this is Lisa Martin coming to you live from the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, baby. Cube coverage of Clickworld 23 continues next.