 Hey everyone, welcome back to Mandalay Bay. It's theCUBE live at Clickworld 2023 in fabulous, but windy Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here all day with Dave Vellante, unpacking everything that's going on at Click. We just came in from the keynote. We've got two great guests. We're going to be talking about the impact of the talent acquisition for customers. You won't want to miss this. Please welcome Drew Clark, one of our alumni, back to Chief Strategy Officer at Click. Jamie Kaiser joins us as well, the COO of Talent. Guys, great to have you. Thank you for joining us. So glad to be here. Great to see 2000 or so folks here, Drew. First Clickworld since 2019. You are a Click veteran, if you will. Talk a little bit about, from your strategic vision perspective, everyone's very excited about the talent acquisition. We're going to get your perspective on where it sits in your strategic vision. Bring out that crystal ball and then Jamie will go to you. All right, well with the crystal ball, you got to go back a little bit. So we're 30 years old and 30 years ago, we started working with our first customers to be able to kind of bring human intelligence, data analytics, and ultimately getting to an outcome. That was done on a simple kind of departmental deployment with Tetrapack, our very first customer. That vision is still true today, but at an enterprise scale. And so now we have 38,000 customers around the world. And one of the themes that continues to come on is how do we actually help the human beings work with data analytics to generate kind of positive outcomes? And this is where kind of our acquisitions have been and will continue to kind of support. We are singularly focused on that. It's one of the things we learned in the pandemic, Jamie, is access to real time data is no longer nice to have. It's table stakes for organizations in any industry to be successful. We, you know, in our consumer lives, we expect, we can get anything we want. 24 seven doesn't matter where we are in the world, we're going to be connected. Talk a little bit about what's going on at Tallend. Your vision as COO for this unity that is impending. Yeah, thank you. So first let me take it back a little bit. Just tell you a little bit about Tallend. I know not everyone tuning in is familiar. So Tallend, not quite as old as click. We're about a almost 20 year old company, French roots. We were French founded, so strong European heritage. Got almost 1300 employees and, you know, really have just, you know, grown to a scale. We're very excited about the acquisition. The last few months for us from a vision perspective, you know, we have, we think every day and talk to customers every day about that point you made. It's no longer a nice to have. The minute the data shows up, it's old, it's stale. And so our engineering efforts, our strategic efforts have really been about how do we help customers to build those pipelines, to put data in the, you know, from source systems to targets in a way that is real time, that is constant, that is accurate. And a big thing for us from a vision perspective is about this notion of the trust score, right? How do we ensure that data is trustworthy so that when a business user is using it to make decisions or needs insights, they know it's right, they know it's accurate. Trust is oil, sorry. No good. I'm just going to comment, trust is oil. It's absolutely essential. Organizations need to work with companies like Talent and Click so that they can ensure that what they have is high quality, but it's all about trust. Basically just want to make that comment. It's interesting through, and Jamie, theCUBE's first big data show was 2010. We did Hadoop World, and it was just sort of, you know, this organic meetup was very cool. And then we just embedded ourselves into the big data community, and Click, Attunity, and Talent were always right there. All three companies were big supporters of theCUBE. And it's really interesting to see how this world is coming together. We were talking to Mike Capone about, you know, platforms, right? Not just these bespoke tools, and I know, you know, Gartner Magic Quadrants have to go in deep to each of these different areas. But my question, Drew, is when you think about M&A, obviously it's going to be customer driven. But how do you make decisions around, what are you looking for in an acquisition? What's a target acquisition look like, and how is that decision made to actually go forward? Well, when we do M&A at the company, there are four things that we look for. First, it's got to be aligned to the vision, what we just talked about. And the second thing is the technology fit. And we get that kind of indication of technology fit from joint customers, how they're using the platform and to be able to work with it. The third is about culture. This is super important for every acquisition that we've done. We've actually walked away from deals where culture wasn't right. And this is where we're excited about our Swedish heritage in Europe, in Thailand's kind of French heritage, and kind of, as we think about a global kind of technology company coming together. And the fourth area is financial. Now, a lot of people that get spent up all their time on, okay, how much did the acquisition cost? How do you work with that? But if we don't have the first three, doesn't really matter about the financial side. And so all of our acquisitions have met those criteria. And then we go through three stages of integration. And this is where we realize the value of technology fit and then cultural fit. So the three stages, you run and work independently. You kind of still continue to do your jobs for the customers. Second stage, integrate. And this is where you start bringing the tools together. And then the last stage is scale. So we bought a company called Big Squid two years ago that's now click AutoML. Two out of three customers in our cloud are using it right now. And they have generated over 500,000 predictions on data models in our cloud. That's the scale, they're at that scale portion of the phase. And talent, we're going to go through the same kind of integration kind of phases as soon as we get through regulatory approval. How would you describe the talent culture, Kami? And why do you think it's a good fit with click? Yeah, you know, the little bit of time I've been able to spend with click folks, one of the things many have said to me is it's like a family. And what they mean by it is having each other's back, lining up around common mission and goals and really wanting to work in the spirit of the customer. And I see a lot of those parallels at talent, the deep roots and the passion for what we do. We have a lot of amazing technologists and people who are just data geeks, right? They've done this for a long time. They love what they do. They're incredibly passionate about building tools and data management solutions for customers. And I think that's going to be so complimentary to click when we're able to come together. So we, oh, go ahead. I think she just called me a data geek. But you know, just. That's a cool thing. That's a cool thing. That's a cool thing. Yeah, I'll take that. I'll take that. I agree. And I am. You should put that on LinkedIn, on your profile. But talk a little bit about, Jamie, about some of those, you know, it's not just about the features and the functionalities and the capabilities. It's the scale. You talked about the scale and what click is delivering. Jamie, talk to us from Talon's perspective and then Drew, maybe chime in. What scale can we expect this acquisition to deliver? And what's the, what are some of the outcomes that those customers are going to be able to realize? Yeah. So one of the really cool things for me when I came to Talon was realizing I was in a business where every single industry, every customer around the world needs talent. It's data, right? Everybody is using data. And so one of the great things about scale that Drew and I talk about is starting lower market, down market, we have Stitch. We have a product from a company we acquired in 2018. Stitch is an entirely managed cloud ETL solution. What's great about that? Some customers don't have big IT shops. They don't have time for a big project. They want to get data moving quickly. They can use Stitch. And then from a scale perspective, as their business changes as things grow, they've got talent and eventually, right? The power of click to come together and we'll be able to grow with them. And then from a talent perspective, because we're agnostic, we can serve customers on-prem in hybrid workloads, cloud environments. We've made a big push to the cloud over the last couple of years and have really invested in our cloud technologies. And so I think from that scale perspective, we meet customers where they are and it's really great to be there. Speaking of being agnostic, I was just looking at some information from click over the last few days, talking about being agnostic. Click said, same thing, we want to meet customers on the cloud of their choice. How is this power couple going to enable customers to do that so that they're really in the driver's seat? Yeah, so from our perspective, we work with customers wherever they are. If they're on kind of private clouds, they're on their own data centers to Google, to Azure, AWS. And as we work with them, what we're finding is that it's always an and. It's never all in on one. It's a this platform and this platform. And when you bring in data integration and you're working with a control plane that allows the data to kind of stay where it needs to for GDPR kind of compliance on the regulatory, but also just the right information to the right place at the right time. And this is where the hybrid really kind of comes in. And we're committed to that. I think that's where that technology fit kind of came in when we looked at how we operate from the delivery to the understanding and to the execution of that kind of data. We have to work with it. Yeah, no, I think you said it really well. It's not going to limit us in terms of when customers change decisions. We've got a big focus on cloud transformation and cloud strategy, and we found Clicks got a similar journey as well. So bringing those things together in terms of helping customers move from where they are to where they want to go is going to be great for both companies. Catch a question about Stitch. I think a Stitch is like a capability, let me take data and put it into a data warehouse from different sources. And I think of attunity replicate as doing something similar. Can you help us sort of understand the difference between those two? Yeah, fundamentally it's about the sources. So Stitch is a cloud SaaS source data loader. You got it right. You know, it's like, all right, I've got these 144 cloud data sources. 140 plus, Stitch API, yep. And that's getting it into kind of the repository that you need. Replicate, and what we loved about the acquisition of attunity and their flagship product, replicate. It is a log-based kind of change data capture really on client manager, on-premises data sources. So as information changes in an SAP system, somebody's ordering and buying something at a point of sale. I just want to move that one piece of data up to where it needs to. I don't need to move the whole thing. And so change data capture, replicate, is about taking that at scale. And so we have customers who are replicating data from 27 SAP systems. One of our customers on stage today talked about 650 kind of data sources moving on that. You add in the cloud from Stitch and now you bring in the trust in the data quality capabilities of talent. I have confidence in the data. It is really about kind of back to that vision of combining human intelligence with data analytics for outcomes, but with today's modern architecture. So we get out of outcomes. Jamie, share with us a customer example, a joint customer example, that Ethan really speaks to the value proposition of what talent delivers with click. Yeah, so Lenovo comes to mind. Lenovo, as you know, is a PC computer hardware company. And Lenovo has both talent in click and they use talent for an e-commerce hub that they have, but they made a change in wanting to be able to bring in an understanding of customer needs. They felt like they had a thriving e-commerce hub, but it was missing that component of how do we figure out that next best action? And so they started with implementing predictive analytics, but the executives were finding it wasn't giving them the information they needed. It wasn't fitting the need. And so they wanted to move to prescriptive analytics and did so by taking a model that then said, I've got, you know, I think 60 summaries of user data scraping sites like Amazon and pulling in that information. So now by using that analytics and bringing that into the e-commerce hub, they found that their sales have increased, they've improved customer lifetime value, they reported hitting their target of $4 billion in sales and on track to hit $8 billion by 2026. So they see those metrics really tell the story. It's a business changing metrics. It's not just we're faster, we can see more. It's revenue, it's customer experience because it's all about the customer experience, right? We have this expectation that we can get anything we want wherever we are, it has to work. Whatever the company is, if my grocery store, if it's a car dealer, if it's e-commerce, I need to be able to have, and I want that next best action to be relevant. We can talk days about that. And there's your intro on scale. You talk about the outcomes at that scale with what Lenovo is doing. It's not just technology scale, but it's business outcome scale. And that's so important. So I presume you're not done, right? Oh no. Yeah, you're looking out there, what's the private markets like today? I mean, you know, the money was cheap, so there was a pretty good balance sheet situation out there, although when you look in, a lot of companies are now having 12 months or less. And so, I guess my question is, how are you thinking about M&A versus organic investment? I'm not trying to take you out of a job, but. But as you, I mean, you've done a lot of acquisitions. Are you done? What's the balance look like? Are you turning the knot back? Well, so if you go back to 2016, we've done 10 acquisitions. Included talent. No, talent's 11. That'll be 11. Yeah, number 11. And we're not done yet, so on that side. We've been very deliberate. You know, I talked about the criteria we use and then the integration kind of methodology. There are other companies out there who are just buying anybody who's up for sale. We are actually deliberate in going out and finding the right companies. And in everybody that has been part of the Click family, we've kind of approached ourselves and kind of brought in on that. We'll continue to do that. We actually took some time during the real, kind of to talk about money is cheap, valuation expectations got really kind of crazy. We're, you know, financially prudent. And so we didn't buy any companies for the last year because we wanted to actually be thoughtful. You know, it's a balance about revenue growth and profit that allows you to actually say, here's how we continue to invest organically and in organically for a long time going forward. So we will continue, but- NFL draft's coming up soon. I understand it's not a great year for quarterbacks in the NFL. How's the draft looking for data companies, you know? Because you're pretty picky, but it maybe is. You know, there's a couple out there, you know, in that we'll continue to engage and work with. And we're doing the same thing, looking at technology fit, joint customers, looking at cultural fit, how do the teams kind of interoperate and work together? And then of course price comes into that kind of piece. And like any sales deals, you have lots of kind of activity, but when all four are right, vision, tech, culture and finance, you'll see a new news from us. Kind of interesting how the private equity world has changed over the last decade plus, you know? It used to be just squeeze as much money as you can and just throw the carcass away. And I think the PE companies have just gotten so smart and realized, wow, if we were just a little bit patient, make some investments, we could do like amazing things. We've been thrilled with our ownership with Tomo Bravo, because they've been a great kind of partner for exactly that reason. Do you talk a little bit about one of the things that Mike shared on stage this morning was the slide that showed the executive advisory customers. Where are they in terms of the vision of the strategic, the organic versus the M&A? How influential are some of those customers in what you do? Oh, hugely, hugely. And just even this morning, I was having breakfast with a number of the people on that slide and we were talking about kind of where are they going in the long term? You know, meaning two years, three years. You know, as we talk about the role of AI, generative AI and how you take operational data and analytics and kind of interoperate in a company and what are the best pieces to be able to work today and together with that foundation in the future. I'm having those conversations individually, collectively as an organization and this is where it does feed into kind of our M&A strategy. One of the things, one of our chief data officer of one of those kind of advisory councils is saying what I like about what CLIC has been doing and as a partner is you're making it easier for us to know that these solutions are interoperable and will work in our landscape. It's making it simpler, but I'm not beholden to just one kind of company. So I know the products will work better together. It's up to you to make that work, meaning us, you know, working together. And then that sets the foundation for them to do new things. And I had a customer yesterday, he stopped me in the halls and he said during the recent banking crisis because we navigated that, there's a commercial bank, we navigated that flawlessly because we have the data, the analytics today using kind of CLIC, you know, I'm here to learn more about what are the other tools because you know, you've helped us stay out of trouble with the credit and you know, we're going kind of bigger and Jonathan, Jonathan too, you know if you're watching right now I think he's in a session, but he stopped me in the halls, just so inspiring to hear from that. Yeah. Well that's transformative. So exciting stuff guys, we thank you so much for joining us on the program, talking about talent and CLIC, better together, we're excited to see what happens over the next quarter. We'll have to have you back as we talk about more joint impact. We'd love to. All right guys. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from CLIC World 23. Stick around, I got a great panel on data for good climate change coming up next.