 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with wikibond.org and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's production of O'Reilly Media's Velocity Conference. We're here for two days in Santa Clara, California talking about web performance, web testing, all the super alpha geeks are here trying to make the web go faster. Tom Lunabus is here. He's the president and CEO of SOASTA. Tom, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks Dave, good to be here. Good to see you, good to meet you. So yeah, this is quite a conference, some serious practitioners here. Very much. Not a lot of hand waving going on, not a lot of chest thumping and vendor marketing messages. I like that, it's a different vibe, isn't it? Yeah, it's a sad man conference. So you're getting people that fix problems and they're usually behind the scenes and they're not in the forefront. So you don't hear a lot of hype, you hear a lot of discussion about technically how do you fix things and it's a good conference. Yeah, not a lot of suits. I don't even know if they know what this is. I know, I dressed up for you. Well thanks for that. So tell us a little bit about your company. You guys are at the heart of this web performance testing world. Tell us about that. Well, 10 years ago we started looking at web performance and mobile performance at the early days and there's quite a lot of differences between a web application, a website or a mobile app than it was to previous generation, client server. The biggest one is the most obvious scale globally, but it's also around agility and such, your ability to move very quickly, your ability to develop very quickly and performance. Doing testing is what we do. We're known for quality as a service. Everybody has to be as a service and the previous generation player was a Mercury load runner and Mercury QTP. So Mercury Interactive was the dominant testing company and had been dominant since 1987. It got acquired by HP. For four and a half billion, big, big market. And we saw those tools being a bit antiquated just 10 years ago and certainly now for this new generation of new types of applications and users and consumers. And so our approach to this was to find more automation, more scale and more affordability associated to testing these web applications and mobile apps. And we introduced literally on this day, five years ago, at the structure conference, the first cloud conference ever held, we introduced a product called CloudTest and what CloudTest was was the first enterprise cloud service ever provided or pushed out there and it allowed customers to simulate millions of users buying tickets to the London Olympics as an example or buying an iPhone from Verizon or AT&T or downloading a song. And before that, it would literally take four to six weeks to set up a test. You might be able to simulate three or 400 customers doing that. And so you really didn't have the representative view. So our view was to become the next generation Mercury Interactive for this new generation of mobile and website. And from that day, so is this taken off. It's been named by the Wall Street Journal, one of the top VC back companies in America for three years in a row. We have over 450 enterprise customers around the world. We tested the London Olympics. We're testing the Russian Olympics right now and all the major events, even NASA landing the Curiosity rover on Mars last year. We tested their website for them. So it's been quite the ride. Awesome. Yeah, well you mentioned the client server days. It was lots of, lots has changed since then, right? I mean, so you really, you had a fat client and a lot of horsepower there and you put a lot of attention on the server and also functional testing used to be very manual. So you mentioned automation. Talk about what's changed, you know, since those days. Oh boy, everything. We used to call client server distributed. And now with cloud computing where you're literally delivering your applications all around the world and you don't really necessarily have visibility as a big, big problem. But the number one problem in the industry right now is fragmentation. You know, trying to get an application in the mobile world to work as equally on Android as it does on iOS or vice versa, or even browsers, different browsers. And what all of our customers are trying to do is find a seamless customer experience. And what they mean by that is they want that application to run as good on iOS or a smartphone or a tablet as they do on Android and then all these different devices. And it's very difficult. You just have to look at Facebook to understand how difficult mobile is. They are having a struggling time trying to get their application performance the way they want it to be. Yeah, for sure. Now you mentioned that you've been doing mobile for a decade. Mobile a decade ago is a lot different than it is now. A completely different world, yeah. So that's interesting, a lot of foresight. John Furrier's going to join us here in a moment. John Furrier, my co-host from SiliconANGLE. So Tom, what mobile 10 years ago, you guys are pretty fresh in looking at that as a trend. Well, part of it was because what we were doing at the time 10 years ago. So we started our company really in 2008. But Ken Gardner, my co-founder and I started looking at this problem, mainly because I had the problem. I had one of the first SaaS-based application companies in 2002. We had a company called Dorado that did loan origination for all the big banks. So I was back in for Wacovia and Chase Manhattan and a bunch of big banks. The acquisition, right? You guys got acquired? Exactly. And they were looking at mobile as well and say, what will we do when mobile comes down the road? And although it was years in advance, that conversation really had an impact to us because we began to see, you know, when we were looking at client server, back in those days, there was probably only about 100,000 client server apps out there. Now there's almost a billion websites and apps. There's a million and a half mobile apps, about 900,000 iOS apps and 500,000 plus of Android. I mean, it's a whole different landscape and fragmentation is going to be the topic. It has been the topic for two years. It's going to continue to be. Well, we had Google on earlier. They were talking about how every website you go to now says download our app, download our app because they want to try to simulate that native performance and have control over that. Is that a band-aid? Is that a short-term trend? Will that go away in your view or is that sort of the norm? You know, the trend lines we're seeing, Dave, even worse, where we talk about numbers of apps, that's really not the issue. Many people are building apps that will only be used for 72 hours. So we're getting to- Disposable apps. You got it. Disposable apps. And let me give you some examples of it. The London Olympics. When you buy, they create an event to everybody come online to buy the million tickets available. Well, that literally sells out within a week. And so that's a one-week app. Whenever Apple introduces a new phone, every carrier in the world has a pre-order site, whether it's Verizon or AT&T, and they say you can be the first to buy the new iPhone 6 or whatever it may be at 12 midnight on September the 13th. Well, they'll get 250,000 orders in 60 minutes. $100 million of revenue going through, but it's a site that only lasts 48 hours. So not only is the trend line going to disposable, it's also putting more pressure on performance. Wow, so yeah, we heard the gentleman from Obama for America today talk about how some performance increase generated a 14% increase in conversion to tens of millions of dollars. So you're talking about iPhone sales or smartphone sales. We're talking about more than tens of millions even. Well, there's an impact both positively and negatively. And I think that's, one of the things that I think is fundamentally changing is we talk about users, all of us geeks, and all the people here really talk about users. Well, there's a difference between consumers and users. Users, when a site goes down or is slow, are kind of, they're either employees or they're going to stay on site and keep coming back. A consumer, if the site's slow, will go find another site that they can go buy that Nike shoe or download a new card or whatever it may be. So I think the big change here is this evolution from users to consumers and the behavior of consumers is not as easy to deal with for the tech community right now. Yeah, because users, the squeaky user gets the oil kind of thing, but the squeaky consumer goes to another website. You guys do a lot in retail, don't you? Yeah, 12 of the top 25 retailers use our technologies to test their both mobile apps and their websites. Right now, this is the big season for retail in the US because they're getting ready for holiday or seasonal readiness. So all the testing is done during the summertime because once Halloween comes. Yeah, Halloween, everything, your coat's got to get frozen. It can't be making changes after Halloween. Even that's pushing it. It's amazing. It used to be Thanksgiving when I grew up that all the sales would happen, but now it's really back to Halloween. So all the testing on most of the sites around the world are being done right now. So we're really, really busy. Pretty soon it's going to be Labor Day. My colleague, John Furrier has joined us, John. We're having a great discussion about web performance and specifically performance testing. What's your take on all this? Well, I'm sorry I'm late. I was just doing a tweet chat. You know, I love doing the tweet chats, Dave, because, you know, we are experimenting with our own little tweet chat client with NetApp. So shout out to NetApp for that great tweet chat just for an hour. Talking about storage, infrastructure, and business apps. So, obviously, that's more enterprise. So, and Tom, great to see you on the Cube in person. We talk a lot on Twitter. We have commentary going back and forth. You've got that tongue-in-cheek mojo on Twitter, which I like. I get slammed for it on my end, too, but. So I got to, some people don't get Twitter as hard. You just have a tongue-in-cheek, some sort of symbol, like, you know, you know, trying to stir it up. But I got to ask you, you have a lot of experience. You've seen all the moves by the vendors over the years. You've seen all the cycles of innovation. We're living in a kick-butt cycle right now. A lot of innovation happening at the infrastructure apps. Obviously, the enterprise is hot, smoking hot. Entrepreneurs are smoking on the consumer side. What's your take on the market, with the vendors in particular? Because IBM, HP, EMC, we're just talking about NetApp. These guys are like, they're slower than the startups. And you're in the world of agile. You know, talking about automation, QA, cloud. You know, the app markets moving so fast. What's going on with the vendors in your mind? And how do they adapt to this new real world? Well, you guys know, I've been doing this for 35 years and all that means is I'm old. But it also says I've seen a lot of trends. You used to be an advantage, Tom. Well, yeah. It's a hot thing. Experience matters now. Well, we're continuously young in Silicon Valley. Never too old to do startup, but I totally believe in it. But we have seen a lot of trends. I mean, I was back in the mainframe days, and I saw client server revolution, and I saw the 2.0 and now really the advancements. I think this is really a significant point, though, in inflection, and I think every vendor likes to say that because it's to their best interest. But the reality is for 35 years, or at least for the last 20 years, the application lifecycle has been dominated by IBM, HP, Microsoft. And what I mean by the application lifecycle is dev, test, deploy, manage. Those are the four cornerstone. And provisioning has a different word back then. Now it's provisioning hardware. I want to push code, I'm waiting for gear. I mean, you remember the days, I got to set up a connection, I got to get the port connected, and then test it, I'm like, hey, I got my code. I'm a local host, I want to get it to the network. It led to the friction of dev departments never talk to ops, ops never talk to test, and all those things. But I think right now, because of this new form of consumerism, and what's really changing here, getting away from tech for a second, is that you're seeing a transition of, right now it's a trillion dollars that have gone from bricks and mortar storefronts to e-commerce. The suggestion is it's going to go to 10 trillion over the next five years. And there is a race to who is going to provide the platform for that transition. This is a fundamental shift going, and it's more powerful than a tech shift where we want to build a better mousetrap. This is driven by real revenue directly to consumers. I mean, you hit the nail on the head and one thing that folks who've been following my blogging and tweeting, it's going back a decade, is I love to talk about online advertising and I love to talk about some of the infrastructure trends because they're kind of the same. I mean, online advertising just never happened, even though it's still massive offline advertising, still the bulk of the revenue. So you're talking about e-commerce, it's the same paradigm. It's still so massively old school. And it's just going to get faster with mobile. So that acceleration, I think it's going to pick up and advertisers we know with banner ads, I mean, granted, there's a lot of limitations and I feel that they just in general have no value at all. But when you start doing transactional things like sales, lead gen, buying stuff, that's the new advertiser, it's all digital. And I think all the vendors get that because all the customers get that. And so I've never seen quite as much fear in the eyes of enterprise CIOs that I've seen in the last two years around this shift of the economy that's driven by mobile. So everybody's trying to figure out what mobile platform they're going to use and how they're going to build and how they're going to test and how they're going to do it. So the young companies like my company are really adept to shift to those markets in significant ways because we don't carry the luggage that the bigger guys have and the impact, and probably the biggest impact for the big companies to make this move isn't necessarily technological, it's things like comp plans. How do you get a sales force that's used to selling a $10 million product to sell $1,000 an hour or something product? And that's a big, big shift for us. So we just had Patrick Lightbody on who's from New Relic and he writes the books on Java and whatnot. And we were talking about Agile. Agile, big fan of Agile, iterate, push code, the lean startup, the lean app. On the web, when something breaks you just refresh your screen. Mobile's different. In mobile you can't pull that genie out of the bottle. I mean, people who have the old iOS and the old Android don't have the auto updates. They don't have all that. The user experience, if something goes wrong it's hard to pull those guys back in. So you're seeing kind of the shift towards old school pre-package QA and test. You got to get it right. You can't just launch mobile and say, oh, we'll fix it. I watched a great interview last time. Do you agree with that? Do you agree? Or what's your view on this? Well, I think quality matters more today than it's ever mattered. When you go directly to the consumer the consumer is three clicks away from a competitive environment. So the brand doesn't have control. For 100 years, retailers focused on trying to get somebody off a couch, drive to a mall, even if the service is bad they're not going to go somewhere else. In technology, when you go directly to the consumer if the site doesn't work, you're done. Monitoring, as an example, has a real problem because while we talk a lot about monitoring around here and there's a whole APM market by the time you start seeing latency on a site your customers are gone and they're not necessarily going to come back. And so that's the bigger problem. So quality as a service is actually becoming of quite the play within these communities. It used to be, I wrote a blog on this about a year ago it was Agile at What Cost. And if it's the cost is quality then you're in big trouble with the show. I think there's a lot of people that are trying to take Agile and take shortcuts through QA and just, you know, Mark Zuckerberg promotes this with his, oh, just go break stuff. Come on, that means you can push crappy code. I did something really interesting last night. I went to YouTube and I was watching some interviews in an old interview with Steve Jobs from 1990 when he was at Nix. And what he said in that interview, he said, you know, we now have to go to the enterprise. We have to be world-class. And what the definition of world-class is Agile although he used time to market back then Agile and quality. If you don't have those two things you're not world-class. And I think that's the definition that still stands here 23 years old. How do you size your opportunity? I mean, you like to talk about TAM but the things are so much in flux. How do you communicate that to investors? You know, even internally for strategic planning? Well, there's a couple of different things. There's a lot of variables and some of them are good and some of them are more traditional and not the right way of doing it. I think the old school way is doing what I said earlier. You know, there's a billion websites. There's a million and a half mobile apps. That's the way we used to size. It's probably more relevant to say there's a trillion dollars of revenue coming through e-commerce and it's going to go to 10 trillion. So how do we preserve that? I think the other side of it is to do, the other traditional old school is in my space alone and clearly I'm going after HP. Sorry, John. But HP. Why are you saying sorry to me? I don't, you know. You were at HP at one point. Yeah. I'm a fanboy, but I've been critical of HP. They know that. I mean, I just wrote a post on their cloud page. That was actually a very good post. I don't think they were happy about that one. The Mercury company, Mercury Interactive was acquired for $4.5 billion in 2006. IBM bought Rational for $2.2 billion. Testing's always been big, but at a much smaller set, meaning there was only 50,000 client server apps, as an example. Now we have millions of apps that are generating trillions dollars of revenue and the world's quite a bit different. So it's about, will somebody that's making a million dollars on a website spend $60,000 to make sure the user experience is a good user experience? That's really what they're expecting. They want to do that through, you know, SaaSification and you're seeing it. I mean, obviously Salesforce got it started, but you see what's happening with Workday. You see what's happening with ServiceNow. The SaaSification of virtually all businesses and it's hard for companies with, you know, legacy on-premise software, a lot of baggage to make that transition. We talk about this all the time. Yeah. It's a tough, I think that's fundamentally the bigger transition. It's not the technological shift, it's the business shift. And I've seen that because we partner with a lot of the big companies like IBM and others. And I think at the same time, this is a whole different infrastructure and network that we're dealing with and the fragmentation of mobile. Technologically, this is a far more complex problem to deliver quality user experiences. So you got to take both. You got to look at the SaaS business model, tough for the big guys to kind of come down. And then you've got to get them to a point where they fully understand and appreciate the new infrastructure and network and all these mobile devices. And we're lucky, we're ahead of the curve and we've been leaders in this area. But, you know, the big guys will come around. I mean, they're big guys for a reason. Tom, thanks for coming inside theCube. Great to see you live in person. Great to also know you on Twitter. It's been a virtual conversation we've had many times. Yes. So thanks for coming on theCUBE and we're at the Velocity Conference. Hashtag is Velocity-C-O-N-F-Comp for short for conference, Velocity-C-O-N-F. Tweet us, we're going to respond to you and get a lot of interaction, Dave on Twitter right now. We have a lot of interesting statistics. People are very interested, obviously, this is JavaScript overlay from Fluent, but in general, a lot of interest in live sketching, SiliconANGLE, web performance, Wikibon, theCUBE. We're all trending on there. Mobile performance seems to be the hot thing right here. So we're going to continue to break it down for here inside theCUBE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We've got the events. Extract the city from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.