 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCUBE, Amit Sena, the founder and chief customer officer at Workspan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me, excited to be here. So, I'm really excited to understand more about Workspan, what you guys do. Tell us a little bit about that. What opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, ah, why isn't it, no one's doing that. And you have this great idea. Yeah, absolutely, we have this aha moment. In this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality is that we all serve the same demanding end customers, we got to align our marketing, we got to align our messaging, we need to align our innovation, and we need to sell together in order to win more. Easier said than done, right? So, that's where we saw the opportunity. Then what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it, when they co-market, they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell, that's where they can improve their win rates, and we are truly seeing that. So, that's the opportunity we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader simpler and easier to do in this connected day and age. Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. That's enormous. So, talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those aha moments as well when you came knocking on there and said, hey, look what we're developing? Absolutely. So, look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big go-to markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70% of them will be actually catching dust on the ground. They won't be even worth the paper they were, the business cases will be written on. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions, but then once they announce it at the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market? That's where WorkSpan comes in. We provide the joint sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize the people coming together across the partnership. In India, we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. Similarly, an alliance is between companies, deep in the company, it's not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So it's a family of two companies coming together. That's what WorkSpan provides the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data-driven argument around it. So you can take decisions on the basis of data to say, okay, where is my alliance working and where does it need help? You don't do postmortems after that. You can fix as you're going along. So let's talk about that process and data-driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups. Just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happen. You look on the show floor, you see brands that are obvious. You know, we're in the NetApp booth for, and we've talked SAP HANA an awful lot. Right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle. So there's this opportunity to cooperate and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data-driven. How do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon and manage those alliances going forward? By the way, that's an excellent question. So when you are living in a network in this interdependent world, you will partner somewhere and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this attribute-based access control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role-based access control just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this newer model of security, attribute-based access control model, allows the right people to get onto the right plans so that they and they alone can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship or the Apple relationship or the Oracle relationship or the NetApp relationship. Only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that within this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts that work span is far more secure than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data? What's your private data? So on the same opportunity, you can have private data for your own company. Employees to see that is never shown to partners. So that translucency, not transparency, that translucency is really, really important when you do alliances and that we understand this model and approach. So how do you help like for alliances marketing, for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners, for example, and they want to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're going to get leads that come in from that and they might say, okay, well, I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that? I mean, it kind of goes to the co-optition theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? Yeah, so what we do is we partner with a company's marketing automation system. So let's say NetApp is working with SAP Cloud for Customer. So at this event, we announced an integration between WorkSpan and SAP Cloud for Customer. Similarly, other customers may have other marketing automation solutions, let's say on a local or a market or a Salesforce.com. So we integrate with those systems. What happens is marketers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results on WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do. We partner and we integrate with them. So that way what happens is we are extending the investment that a company already has made in their marketing automation stack, and we come across as the partner or the alliance automation stack. So that way the alliances move on and on. And why is this important? This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So imagine if you're an Intel or if you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back because there's WorkSpan in there. So as a network you may have just 1% of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent with all the data that you can collect. So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Furrier's name and get some blockchain conversation going on. From an ideal of, basically there's this, you guys become an authority of authentication. There's reputation. There's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through it. You scale this out beyond just alliances and obviously technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing and other companies. How does this align with or a more aggressive question? How does this supplant like the ideas of smart contracts with the likes of blockchain? Yeah, absolutely. So blockchain is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions that are flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted like across different parties. When let's say an Intel or a NetApp says approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract there. So in some ways, in a living in a connected world, you need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. You're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners that NetApp works with is both Intel as well as SAP, right? So because SAP program funds and SAP marketing campaigns are here and so is Intel's. And they both come from trusted parties. NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction and execute it. So we provide that trust foundation based on technologies. Sorry, that's kind of the trust foundation is sort of aligns to what Bill McDermott said at his keynote this morning about trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that. And then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand value. Share that too. Absolutely. So we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances is seeing their role to be very strategic at the board where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified. They want to say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is. We have had companies on our platform that have generated 58% more views that have reduced their marketing cost by 50%. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform. And year on year, they have collaborated on more number of campaigns deeper in the regions where their marketeers are working with Intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24x return on marketing investment. Wow. Whereas they were expecting an eight to 10x return on marketing investment. So dramatically increased, for SAP that meant $100 million more in revenue at lower marketing cost. Just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with shared customers across them. Now this happened, this is not an overnight success. This is a three year success in the making where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the market unit level and all rolling it up at the head of alliance. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course is a market account, they've not only worked with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large as many SI's that you see here, those programs are coming on WorkSpan as well. The Lenovo worldwide on WorkSpan, HPEs on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well for Fortune 500 customers. Wow, a lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening or for their jobs don't have to know or care. It's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our private services when it's not something that we can touch or see or feel? And it's really through the validation, the best you can get is through the voice of your customer and the stats that you shared. You must be sort of salivating with, we can actually help you increase, lead you in my 58% or increase revenue opportunities by 40%. I mean, you've got some really substantial data-driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, it's got to make, you know, doing business a little bit easier that you know you've got such solidity. Actually, when you think of the world, it's very diverse, right? But you can see patterns from this thing. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right? But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan. Late evening events work better in Japan. But in the U.S. on the West Coast, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring client, you know, in events, but that this other partner I spend a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or not advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit out there, right? So you can make these data-driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know, by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance is, this is exactly what the value proctor works plan is. Now you can be totally data-driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. Fantastic. Well, I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing, not only who works spent as in what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Left talking to you. Likewise. We want to thank you for watching the Q-bye. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching.