 From New York City, it's the Cube, covering New Relic Future Stack 2019, brought to you by New Relic. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at New Relic's Future Stack 2019 at the Grand Hyatt, next to Grand Central Station here in New York City. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Roger Scott, who's the chief customer officer at New Relic. Roger, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Stu, thanks for having me on. All right, so I love this morning actually, in addition to hearing all the announcements, my first handful of guests on the Cube were customers, so I got to hear from them. And we know your team is always excited about the announcement, but definitely enthusiasm from the customers, things in the keynote that got people clapping and fired up, things like, oh wait, 10 terabytes of data, pressure thing, refresh for like a second, and oh my gosh, there's results, pretty impressive. So maybe give us a little bit of insight into customer engagement and how it's led to the bevy of announcements here at the show. Oh, it's a great question actually, and I think in my capacity as chief customer officer and the functions I'm responsible for, we continually engaging with customers as you can imagine. And one of the things we take a lot of pride in is being a proxy for the voice of the customer back into the organization. So we have a pretty rigid process, not rigid, a pretty disciplined process I would argue, that allows us to get feedback from the field, listen to our customers, understand what's important to them, and reflect that in our product roadmap. And I'll let you know that that's on a weekly cadence, we do that. Now we're not doing that in a reactive fashion such that our roadmap diverts every single week in that, but we hear that constant feedback from the field as to what our customers are liking. So a lot of what you hear today in terms of those six great announcements that we have were a combination of feedback that we've had over the last couple of years I would argue, because it's a dramatic shift to go from what we were previously, which was essentially six individual products that worked really well together. But through the release of Neuralic 1 in May earlier this year and then what we announced today has truly developed this into a true observability platform. So monitoring with six different products to a true observability platform that's open, connected, and programmable is a dramatic shift. And that's a combination of a bunch of feedback from our customers over the years. Yeah, I'm sure it's pretty much feedback from all customers. They're not asking for more tools and more interfaces and more things that they need to learn. In many ways, software can be a unifying, Peter, especially that term platform. Lou spent a bunch of time emphasizing what's needed from platform. What were your customers struggling with that Neuralic 1 in general is looking to solve as well as kind of the observability piece? What went into that launch that was customer pain points and things that they'd been asking for? Yeah, maybe to stand back a little bit and understand some of the challenges that customers had and then why they were asking for different solutions or evolution of our solution. If you think about today's world, there's this rapid development and deployment of software. Almost got to the point of continuous software deployment. And so your speed of needing to be able to react to problems in your environment, your customer experiences are degrading, et cetera. Being able to respond to that really quickly is essential. Understanding the customer experience is essential. You talked about operational efficiency of reducing the number of tooling sets or data sets that I'm looking at continually. So anything that we could provide to our customers that allowed them to get to answers quicker, understand the why, and then be able to remediate that really easily so that their customers have a greater experience. And at the same time, reduces this friction that's unnecessarily introduced when you're going from one product to another, one tool to another, and you're spending too much time rationalizing data sets across those tool sets. So consolidation is a big theme, ability to get to answers really quickly is a big theme. And that's really been the genesis of being able to create a platform. But not just a platform for consolidation for better visibility and observability, but we believe it's not truly a platform and so you could develop on it. If you think back in technology history of all the different paradigms we've had throughout the history of technology, those who've won the platform wars over the years have been really good at being able to provide tools and ease of adoption of the platform by virtue of being able to build things on top of it. The ability to give people tools that allow them to build technology is really at the essence of the platform as well. Roger, there's a certain trust level that customers have to have if they're going to be building on top of your platform. When I've talked to customers in New Relic, they do talk about a partnership and good back and forth, but there's definitely a certain amount of stickiness once they've built something on your platform. Any concerns from them as to, there's that term lock in out there as to the, how do I know that this is going to work for me and that I'm not going to have my pricing kind of crank up over time and be like, oh my gosh, a year or two later, what did I get myself into? Right, it's a really important point that I'd like to start off by actually re-emphasizing the point you made. I think we pride ourselves on the relationship we have with our customers. It truly is the heart of everything that my organization does. We have this saying that we are because they are. In the realization that if we don't serve our customers really well, they have choices frequently. We're a SaaS vendor. Their contracts come up for renewal frequently. And if you are unable to deliver on the promises that you made in their sales process, once they implement your solutions and try to use those in production, environments, and everyday work, if you can't deliver on those promises, then you're going to break down that level of trust. And trust is at the center of all relationships as you know, no doubt, no, whether it's a personal relationship, you're playing on a sports team, whether you're working with your customers. And so we want to make sure that we can deliver on those promises. Once we've sold them the product. So I haven't heard any specific concerns about lock-in or anything. I think what they regularly come to us though with is they want us to have a really strong point of view. They want us to be opinionated. Tell them how this should work effectively together. What does best practice look like? What's the gold standard? What are some of the artifacts, tools, frameworks, reusable templates that we can share with them that accelerates their time to value? So I think the value statement significantly outweighs the concerns around lock-in or reduction of the number of vendors that they're working with. You know, if I look at really the enterprise space, you've got customers working through their application modernization. You know, they've got their monoliths, they're, you know, going after microservices. I heard a staff that only about five to 10% of apps are monitored at the app level today. So, yeah, how many of your customers are dealing with the installed state versus, you know, new deployments and what are some of the challenges you're hearing from customers there? Yeah, and I think it's important to pause that number because I think it's, you know, five to 10% or growing to 20% as I think Gartner indicated. If you look at those organizations born in the cloud or born digital, it's a significantly higher percentage of that, which is possibly an indictment of the low level of instrumentation we've seen a lot of legacy software technology stacks. And so, you know, I think in today's world, we're trying to get that level of instrumentation observability up as much as possible. But maybe to link back to your previous question as well, I think there's an important aspect here when we move to a platform. You know, when you're a product company, your differentiation comes through product, comes through the capability of that product, features and functions. And we've certainly found ourselves in a significant number of those battles against competition where it's feature and function based. That's not a great outcome for the customer. I think when you move to a platform, it's very much around the network differentiation. When I say network differentiation, I think it's about getting the users of your service access to third party applications, to third party data sources, be they open source data emitters, open telemetry, open sensors, any of those data sets that we announce support for today, giving them access to those data sets and being able to enrich the experience that we provide them. That creates a network effect. And that's really where we see the opportunity to deliver significantly more value to our customers with the ability to then build your own applications on top of the platform. And that's second to none in the industry, in my opinion. Roger, what's New Relics' role in helping customers as they're really, they're modernizing their workforce? You know, when I talk to so many companies, it's like, you know, they need to retrain and they have to have new skill sets. They need to make sure as, you know, certain cloud and automation changes where they focus on things and, you know, embrace DevOps and new ways of doing things. You know, there are a lot of challenges there. You know, where does New Relics play in that, modernization for customers? You know, I think it's in a couple of ways. There are ways that my organization can help the customer in terms of just share understanding of the capability of the platform, what are best practices, how we can drive better accountability as you move to these new technology stacks and new ways of working much more agile environments. And so I think we can do a combination of that, just share skills development, working really tightly with the likes of AWS. You've heard Dave McCann this morning talking about how when customers migrate the application workloads to the AWS cloud environment, you know, hopefully they're not just doing that by way of compute lift and shift, but they're actually looking at modernizing and refactoring those applications. And when they do that, you heard Dave talk through a number of assets and frameworks and models and reusable best practices that we're trying to work with them on that we can give to our customers that accelerate their journey. Because it's not easy. We were talking to Chris Dillon this morning from Cox Automotive. And when you think of an organization like that, that's 40, 50 years old and has had to transform itself in terms of digital experience for its customer base, it's a significant cultural adjustment quite often to get teams to work in fundamentally different ways. So it's not an insignificant challenge, but that's partly why we've invested so heavily in customer success, taking customers on journey, thinking about their maturity over time and constantly looking for them to get better value from the platform. Roger, there were a number of things that have jumped out at me. Things like, you know, oh hey, you're going to say, we could save you potentially millions of dollars on your AWS cloud bill. You've already got customers building on top of the platform. You had the Future Hacker event just a couple of weeks ago. Any other kind of, you know, interesting or, you know, exemplary customer outcomes that you might be able to share, you know, either, doesn't have to be about the new stuff, but just that you've seen recently with your customers. You know, one of the things that's most gratifying for me when talking to customers is when we've been able to see, you know, when you work with older, more traditional companies that are undergoing some form of digital transformation and they're trying to shift a lot of their applications into a more modern stack and environment, become more agile, et cetera. They frequently sort of peel off part of the business and will have a digital division that will build some innovative, typically mobile-based apps. We've seen a number of different retailers that we've worked with, a number of different travel organizations where we've started out instrumenting the mobile application because they've built a new application to give their consumers or customers access to their services. And at some point that application is going to merge into the back end and have to connect back into older technology. And it's been the beauty of being able to connect those two different environments together. You know, starting off with what we would have got is a slightly easier place to start, which is the more modern application environment where we're really well suited to, but then seeing the full value of being able to instrument the front end all the way through to the back end, link that back to the customer's experience and to the impact on the business in terms of funnel analysis from number of people using the mobile application to actually ordering something to once they've ordered it, feeling satisfied and actually receiving the goods that they ordered, being able to instrument all of that and understand the impact of performance and availability on the overall business outcome. That's when it's been truly transformational in working with customers. And that's certainly where we would love to help more of our customers in that fashion. All right, Roger, want to give you the final word. Of course, you bring together a number of customers here at Feud for Stack in the US as well as there's a few of those run in other geographical areas, but throughout the year, any other key things you want to highlight as to how customers can get engaged even more? Yeah, I mean, we've got a sort of a, what I would argue is sort of a tiered approach to customer success. At the very high end of our engagement model, we have a significant number of resources, solution architects, customer success managers that we can deploy directly with our customers. We typically do that in conjunction with them, build out success plans, et cetera. What we're looking at investing heavily at the moment is also having a good understanding of what the ideal customer journey is like. Realizing that a customer can come to an event like this and can learn about our product, but the best way for them to experience that is in the course of using the product. So a heavy focus on product-led growth and how we actually deliver better value through the product itself, remove friction and adoption and getting to better value. We want to automate some of that customer journey so that we know that if you've just signed up and you've configured your, for instance, you've configured your agent and you've done your alerting policy, but you haven't yet configured a custom app dex on that application, or you haven't understood what your key transactions are. We've got all that data in the back end. So we're working really hard to understand how we get that information back out to customers that go, hey, we know you haven't necessarily done this yet. Here's some access to great assets. A short video clip, a self-paced learning guide that somebody can get on demand from an LMS system. So trying to use a combination of direct resource investment, events like this where it's great to make announcements like we did about those six great innovations, and then increasingly using digital through the product, but also through just the general customer journey to say, hey, this is really important content and information. You should look at this now because it's going to add value in what you're doing today. Well, Roger Scott, Chief Customer Officer with New Relic, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks so much. It's been great talking to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more here at New Relic Future Stack 2019 in New York City. Thanks for watching theCUBE.