 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversations here in our studio in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, co-founder of Sylvango Media. Special guest today inside theCUBE in Palo Alto, is Steve Lucas, the new CEO of Marketo, formerly of SAP, industry veteran. A lot of experience in the enterprise space. Now the chief executive officer at Marketo. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation, great to see you. Yeah, great to see you again. So Marketo has been on our radar, it's been on everyone's radar. It's been one of the hottest marketing companies that have come out of this generation of SaaS, what I call SaaS cloud offerings, and certainly has burned the field in terms of reputation, in terms of quality, high customer scale. A lot of other companies have been bought out, you see Oracle doing a lot of stuff, you got Salesforce, the SaaS business is booming. Oh yeah. And you have a rocket ship that you're now the CEO of now for two months. First question, what's it like there now? Compare SAP to Marketo, what's happening? Well, SAP is a fantastic company and loved it. The kind of metaphor I've used is with SAP, it's a bigger vehicle, you're driving a bus and you can carry a lot of people with you, takes a little bit longer to make a U-turn. Marketo's a Formula One car, I mean this thing is just in and out of traffic and it's unbelievably nimble. So it's been a big kind of shift culturally but absolutely love it. Well, for the folks that are watching you might not know but Steve was in the HANA analytics president of that division with SAP, which was a really interesting transformation because HANA and SAP was a traditional, big enterprise software company but had to move very quickly. HANA was basically built before Hadoop was even conceived and it was built before the big cloud explosion but kind of well built for the cloud. So you had to kind of move quickly from scratch into the cloud with SAP's resources. So compare and contrast with your experience with SAP, what is Marketo's prospects? I mean what's going on there? I mean obviously you've got a Formula Speedboat but the big aircraft carriers are throwing off a pretty big wake. They are. How are you going to maneuver? Yeah, yeah. Well it's a fascinating environment right now because going from SAP I'd say that my experience there kind of highly tuned me or prepared me for what I'm doing at Marketo. SAP had to move nimbly at the time, really nimbly. You're entering a market where you've got Oracle, Microsoft at a database level. They're the incumbents, they own massive share. How does SAP penetrate that? But we were successful at the time at SAP and I loved that experience. Coming into Marketo really, I mean it's a couple things. One is you've got to out-innovate the competition. This is not rest on your laurels and wait for the release a year and a half from now. That doesn't happen. So this is about moving quickly but the second thing it's about I believe is it's all about putting the customer at the center of your strategy. They have to drive everything. I've talked to more marketers and more CMOs in the last two months than I have in my last 20 years. Putting them at the center is all about that and Marketo, their heritage was marketing solutions built by marketers for marketers. What are the people saying, you've met with a lot of those CMOs more in the past two months, what are they saying? What's on their agenda? What do they care about? What's important to them? Brand, revenue and impact. They want to know how do I drive my brand, how do I drive revenue and how do I show that impact to my CEO, the board, whomever it may be. But the thing that scares marketers right now the most is what is digital transformation changing relative, the big trend, macro trend globally. How is it changing buyer expectation? How is it changing the customer-brand relationship? That's top of mind. Peter Burris who heads up our research for Wikibon and he used to do the B2B practice at Forrester around digital and Dave Vellante and I were talking yesterday that digital now is everything, right? So if you look at digital, it's not just oh, marketing needs some tools to send emails out or oh, I need to get a website up, call IT up and provision a landing page. This is now a fabric of pure infrastructure. Yet the infrastructure was built in the web days and you can go back to your business object days and go back even back in the 90s. That infrastructure now is so hardened as instrumentation there's no agility. So I feel that and we here in our teams and our customers that I want agility but I also want to control what the infrastructure might look like but then I don't want to touch it again. I want it to work for me. Do you see that same dynamic and how does that play out? Because I mean it's kind of the nuanced point but in the end of the day shadow marketing is going on. Shadow IT is happening and it is unequivocally. Unequivocally I mean so literally the what's crushing the marketer right now is every time we get a new touch point, a watch. So we go from just a watch that tells me the time to an Apple watch, right? Every time there's a new touch point, there's a new point solution for it and it's crushing the marketer. So if it's social, there's point solutions. If it's mobile, there's point solutions. If it's a watch, there's point solutions. I blew my mind, I literally saw a startup that says we can do monitoring and engagement of people on a watch, it's overwhelming the marketer and so their landscape of applications is looking like 30, 40 different apps and their big win, single sign on. That's the big win for the marketer internally. It's just crushing them. So what they're looking for. Well your point is the MarTech or marketing technology graph and map is so big. Each one with their own underlying stack, database, software, is that kind of what you're getting at? Yeah absolutely, absolutely. You pick a marketing cloud, it really doesn't matter. You could say Oracle's marketing cloud, Salesforce marketing cloud, Adobe's marketing cloud. It's just convoluted, the graph or chart of what's out there. So point solutions just put together, cobble together. That's exactly right. And the benefit or the problem with that is what? Well the problem with that is that, first of all you lose any context relative to who you are. There's no way that I can, across 30 or 40 systems, keep a consistent definition of job free. It was just impossible to do. And our notion is we're looking at what we're driving is a single engagement platform where the definition of you, who you are, no matter what touch point, how we listen to you, how we learn from you and how we engage with you, it's all the same, it's all integrated. So let's get back to this point because I think an engagement platform and then the applications are interesting. So I mentioned the CMOs earlier. There's more development going on in marketing with like programmers developing apps because it's an app craze of course. So they're using the cloud. And the marketing cloud is not like a one-off, it has to be part of the core infrastructure. So one of the things that Wikibon's going to be releasing a new research coming up, but I saw David Fleury yesterday who's head of the research project that they're going to show market share numbers of Amazon, Google, all the top cloud guys. Interesting dynamic. Pass is squeezing now, platform as a service is being squeezed down and SaaS is increasing. And then I as infrastructure service is kind of shortening which means there's automation in there. So the middle layer is gone, but yet there's more SaaS. How does that relate to the marketing cloud? Because the marketing cloud would be considered middleware or is it just the SaaS app? And does that speak to an explosion of SaaS applications? Well, I mean, you're going to see an explosion of SaaS applications regardless. I mean, we reached that point of critical mass a while ago. That's, there's no going back at this point. But if you look at kind of, I think you're absolutely right. There's compression at the IAS layer and the pass layer, et cetera because these larger kind of SaaS applications, they are really ruling the day. And if you look at how that applies to marketing, we actually think about three technology tiers within marketing. There's the listen, learn and engage tier. The listen tier is, how do I listen on these digital channels? The myriad that are out there. And then the learn tier is core to our platform, the engagement platform. It's all about an automation engine, an AI engine and an analytics engine. It's learning. And then the engage tier is, how do I go back to those self same channels I was listening to and engage you the way that you want to be touched? And so that's really the stack that comprises the Marketo engagement platform. What's interesting, the dynamic for us is we're actually seeing our own native applications that we're building on our engagement platform. And then we have over 600 partners that are building applications, sorry, not building applications on our engagement platform. So they're writing software on top of Marketo. Absolutely. So they're extending it. So if social listening, which I know is a big thing for SiliconANGLE, that's like, I mean, you guys are masters at it. If that's your thing, then we have a, not only do we have social listening capability, but there's an app for that. There's dozens of them. So we could potentially plug into that. Oh, absolutely. So that's your vision. So let's go back to the vision. So more apps, a platform that enables more certification and you mentioned people building on it. That's an integration challenge. And that's something that people, they want to do more of. They want to integrate other things with platforms, which could be a challenge. But it brings up the point, data. Where does the data sit? Because now the data is the crown jewel. Yes. And also a very important aspect to get real-time information. So if you have information on me, you want to have access to that data fast. That's right. And so there's an architectural challenge there. There is. Your thoughts and reaction to the role of data. Well, I mean, first of all, marketers still want to own their data. And I think we need to, you know, the reality is that if you look at a lot of these marketing clouds that are out there, the vendor perspective is going to be, well, if I own your data, I own you. And our perspective is, well, that your data can sit within our platform, but we can actually drive that data into, you know, on-premise warehouse, et cetera, et cetera. So we're, our goal is not to own your data, ergo, we own you. That's not our goal. I think the big thing, like in the context- Your job, what you're saying is, you want to use their data to give them value. Absolutely. And so for us, it's a matter of, you know, we can- You can protect their data too. Exactly. And so for me, it's all about, you know, it's securing the data, it's, but it's also, data is so complex now for the marketer. So you've got social data, highly unstructured, you know, you're listening for keywords. You still have to interpret that information. You've got highly structured data, demographic, for example. So it's how do you bring all that together? You can bring that together in the Marketo Engagement Platform, and then you can turn that into something meaningful. It's always funny. I always love to interview the new CEOs because they've got the fresh perspective, but I can't ask the tough questions because you've only been there for two months, you can say, I'm only been there two months. I really can't answer that question. Yeah, I've got my- So I'll get a more generic on that. What, to try to get some of the hidden questions that I'd like to expose for the audience. And really the main one is, what attracted you to Marketo? I mean, you left a pretty senior, very senior position at SAP president. And Marketo is like the ship that's out there. It's a motorboat, but some are saying that the waves might be big enough. And so, you know, be like, okay, but they're public companies, so everything's out in the open. What attracted you to Marketo? What got you to say, hey, you know what? I want to ride this speedboat. Well, the trigger point for me was, especially at SAP, you get exposed to kind of the big macro trends. Big macro trend, everybody knows it is digital transformation. SAP's talking that Microsoft, Accenture, pick the big company they're talking digital transformation. And it is real. The reality is you either are a digital native company, we're born digital, Uber, or you're going digital, i.e., you're a hospitality company trying to compete with Airbnb and you gotta go digital. So I wrote an article on go digital or die, right? That's the notion. And when I looked at that, I said, so how does that lens apply to marketing? Well, the reality is that the marketer in the digital economy is only going to win if they can engage with not two or three people, but millions in an authentic and personalized manner at scale. So that is kind of juxtaposed. How do you do that? How do you engage with millions of people at scale but deliver personalized and authentic experience? And I looked at Marketo and I saw this platform and I just said, oh my gosh, there's like this convergence of those two things that are going to happen. And I just think that the whole kind of marketing automation space, which is known as really, I want to transform that into the engagement space. We're talking about things like this engagement economy trend. I absolutely believe we are fully in this notion of the engagement economy. I think Marketo is right there. So I got to ask you a question because this is interesting. You mentioned getting personalized information. One of the things that's apparent, we talked about this on my Silicon Valley Friday show, if you go to soundcloud.com slash John Furrier, that people watching can get the copies of those. But the thing was the recent election highlighted an issue around trust, right? Fake news, younger natives, digital natives, younger kids, they actually don't know what fake news is and what real news is. A lot of people are moving off cable TV into digital, which opens up the Snapchats of the world, different channels, omni-channel, like things. And so this brings up this notion of communities because what people are turning to in this time of no trusting the mainstream media or news or Trump or what they were saying, it's causing a lot of fear. But it highlights an issue, which is what's real and what's not, it's content. Content also has a relationship with users. Content is marketing. Content is came. Trust is now a huge deal. How do marketers now deal with the fact that content marketing coming from a company, it could be fake news, but is it real or not? And how do they get the contextual connections? Is it the communities? We see that in elections. People kind of going back to their tribe and saying, oh, anti-Trump or Ford Trump or whatever. So tribal communities are a big part of the data. It is. What's your thoughts on this trust factor and data and the content? Yeah, yeah, well, so I think, I mean, a couple of things. First of all, I think you or I as a consumer or anybody really, we don't respond well to sterile, moderately creepy advertisements that show up that you know, okay, you're tracking my cookie in my browser. That is just, that's a non-starter. I think that that in and of itself is not interesting. Now we respond well to, as I said, that kind of personalized, and I use that word authentic content. So if there's content, it's not just, hey, I know that you visited three websites about cars, so I'm just gonna pump you with ads full of cars. But if we deliver thoughtful content, it could be a comparison of vehicles that you've been looking at and take a look. So there's more thoughtful content that you can deliver that I think can come through a Mar-Tech platform like what we have our engagement platform. Now, I will tell you that trust, to me, it's not just the authentic nature, it's also a consistent engagement. You can't show up, show me an ad one time and I'm just gonna buy from you. It doesn't work that way anymore. So it's about having a relationship digital at scale, but it's delivering that human touch. I wrote a blog on this where I said, how do you deliver the human touch at scale? What's your blog address? Was it on? It's on Marketo's website, actually. Yeah, right on our website. So we talked about that as well. And as companies are moving away from you or I managing the social engagement to the AI engines, the machines engaging with us, I think that we run the risk, the marketer runs the risk of reinforcing the sterile kind of engagement and that's not what we want. We want warmth and human touch, that breeds trust. So what's Marketo's technology? I mean, people look at Marketo and people in marketing general, ah, they just hire in agencies to do all this work. This is a real Mar-Tech marketing technology going on. Highlights some of the technology for the folks watching because I think it's pretty interesting. Most people don't understand that there's a lot of machine learning, a lot of technology involved in databases from security to trust to also enabling real time, share some insight into what's going on there. So there's a notion of engagement platform which we believe is just fundamentally different than your run-of-the-mill marketing cloud. So the engagement platform from Marketo is all about that listen, learn, and engage kind of methodology that we think about. And the listening notion, as I said, literally is we can listen to anything, your custom data, social channels, smoke signals if we had to. We can read and consume almost anything. And if we can't do it, one of our partners can with like a DMP, for example. The learn, the core of our engagement engine, and this is pretty neat. So we have three engines in our engagement engine. We have the automation engine, which is all about, I hear you say something on Facebook, I can engage with you. Then there's the analytics engine so I can help you understand what are people talking about on Facebook? What are you talking about on LinkedIn? And then there's the AI engine. This is where I think the merger of the marketer and the machine is going to start coming together in a big, big way. So our AI engine allows you to not just say, well, if people say Silicon Angle on Twitter, then send them this. But you can actually have it adapt and customize. And learn and reason. Learn and reason. So figure things out and do some prescriptive or predictive. Oh, not only just predictive, actually have it, I think it's borderline kind of clairvoyant, but understand, well, I'm not just gonna immediately react to something that you put on Twitter. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna check the rest of your digital persona that we deploy. It's just a digital assistant, basically. Not a sales rep, it's more of an assistant. It is, it is. And so the future of marketing is simple. I can build a marketing or an engagement campaign and I can click a button that says make it adaptive. And then that's when the machine and the marketer come together. And so on top of that engine, we have our marketing applications, our native apps like marketing automation. We have a new one, account-based marketing, which is a pretty big deal, especially in the enterprise. Account-based marketing is all about going from the single buyer to the consensus buying, the behavior that's seen in the enterprise. And then we have other technologies like mobile marketing so we can track when you open an app, if you close it, if you click on it. So it's not just one thing. We have a range of marketing apps that sit on the platform. All right, so I wanna get the final question. I wanna get your thoughts on just the future of the business. Obviously you're there two months. You gotta get to know the team. You gotta get to know the players. Any changes on the horizon that you'd like to show? So you've got a big launch coming up with Orion, codename Orion, which is there in your new engagement platform that you guys pre-announced. You've got the announcement coming up there. You've got a book going on. But for Marketo, what's the guiding North Star for you? What do you say to customers and kind of the vision and what changes do you look that might be coming down the pike? Yeah, so the vision, there's two elements to that. One is that our core focus at its core is we're going to help the CMO build the lasting relationship, drive revenue for the company. And the way that we're going to do that is deliver the engagement platform, which we are now rolling out. I mean, we've been working on Orion for a long time way before I showed up. And Orion takes the ability for a marketer to go from millions of interesting touch points per year, social, mobile, digital touch points to quadrillions of touch points. We are ready for that digital transformation, what we call the engagement economy era. I'm writing a book on the whole notion of engagement economy. We're entering this new era where if you're not able to engage with people and also things, because things will be out there too, at scale, you won't win. You just won't win. I want to get your thoughts on one final point. I know we're kind of running up on time on this segment, but if you look at the cloud, going back to 2008, 2007 timeframe, when it really emerged and Amazon's already, had a couple of years under their belt with what they were doing, you saw the DevOps movement, emerging development and operations, be the real catalyst, those early adopters, those Navy SEALs, the Green Berets, eating nails and spitting glass out. So that was Facebook. That was the big web scalers. Yahoo, essentially invented Hadoop, which became big data. You saw all these companies that were new natives build their own stuff, not buy off the shelf equipment. And they became the canary in the coal mine for everybody else. Now everyone wants to be like AWS. Even Microsoft's changing to be more like AWS and competing directly with them. Google's changing. So those early guys in Facebook, what they're doing with drones and virtual reality, you know, the stuff they're doing with open compute, those are now leaders. So they are the predictors of the future, in my opinion, that's how I look at it. So the question I want to ask you is, how does Marketo rank up? Because companies that don't have huge early adopters of the scale side of it, platforms that can't scale probably won't have any headroom. So do you have an example where your business has guys pushing the tech, scaling it up, that are gonna be that canary in the coal mine? Do you guys have that mix of business? Can you give some examples? Yeah, I mean, first of all, we have fantastic customers that are using us today. At scale? Oh, at scale, absolutely. Whether it's a GE, for example, GE is literally attributing billions in revenue to the Marketo engine and the campaigns and efforts that they're driving through that. GE is a perfect example. Microsoft and other great, when there's lots of great examples of customers of ours that are doing what I would call hyperscale engagement. With marketing data and everything. With marketing data, et cetera, et cetera. So they're using your tools at large, large scale. Yeah, and I'd say it's the scale that today you get these hyperscale example points, but tomorrow everybody is gonna have to do it. It's just, what's neat for us though. Do you see the same thing I was mentioning that those hyperscales are gonna be the pioneers that are gonna let the settlers come in and behind them? Do you see that model? Yeah, unequivocally. And the neat part for us is because as a marketing automation technology or an engagement platform, we're fully integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera. So they actually pull us forward. We get that, I think we get that, we've got the telescope to see the canary in the coal mine a little bit further down the road, assuming it's a well-lit coal mine, but we get to see that a little bit further down the road. So it's an advantage for us strategically. So I gotta ask you the question because in the database world, there's systems of record, there's systems of engagement, and then systems of AI, IBM calls it cognitive. Yes. How do you guys play in that new era? Is that just all marketing for them? Well, I mean, everybody has their kind of- Does cognitive exist? Yeah. And do you have something? So to a degree, so everyone has tech and we certainly have, what I characterize as adaptive and intuitive, that's my version of AI. You know, I think saying artificially intelligent, it's kind of like, I've met a bunch of teenagers that I consider to be artificially intelligent, but the reality is that everybody to a degree has this brochure layer tech that they run around waving. It really comes down to what's practical, what's usable. And for us, that's what we're focused on is what is adaptive and intuitive technology that's gonna merge the marketer and the machine? Final question, final, final question is, what's the top three priorities for you? If we look back on your performance next year, this time, what are the top three things you wanna accomplish as the new CEO of Marketo? Well, number one, championing engagement economy. We're there and I think people just need to understand what it is. Two is help the marketer win. I mean, the reality is if you boil it down, you ask the question, what does the marketer want? They wanna win. They just want to win, help their company win. And so we wanna help the marketer win. And then three is really engage our marketing nation. We've got a community, an online community, talked about communities, over 100,000 marketers that are working inside of that community. It's just absolutely huge. And so I wanna engage the community. If we can do that and be just customer-centric and oriented, our technology, the AI, all of those things, part of our engagement platform, it's gonna help us win too. Steve, congratulations on being the CEO, Chief Executive of Marketo, great to see you. Steve Lucas here inside the Cube, and Palo Alto's new studios here in Palo Alto. 4,500 square feet, you can see a lot more content, live programming, as well as featured interviews with top CEOs of Silicon Valley and top technology companies. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.