 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. We are back in Las Vegas here at AWS re-invent. Along with Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls, and I know what you're thinking, email. Oh my God, email, the avalanche, the problems that it causes your folks in IT. Well, I tell you what, Chris McFadden is here to solve your problems. VP of Engineering at SparkPost. Chris, good to see you this afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you, I'm happy to be on theCUBE. Yeah, great. This is my third time in re-invent, but first time on theCUBE, so happy to be here. Oh, so a CUBE rookie. That's right. We have a fine stick to leave you with it on the way out. Remind me to get it to you. All right, so tell us about SparkPost first off, about, we talked about email, I mean what your primary focus is, and just the challenges that you're trying to solve for your clients. Sure, yeah, SparkPost is a leading email delivery provider. So our customers send over five trillion emails a year, that's over 37% of the world's commercial email, so that's obviously a lot of email. So we're focused on a B2C email, and what that means is that any app who has the need to send email, we help with getting that email on time into the inbox. That really helps product managers and product teams with ensuring that they can get the right kind of performance, the analytics, and also the human services to make sure that they can get customers to adopt their service, grow engagement, and ultimately revenues. I understand you have a new product, SparkPost Signals. Tell our viewers a little bit more. Yeah, so I'm very excited to talk about SparkPost Signals. So as everybody knows, email is super important to people. And with email being such a high ROI for most companies, when you have a dip in email performance, that can really impact a company's revenue as well. So I'm excited to talk about SparkPost Signals because what that can really help with is being able to provide some dashboards and tools so that you can have more data-driven, predictive, and actionable insights so that ordinary customers can have that kind of email expertise at their fingertips really to be able to then boost their performance. So I can certainly talk about some of the particular challenges that this would solve for people. So in particular, we have a health score and also spam trap reporting. So for example, what can happen is if you or maybe somebody in your organization that you don't even know about, they could go out and acquire an email list. More email addresses, the better, right? Sure. You know, you end up landing on spam traps. You're getting blocked, your email's not going out. So it's better off to get early notice about whether there's some sort of problem so then you can actually react and correct the problem before it starts impacting your business. So is it a delivery problem or a challenge or is it a firewall challenge or a problem? And I mean, kind of how do you balance that out because I mean, it seems like it's a little bit of both. Actually, it could be a little bit of both. So email is very much an open network. There's no one particular tech company really owns it. So anybody can send any email, right? That's why most email that's sent is actually spam. So on the ISP side, these are the internet service providers who are like Gmail or Hotmail that are actually receiving the email. They're very protective of their users, right? So what that means is that if you buy email addresses or you're sending too much to people and they say, I don't want this email, then the ISPs can actually say, you're doing this too much, you're being abusive and we're actually going to start blocking you. So none of your email is actually going to get delivered. So none of your password resets, none of your order confirmations, none of your marketing email. So you have to be very, you have to have very good email sending practices otherwise you run into trouble. So for most customers, for most companies we work with, their expertise is elsewhere. They're in social media, they're in banking. Marketing, whatever, right? They don't necessarily know all the best ways to be able to manage their email streams. And yet email is mission critical to their businesses. Exactly. This product launches in January, but you've already been testing the waters a bit with some of your customers. What are you hearing, what are they saying? So we've heard a lot of very good things. The usual response from customers is, when can we get it, you know? So we're frantically working to roll this out, right? But we've actually, when we were doing the demos with customers, we were actually showing them real data so that, so this wasn't hypothetical. We're actually showing them real data with their own health scores, with their spam trap reports. Also showing, which is really interesting, their engagement cohorts. So what that means is that if customers, I mean, if our companies that work with us are not sending to their most engaged users, but are also sending to users that don't actually engage much at all, then that can actually hurt their overall deliverability and engagement. Sure. So when we showed them these cohort reports, showing them that if you actually are sending more to your more engaged users, ultimately your engagement and revenue is going to go up. So we've actually worked, even before Signals was a product, we've worked with customers to do this, and we have some very high profile customers who've actually reduced the volume of email they've sent through us, but their engagement has gone through the roof as well as their revenue. We've also worked with customers, and that's more on the engagement cohort reporting. On the other side, when it comes to the spam trap reporting, we've had customers who've actually run into problems where they inadvertently started emailing to addresses that are on spam traps. Spam traps, if you don't know, are essentially like bogus email addresses that are out there like honeypots. And if you email them, then it tells the spam trap owner that you obviously didn't get a real person to subscribe to this or to opt in. So you're obviously following bad practices and I'll report you to maybe a blacklist which will then prevent all of your email being delivered. So we were able to work with that customer to really identify the rate of spam trap hits that they have and they were able to clean up their own practices based on that and then get back in business and actually have better engagement for what they're doing. So I mean, you're here at AWS. So there's a public cloud play here somewhere. Is this about a customer migration? Are you educating people and bringing them along as well to the public cloud experience? Meaning like, what are you doing here? Right. So we have our cloud service and that's built on AWS. We've been in AWS for over four years now and we love coming here learning about a lot of the new technology. We also have a booth here and we're promoting our own service. What we also have is that we have on-premise products, Momentum and PowerMTA and both of those products are heavily used throughout the industry for sending email. So we have a number of customers who are coming to us and saying we're looking to move to the cloud. So we can either help them move their mail streams to SparkPost, which can be very convenient or if they want to continue to run their own MTAs and some of their own infrastructure, possibly maybe they're a bank or maybe they're just not, it's not the right time for them. Then we're able to look at other options potentially, things like hybrid analytics and that's a way for them to be able to get the additional analytics and things like SparkPost signals but without actually moving everything. But I'm definitely very encouraged. Yesterday's keynote had Guardian and that's quite an ambitious project to be able to move to the cloud. So I'm very excited. We're also, SparkPost is one of their SaaS providers that they chose to use in part of their migration. So rather than continuing to try to run their own infrastructure, they said, here's an API, I trust SparkPost. They've got the right security, the support services and things like that to be able to get the job done. I'm curious about the future and sort of will email always be an integral part of doing business for companies and sort of what, how SparkPost is thinking about its future business model. Right, so email's been dead about 20 years. That's what they keep saying. However, every year, email volumes keep growing. Everybody has an email address. It's the, really there's the preferred method of communication even among millennials nowadays. Email is also, again, it's an open platform so it's not controlled by the big tech companies. And so it's very ubiquitous. It's also a good system of record and also there's certain things that don't really make sense to send over push or SMS. So email continues to be a real workforce for companies both in triggered email as well as marketing email. So we have a number of customers who are in these next generation, MarTech vendors who are providing even more services. They use us as the back end for doing that delivery but they're seeing even more demand for again on the marketing side. And again, there's more and more apps being built. There's more and more opportunities there. They all need to send email. And we see certainly with SparkBusSignals and otherwise that with the smart use of data, it really becomes an even better opportunity to grow those relationships with your customers. Right, so rather than just being a transaction, right, that's an opportunity for a relationship building interaction. A value add. Right. Well, five trillion emails. I think half of them, I think I'm sending half of those these days. So maybe you and I ought to talk. Thanks for the time. It's been a pleasure to have you here on theCUBE. And again, we leave you with a parting gift please by all means. I appreciate it. Chris McFadden joined us here and we'll be back with more from AWS reInvent. We are live on theCUBE from Las Vegas.