 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello and welcome to the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Donald Klein. Today we're here to talk about digital transformation and the challenges many enterprises face in helping employees adopt the new applications that drive their business. To have that conversation, we're joined by Vara Kumar, CTO and co-founder of WhatFix. Vara, welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks Don for inviting me to the show. Great, so looking forward to this, tell us a little bit about WhatFix, what you guys do and a little bit of the history here. Sure, WhatFix is a digital adoption platform. So essentially it overlays on top of applications and makes employees to use applications faster and better. So we have five years old company, so we have offices in four different countries and we have 500 customers and 60 or Fortune 500 users including companies like Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Microsoft, Western Union, Western Digital. The users are on a variety of applications like CRMs, ERPs, HCMs. Great, fantastic customer base, that's really good. So when you say you're a digital adoption platform that kind of provides an overlay, what specifically you're talking about? You're talking about notifications inside of an application. Tell us a little bit more about that. Sure, sure, so WhatFix helps employees throughout their journey in their applications. As they onboard to the applications for the first time, WhatFix welcomes them and holds them to the application. So we provide these, what we call it as flows. So these are step by step guidance to the users for using the applications and processes. And not only within the application, WhatFix guides the users across applications that the employee is faced with. So for example, cross application workflows, that kind of thing. That's correct, that's correct. For example, an account executive, so they have to manage opportunities in CRM and then to create a code, they have to go to a CPQ and then to submit a purchase order, probably they'll have to go to a digital workplace to maintain the code and proceed to the contract. So WhatFix can guide the users throughout this entire process. Great, so it's not just about the challenges of learning about one particular application, it's actually learning an entire workflow that might stretch across multiple applications. That's accurate. Some sort of end to end process that gets very complex because you're moving from one interface to the next. That's accurate, that's accurate. Great, and I guess another challenge would be that many, in a large enterprise, many of the applications that come from the well-known vendors get highly customized for that particular business environment, is that correct? That's completely true, Don. So Salesforce instance of UPS looks very different from Salesforce instance of Western Union because it's completely customized to the organization, business workflows and the nature of their business. So this customization also brings in a lot more adoption challenges because even though I have an account executive who have seen Salesforce in my past experience, it looks very different from my current job. So there's more challenging for the enterprises to train the employees and make them use. Great, understood, okay, very good. So the problem that you guys are really trying to solve is around this challenge of getting employees to adopt kind of the new applications and as part of their kind of overall digital transformation journey, is that right? That's true, it's not only new applications now with the so much of cloud movement, so the applications are actually getting updated more faster, as you must have heard so much about as well being used in the enterprises for the IT rollouts and IT deployments. That means changes are constant. So because you are reinventing your business processes as you are learning that. So now employees actually it impacts more the employee experience because now every update employees have to be on top of those. So Netflix can help them with these updates and making sure that employees are self-served. Understood, okay, very good. So now this has become really such a widespread problem across many of these large enterprises that it's now become quite a mature category of software solutions, is that right? That's accurate. Gotten called out this category as digital adoption solutions, DAS. Digital adoption solutions. That's correct. Okay, DAS. DAS, that's correct. And then they contest only Quaterback and they publish reports in terms of seller productivity and how it will influence the digital workplace and such kind of things. Great, yeah. Okay, great. So this category now is becoming more widespread, right? And people really see these types of solutions as being key to enabling digital transformation in the enterprise, right? That's accurate. Okay, great. So then what are the trends that are driving this problem? What is it that's making this such a problem area that companies really need to focus on dedicated solutions to solve it? Yeah, so one primary is the cloud migration. So more and more the companies wants to move to the cloud. For example, you no longer hear CRM being on-prem. So people are using all the cloud CRMs. So the migration to the cloud and then overall the digital transformation of these business practices to suit this cloud migration. That'll also, it's all putting pressure on employee experience. So impacting and making sure that employees are getting used to these new applications and the constant rollouts. Got it, got it. Okay, so with all this happening, right? More and more applications moving to the cloud. The applications themselves are evolving much faster. The interfaces are changing. And then moreover, they're getting more complex because they're getting more interconnected, right? That's accurate. And so you have this step-by-step kind of workflow that helps people navigate, you know, all of these integrated applications, you know, to actually perform a single workflow. That's accurate, that's accurate. And at the same time, given that what fix is on top of these applications, we are learning a lot about the user, this particular user and what they are doing, what they're good at, what they're not good at. This is helping us to make our content more personalized to the users. Just like Google, you search for the same keyword, I search for the same thing, we both see different results because it's personalizing to our taste and our knowledge and expertise. So that's exactly it's getting into. And it's not only guidance, we are also helping users to be more productive by automating certain steps. Let's say you do certain activity every day, then what fix can do that automatically for you so that you're becoming more and more faster in your job. Interesting, that's interesting. So it's not only helping provide guidance for people moving through these applications, but it's actually collecting data about how users are interfacing with it, right? And then delivering a more kind of personalized experience in terms of the guidance that it offers. Accurate, that's accurate. Great, so that's really kind of, I guess that would really be the main kind of area of innovation I would imagine for a system like this, right? The ability to capture data about how users are interfacing with the application and then provide recommendations on how to do it better. Yes, that's definitely one of the area. There are several reasons why customers choose us. We believe in the concept called adoption everywhere. So that means everywhere. That means employee need not be on the application all the time. They may want to interact with the application when they are outside of the application. So be it maybe you're in the wiki, you're looking for something, then you want to interface with the application. So what fix is present across all touch points wherever employee may reside and guide them to the application and help them use the application. And second, we are very easy to deploy and maintain. So we invested heavily on this because we realized that we don't have to, we shouldn't be providing a platform which is technically more complex for the business guys to create these kind of process flows. We kept them very low tech and our othering environment is very easy for them to use and maintain. And then we are very open in terms of our APIs just like Salesforce, which is very open in terms of integrations because we do understand that enterprises are wants more of interconnected applications. So all our APIs are open and we work well with the enterprise ecosystem. And our customer success is highly regarded. So we are best among one of the enterprises in the software vendors in terms of the highest customer satisfaction. And we care a lot about real user privacy and security. So we don't really collect PII information for doing the recommendations and personalizations as I spoke about. Okay, very good. And so then the, tell us a little bit more about which kind of applications are you guys finding which categories of applications really kind of benefit most from this kind of guided walkthrough capability? Sure, so the applications are widespread. So, but more commonly people use us on CRMs, ERPs and HCMs and digital workplaces. These are the kind of applications where customers commonly use us on. Okay, so ERP and CRM would be the kind of core, would you say? Yeah, CRM, ERP and HCM. So these will be the core, I would say. And it's not only the applications that customers are purchasing from outside, but Vortex can work on any applications that is internally built or any applications that their IT team is customizing. Vortex can work on any of those. So bespoke applications developed internally inside companies are equally suitable for this as are the packaged applications that they might be customizing for their business processes? That's correct. Okay, that's great. So I just on the kind of conclude here, let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the customer success stories that you guys have had. I'm not asking you to necessarily name names, but maybe talk about some of the areas where you've seen some real value creation from implementing a system like this. Sure, sure. Our customers have seen that onboarding time of employees into the applications have reduced one third. So because of using Vortex, because now employees are learning in the flow of work you no longer have to train them to use the applications. And we've also seen that organizations telling that their content creation times and the amount of training preparation time has reduced 85% or 85% because of our easy to use ordering environment and easy to maintain ordering environment. And we've also seen organizations have reduced support tickets, internal support tickets by 60%. Wow. Yeah, so we have also seen that overall productivity of the employees increased by 35% because they're able to find things and be able to self serve and do more faster in the applications. Got it. So the old days of sitting down expecting the employees to read the user manual kind of page by page before they dive in is gone now, right? It's gone. It's gone. What people want to see is they want to get into the application and then they want to be able to be guided through what they need to do to solve their particular problem. That's what we've done. And they want it done in real time. That's true. That's what I've done. And even better, they have that whole guide through maybe customized to their particular problem. That's accurate, Don. That's the digital adoption solutions for you. Great. Sounds like a fantastic solution. Understand the role plays fantastic. I think you guys are doing great work. So want to maybe just kind of touch on this last point. Where do you see this kind of industry going maybe in the future? This is fantastic innovation, but how do you see this trending as digital transformation becomes more widespread? Yeah, sure. So adoption as the problem statement more and more organizations understands and more and more software vendors understand today. We are a dream force now. So if you see the number of sessions around adoption is phenomenal. So like when the partner called out that only 6 to 7% of enterprises have adopted to the solutions like what fix. So there has to be more awareness. So people, enterprises understand that adoption is a problem, but they are not aware that there are solutions exist to tackle that problem. So we see that's going to be the future for us as we go forward having more and more enterprises head up to these kind of solutions. Great, okay. Well, if you happen to be a dream force folks you'd stop by and talk to what fix. So Vahra Kumar, thank you for coming on theCUBE. So thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time.