 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE from our Boston area studios. We've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions, talking about how everyone's dealing with the global pandemic. Happy to welcome the program. A first time guest, Katie Bullard. She is the president of A Cloud Guru. Of course, A Cloud Guru, a online learning company. We've had on theCUBE many times over the years. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Stu, for having me. I really appreciate it. All right, so Katie, I remember I saw the, I think the announcement was the end of 2019. I came on to A Cloud Guru at the beginning of the year. You're based at the headquarters in Austin. Online learning is a huge topic. Cloud, of course, one of those mega waves that we've been watching in a long time. And then out of nowhere, global pandemic is striking us. So bring us inside. Obviously, taking a new role in a new organization as it's own challenges, normally it's like, okay, what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan? Tell us how you reacted and how the company has reacted with the COVID-19. Did you get a chance to look at my 90 day plan, Stu? That was exactly where I was. No. Well, let me take you back. I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ACG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well. When I was looking for the next opportunity, what I look for is I look for two things, primarily in a company. One is a product that's in a market that's growing really, really fast and a product that has raving customer fans. And obviously ACG really checked both of those boxes. If you think about, this is pre-COVID, if you think about the cloud computing market growing 50, 60% a year. And the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi-cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to do that effectively. There really wasn't a better intersection of two value propositions than what ACG offered, which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market. Fast forward to February, it was interesting. I actually went out to our Australia offices in mid-February as this was starting to heat up, came back just in time, I think to not go into quarantine. But we very quickly saw the impact and this isn't easy for anybody in any situation. But what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now. I think the latest stat I saw from the 2020 cloud report said 65% of companies are planning a cloud migration, 95% of companies are employing a multi-cloud strategy. So that is accelerating. And then of course, we're all sitting at home right now. You're getting me in my dining room. And we have to both learn online versus in-person. There's no longer in-person training. There's no longer events for us to go to live. So we're doing that online. We also are seeing that, you know, the way that we use our time is changing. So we're not spending hours anymore commuting. We have a lot of customers who are saying, let's use that time instead of commuting to learn, improve ourselves, improve our skills. So, you know, everything is very unpredictable in this environment. But we do feel like at ACG, our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need. So that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later, this year, they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. Yeah, no, you hit on a lot of topics. You know, so much right now, you know, remote learning, remote work, of course, you know, a big discussion. The developer world has been looking at that for a long time. And, you know, when I see, you know, the elementary and high school children as well as, you know, colleges and how they're handling distant learning, I was like, well, come on, the Croninburg brothers, you know, built something in, you know, two or three weeks from their mother's basement using Amazon and serverless. And they've trained millions of people now. Now, some of those things, you know, could absolutely translate, but it's challenging. So I'm curious, just, you know, and you're working with the team, is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience, you know, lessons that can be learned? Because as I said, you're, you know, highly scalable, you know, large scale. And, you know, you have nowhere near the budget of, you know, these municipalities and colleges, yet you do reach, you know, a very broad audience with some very important skills. Yeah, so I mean, if I think about the actual product itself and why it worked so well previously, right? Why the Croninburg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved, but more importantly, why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks, right? Most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit, leave our job and go learn something. And so from the very beginning, their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minute chunks. So whether, you know, I'm on my commute in the previous world or whether I'm, you know, using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new, I can do it in very digestible forms. And in a way that's really engaging to me. So I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment. I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles, right? We all learn a little bit differently. And so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks, whether it's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on, testing things, breaking things, building things, the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey, whether they're a novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of the PowerPoint basics, me when I first came on board, right? Of the cloud or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications. So I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long. And now as we have added a platform specifically for enterprises, where previously it was for individual developers, we now have both. I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time, realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style. Yeah, Katie, as you said before, there is a broad need for the skill set of cloud computing. I'm curious, have you seen anything in kind of your customer base, either from the enterprise side or for individuals? Are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are of critical need or anything that has grown? And we're curious, we're always, there's some people it's like, oh, I'm going to come out of this, whole experience and I'll have worked in my home gym and learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough. Me personally, I've been really busy. So I wish I had more spare time to do the computing and no travel has definitely reduced thing, but it's also given up the time that normally I was going to read a book or catch up on training. Yeah, the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse. So we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months. The first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30%. So people are taking advantage, I think, of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning. The other thing that we are seeing, and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing. Some of this was happening pre-COVID and some of this is happening post-COVID, so I'll split those up. Pre-COVID, what we've seen over the last quarter to two quarters actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills. Azure in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CSPs, although they're all three increasing rapidly. So as we think about the curriculum and our structures that we're bringing on and what we're building up historically, ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world, but we are responding to that change very, very quickly and then investing in Azure, GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses. So that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters. Most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what I call our beginner or fundamental courses. I think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to reskill, to set themselves up for a new career. So our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to GCP, those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking. And anecdotally, one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at what people are saying about ACG. And over the last week, especially, I can't even count the number of folks who've said, I'm using my lockdown time for learning or I'm putting my time and quarantine to the best use by getting trained on ACG. And so I think that what we are seeing, there is a direct reflection of that. All right, yeah, Katie, maybe give us a little bit of the update on A Cloud Guru. There was the Linux Academy acquisition. And if you can share a little bit about just kind of the numbers of how many people have gone through your program, you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards, which I know they need to go to the providers, pay a fee for that kind of thing. Yeah, we do. Yeah, there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months, right? We had a small acquisition and then we're dealing with this now. So we acquired Linux Academy in December. So actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business. One of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June, ACG had about 100 employees total. By the time I was actually accepting an offer in October, I think it was 200 employees in total. So in a four month span, the company had actually doubled. We acquired Linux Academy, which was of equivalent size to ACG. And so by the end of December, we were a 400 person company, a company that had been 100 people in the middle of 2019. So 400 people now we are, our biggest office is here in Austin. We do have a large office in Melbourne, Australia, which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is. We have an office in London where Ryan is. And Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth, Texas. So we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well. So it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months. Everything that goes into scaling a business like that, bringing two competitors together, integrating the business. We are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now. So we're excited to bring that to market later this year, all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment. Yeah. Congratulations. Always good to see great growth. The thing I've noticed is, ACG just has a really good will in the community. I see the orange shirts at many of the shows. I, you know, Ryan and Sam. Oh, I feel bad I wasn't wearing one today. Many of the other teams, yeah. They'll definitely have to get back to you about being on-brand. I was trying to coordinate with my background. One of the other things, you know, is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done theCUBE has been the serverless event. So, you know, any discussion about, you know, will there be some virtual versions of that or are we just going to need to wait for, you know, the physical events to return before we see those? So we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar. Actually, our very first one was yesterday. We had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series. It's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry. So expect if anyone's interested, you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars, but we'll be having those every two weeks through the course of this year. Awesome, love that. And I guess the last thing, Katie, there's some other things you've been doing to help the community in this need of the pandemic. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so two things in particular that we've really focused on. The first one is, across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms, we have lowered permanently the price of our individual membership. So for individuals from 449 down to 379, we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it. So that's now in market. The other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program. So we are offering 1000 subscriptions to ACG for the year. So annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by COVID. So we have a couple of different specific criteria, but if you've lost your job due to COVID and you're in one of the most heavily impacted industries, whether that retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers, get into the tech field, get your initial certification, we do now have a program for that. So you go online to our website, you're able to apply to that program. We launched it yesterday, maybe two days ago. And I know we already have hundreds of applications. So we're really excited to offer that. All right, well, we'll make sure to get this out to the community because I expect you'll be sold out of that. All right, Katie, thanks so much. Really pleasure to catch up with you and congrats on all the progress we've made. Thank you so much, Stu. Thanks for having me. All right, serverless, absolutely one of the topics. I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple of years. Hope you've enjoyed coming along for the journey. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.