 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here in Palo Alto at our studio. I'm excited to have with me an awesome expert guest here, Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of Sision, formerly the Marketing Cloud, brand new as the chief executive officer of one of the hot new companies in a new hot mega trend around communications and earned media. Kevin, great to see you. Part two of our segment, really getting into your company. Great to have you on me. We just had a great segment where, you know, you've got so much experience. You've seen, you know, I would call Gen 1 SaaS. Clearly from day one. And then you've had a great experience on a lot of M&A at Oracle. That's why this is so great. You know, right here. You know, a lot of now, it's going to get worse. You're the chief executive officer. But you're pursuing this new line of attack with this new market that's super hot. I think it's going to explode. I personally think this is going to be a new kind of category that's going to pop out of the woodwork pretty quickly. As you said, turn a caterpillar into a butterfly. Is this notion of earned media? Where now a PR function A or comms, traditionally a manual antiquated workflow, now can be disrupted with value propositions with software and automation. That's an app. You said, I couldn't say it better than Shelf. That's exactly right. What is going on with the company? What are you guys doing with the product? What's the vision? What is the company doing from a solution standpoint? Cher, take a minute to explain what you guys do. Yeah, you got it. So just like all these other mega movements that have been M&A based, we are too, right? So as you know, I acquired nine different businesses put Oracle Marketing Cloud together. Adobe I think is on number 11 with the two mogul acquisition, IBM is on number seven, Salesforce just bought Crocs, right? So the first one, it's pretty basic is, you know what? If all of these components of the right cake, right are scattered, the eggs are sitting over there, the yeast is there, the milk is there, the sugar is there, the flour is there. Until you put all the ingredients together and put them in a bowl, right, you can't bake the right cake. So silly analogy, but I'd use that for this $20 billion of marketing ad tech consolidation. We are a consolidation via M&A just like Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, IBM and the rest of the marketing clouds are. And basically that's the first point is we had to go get the right best of breed point solutions. And in our world, that basically means a couple of things. You needed to go get the solutions around listening, i.e. I need to listen to social, I need to listen to web, I need to be able to actually go get all the other digital signals from communities and blogs. And you know what? I need to listen to broadcast and radio and print because you know what? That stuff really, really matters. So one, you've got to have a omnichannel, online, offline, analog, digital, social, mobile, right? Listening function that allows you to ingest every single signal you need to listen to to if you want to be ahead of trends, right? And do gear communications towards them, you need to know what's going on, right? So several point solutions around that omnichannel listening. The second thing you need to be able to do then is put them into targeting, workflow, campaigning so that you can actually go execute your campaigns because you're right. Ad campaigns or email campaigns or print campaigns used to be manual as all get out. None of that exists anymore. It's all been automated. We're finally automating it over here too. So that whole targeted content workflow automation of campaigning, that was a second set of capabilities that needed to happen. The third one was then the actual distribution, right? If I now am listening, I can predictively understand what the communications elements of my story needs to be. I've then targeted to say, I've got 11 different audiences that need to hear that story, 11 different ways and 11 different channels. I've got to have the sophisticated real time distribution back out into those social, into the blogs, into the communities, into the web, right? In broadcast, et cetera. So that outbound and mile influencer and in mile customer distribution and then robust insights and analytics. So I'm constantly measuring, I'm constantly optimizing to go all the way back down to the bottom. And when all of those were sitting in different applications and the customer was using different content databases, different databases, different UIs, different workflows, right, different analytics, different data. Stop optimizing at all levels. All you're doing is optimizing for syncing systems instead of actually driving your goals. That is what the acquisition play was, which is exactly what I did at Oracle. I just, we did it again here. So that's what the component solutions are. And it's all been through M&A and it's all been in the last two years. There's been six different companies acquired to enable us to do step one, which is integration is innovation. When you can hand that CMO and Chief Customer Officer, less technology, better integrated, it can actually do more with less people. So who put the idea together? This is a brilliant idea. It is a good idea. It's a roll up, classic roll up, but to target this market that's gotta have some vision. Yeah. That vision with vision, what's that? Sometimes timing is good. Because what you have here is you've got the classic private equity model that realized, okay, if I put all these things together, wow, there's a lot of scale to be had here, right? With scale comes, I can take synergies out, I can take cost out, I don't need seven G&A departments, I don't need seven discrete sales teams, I don't need seven marketing budgets. So what you have here is this wonderful confluence of a really intelligent financial engineering that made a lot of sense from a traditional PE model and they just happened to put assets together that culminate into this incredibly strategic, let's go do this hop into today's definition of modernization. So you had somebody that kind of has had this vision and deployed it once at Oracle and is ready to do it at Oracle Marketing Cloud, it paid no, and ready to go do it again here in earned and comes, who got himself married with a private equity firm that didn't really understand the vision of what this thing could turn into, but had done all the right things. So I can take no credit for the actual six assets because they were done before I got here. When I saw it, I said, wow, you guys have absolutely no clue. I've been through it. You guys have no clue how good your investment thesis was and what this thing can actually turn into. So I can't take any credit for that. What was the moment in time that got you over the hump to leave a really great job at Oracle and as you said earlier, it wasn't anything about Oracle. It was when the customer testimonial, was it like someone saying, hey, this is working, was it a use case? It was by being in the market and talking to, John, as you know, I literally talked to thousands of chief marketing officers and chief customer officers all day long. I've been in the market forever, hence all the gray hair. The tipping point of this whole, you know what? I'm not just gonna advertise and promote my way there. It is gonna come over to this side. There was a tipping point of customer feedback about what is the big next thing my customers that I've been selling to for 25 years all the way back to direct mail and catalog days, pre-digital, I've been talking to and selling to this customer for 20 years and we hit a critical mass around what that customer needed next. Married with this stack and when they pull the trigger on the PR newswire piece, because that is one, it's the largest communications distribution network on the planet, but far more importantly, it's the ability to go get at billions of consumers, the influencer graph, the closing the loop between the reporter and the end-mile customer. That was a piece that in private equity lands looked like, oh, that's just a great asset, right from a financial standpoint. I said that's the final piece to let us bring the database, right, the software and the automation and the influencer into billions of consumers via digital distribution network and that was the piece that clicked. Is it a SaaS model or is it a SaaS model? It's a media stack. You got it, it's, I hate to say it, but it is literally. Now you had some nuances, right? Responses had a different pricing model than Eloqua did and that was different than Maximizer and that was different than Bluekai and that was different day logic, right? You had a whole bunch of flavors, but at the end of the day, they were, they was a SaaS model. I just had to squish those together into one Uber SaaS model. We're the exact same thing. We are a cloud platform that is priced and delivered exactly like a SaaS software stack. What's the low hanging fruit now from an implementation and pricing and solutions? Yeah, the low hanging fruit is one. You know what? Do it all with one vendor and you're gonna, not only are you gonna spend less overall total cost of ownership, but you're actually gonna spend less on the software because you're not buying seven things from seven vendors. Number two is I'm actually going to have the data go all the way through to an end goal like the influencer graph or mapping measuring impact and then mapping it to end user consumer impact. I can't do it, right? Otherwise, and that data is just gonna come for free with the stack. So not only do I not have it, but I get it for the price of admission. Holy smokes, that's fantastic, right? And then the last low hanging fruit is that the second we light up the APIs, I get to measure its impact right back over into what it's doing on the website or what it's doing in paid or what it's doing to any of my other kind of more better known attribution. That also is gonna come with the paid admission. So if you're a buyer of Cision, and I hate that this sounds a bit avatorial, I don't mean it to be, but wait a second. I was spending a dollar across seven different vendors not integrated. Now you're gonna let me spend 90 cents for the same thing, but better integrated and you're gonna give me the data and you're gonna get me to the end user and you're gonna connect me to the rest of my marketing ad tech I've already spent, $200 million for 90 cents instead of a dollar. Okay, that works for me, Kevin. So there's some really low hanging fruit of all. And they don't have to over buy, they can use what they can. That's exactly right. That's why Amazon Web Services is taking that so far. And we sell it modally, just like we did at Oracle, Oracle Adobe Salesforce, they'll still sell you only a piece or they'll sell you the whole stack, so will we. So do you, I can see how you can help customers. I'll see if those customers are probably end user customers and agencies. What about media companies like SiliconANGLE and others? What's in it for us? How do I get paid? I think, and I'm glad you asked me that because I think that really is, if you say, okay, Kevin, at the end of the day, what decisions, three audiences that really matter. One is obviously the brands, right? The buyers that write all of our paychecks. Two are the agencies that are a mission critical part of the ecosystem. And I would say the publishers and all that as well. And three actually is you guys, right? And I think that there's quite a few benefits. One, the relevance, the targeting. Well, if you're, if you're. So do I use the software? Do I resell the software? In a way, the ad units change and there's no more. Impressions are going with ad blockers out there. People don't want to see ads. They want to see content. So how do I, I can make money with this potentially. I think what happens is, A, when the spotlight shines and says, you know what, instead of spending $801 million with Google and Facebook next year on top of the 800, that extra $1 million, if you spend it here, we have now closed the analytics and measurability loop to show that that million dollars ought to be spent here with you. So I think for all of, all of us that are in the earned immediate profession, we've always known the value. We've struggled to measure it. And more importantly, get the CFO to measure it. It's hard to aggregate the data. That's exactly right. So let's talk about data. How do you aggregate the data? That seems to be the key value proposition. Obviously having functional point solutions in a seamless, coherent way is a good user experience, operational experience. But at the end of the day, it's like, if you run a blast on PR newswire, you get that, that's the big top, you know, blast broadcast, then you now have community data. You get listening data. That's right. You have organic community data. So we're a big, the answer to that question is, we are now a big data source ourselves. Right? I, by the very nature of sending half of all PR and earned media for the last 30 years in the world, I know that was CPG. It was Clorox. It was the dog food brand, right? It had this kind of content. It went to this kind of influencers, you know, the ocean of data that we have around this just in-house is absolutely amazing. Number one, number two, because of the large digital distribution network, the second we light up, which we will be doing in the next month, not only do I have all of that that has to do with the brand, the content and the influencer, the reporter, the media, or the media channel, now I know how to influence 2 billion end users, you know, our consumers. That is a second data element because there's lots of that data around from lots of data providers. None of it is linked back to, wait a second, this brand and this content through that influencer, the reporter or the, or right, the cube or, right, regardless of whether it was online show or an infographic or an event, all of that's earned stuff with people like you. When we go measure the impact of that tied to, right, we know now that you touched 111,000 B2B customers. The right ones. The right ones. And they all look and smell like this or 90,000 or target market, whereas 9,000 of them in the advertising budget were target market. And then because I closed the loop on the data and now my ID talks to the Marquette or Eloquai ID, you know what, not only were 90,000 of those people that watch the cube, the right target audience instead of 9,000 from advertising. So this blows up, this blows up the CPM. 45,000 of them showed up in my lead nurturing flow and ultimately 5,000 of them closed, right? So by tying the measurement loop, which is data driven and introducing that into this earned media category, which is always intellectually known, it's worth, has never been able to put it on a report that the CFO buys off on and throws Marquette to death. We can finally start doing real numbers and real attribution, which is gonna take our whole category up. And quite frankly, we'll get funded out of the excess, right now. So all of us, whether you're tech and data vendor like me, whether you're a publisher, whether you're journalists, whether you guys, the fact that this is gonna go data-driven and measurable instead of arcane and alchemic, the results aren't gonna lie. The efficacy is gonna be proven and this is a set of ships that's gonna rise pretty rapidly in my opinion. As Jeff Frick on the cube always says, you shine the light, the cockroaches run for the cover. That's what the data does, data shines the light. But the sunflowers rise, right? And us sunflowers are about ready to have a lot of light shown on us, which is gonna prove the efficacy. And I quite frankly, we're gonna enjoy the investment accordingly. Well, we'd love to see how theCUBE and SiliconANGLE, how we turned out on the influence ranking, but this changes the whole CPM mindset of, you know, cost per million, cost per thousand, I mean. And so you got all this stuff going on. Final question for you is, how big is the company? How many employees? And what's your vision for 2017? So the six acquisitions ended up with a company that's about $650 million in annual revenue. So amazingly enough, that's a top 15 SaaS company. So we're the, we are buying way, the largest top 15 SaaS company nobody's ever heard of. I'm gonna try to do something about that. I've got a little bit of my own branding to do, which is why I asked you if I could come on here. Because I certainly value your audience and you get to the people that I want to brand to. So it's a $650 million SaaS company, which is top 15. It's about 2,400 employees. About 10% of that is in China. About 25% of that is in actually about 30% of that is in Europe and the rest of it is here in North America. And it's kind of, you know, it's rapidly dispersed every single company. And your plan for 2017 is get the cohesiveness with the organization, go to the market, get sales, branding, events. I have had to, anytime you take six companies and put them together and all of them were doing pretty well, you've got six ethos, six cultures, six sets of people. You got to go get your culture. You got to go turn six cultures into one culture. Six missions or, you know, goals into one goal, right? Six visions and roadmaps into one vision. People think that the tech integration or the systems integration or the process integration is the hardest, it's not. It's the people, the culture and what are we collectively? What's the hill we're going to go climb together is one decision communication cloud instead of the six different component categories. So a lot of that work has been done as well as a lot of the taken three and a half DCL source instances down to one. All the operational stuff, all that's been done as well. So the good news is I was able to get that out of the way in the second half of 2016. So we're kind of, we have our mission, we have our hill to take, we've got our one culture, I've got 2,400 people and thousands of partners and customers really excited about what we're gonna go be. Now it's execution and execution means finishing the job from an integration standpoint. So it's a real platform rather than just point solutions. Getting the data to flow up and down and out right the way I just articulated, number two. Number three is teaching my customers how to adopt and utilize, right? Don't just think about it, but here's how a good practitioner, this is what a good practitioner looks like. This is best practices, this is how to measure it. This is how to sell it internally, right? All of that and people trivialize that too. I've got a very hungry customer base that's never bought this. So they need to be taught how to buy it, how to roll it out, how to measure it and how to sell it to the CFO. So that's my 2017 is delivering world-class solutions but also helping my communications audience know how to get them sold internally, adopt them the right way and poop out world-class results so that investment looks like the most brilliant thing they've ever done. Well, you got a lot of wind at your back. Story challenge there have been hotter. Original content is the premium. You got artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data. Every trend is in our sales. And again, the active desire to realize I can't advertise my way there. I got to go do it this way. We don't even have much convincing to do. People know it. They just need to be told how. All right. Kevin Akeroy, CEO of Cision, brand new. Pull together, roll up the biggest SaaS company. You'll soon be hearing a lot about 16th or 15th with great 600 million plus in revenue. Great story. I think you're in a hot segment. Congratulations. And thanks for coming in. Good to see you. Always good to be here. Have a great holiday. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching The Conversations on the Ground here in the studio in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Thanks, John.