 Live from San Francisco, California, theCUBE, covering MarkLogic World 2015. Brought to you by MarkLogic. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and Jeff Kelly. Welcome back everybody, we are live here on theCUBE at MarkLogic World 2015 in San Francisco. I'm Jeff Kelly and I'm with my host Jeff Frick. We are getting towards the end of our wall-to-wall coverage here. It's been a long day, but we've heard some great stories. We're going to hear another great story. We've got Freddie Quick, who's the director of strategic initiatives at Wiley, joining us, Wiley Welldown Publisher. Thank you for your welcome. Freddie, thanks for joining us, first time on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Probably most of our audience is familiar with Wiley, but why don't you tell us a little bit about Wiley and your role and then we'll kind of get into some of the things you're doing. Yeah, I don't think many people actually know of us, right, the thing that they probably know is this is for Dummy's brand, but we do more than just Dummy's. We are one of the oldest publishers in the world. We've been around for 200 years, even longer than Coca-Cola, yeah. That's a long time. And we do a lot of things. We have three main core businesses, one around research, academic scientific research, one around education, and then one around sort of professional development, professional practice, what you do in your professional life. We are a $1.8 billion company with 5,000 employees globally. So, you know, it's been interesting in the sense as a company, I was at a conference recently and I asked the audience, how many people work for a company that's been around in the last 20 years? Lots of hands. When I asked how many work for a company that's been around for 200 years, I'm one of the few. Well, I would imagine being on the one hand, a media and a publishing company, and the fact that you've been around for 200 years, you've got quite a lot of content from a lot of different systems that you're trying to juggle and manage to deliver to your readers. Yes. Tell us a little bit about that environment from a content and data perspective that you're working with. I mean, as you just said, we have lots of content going all the way back to the 1800s, right? And when the internet came along, that was when, in fact, one of the sort of perception on me is about publishing companies that we are traditional, we are all, we are not, we are followers rather than leaders, but when I'm looking back now, that is not quite true because when you saw the emergence of the internet, guess who were the first people that put lots of content on the internet? It was the publishers. I used to work for another major publisher and now I work for Wiley. And that was the beginning of where lots of content was put on the internet. But because of that, we were also the first to start discovering the problems around dealing with what is now called big data. In those days, you don't have those terms, but we have problems with lots of content that we have no idea what to do, right? And of course we were looking for a solution that helps us to not only just put the content out there, but to be able to put it in a way that we can do more with it. For example, to be able to reuse that content to what they call slice and dice content. And one of the things that we did was to introduce Maclogic as not originally back in 2005, very long time ago, as our content repository. So keeping all that raw data in one place, in one repository. And then a few years later, we had Maclogic building us a custom application and it's called Wiley Custom Select. It is a custom publication application for people to produce their own work from the content that we have. And that only took three months, right? You say that people, is that enterprise customers, is that individuals, I mean? This is mostly academic institutions for like professors who wants to create their own syllabus for teaching. Okay. Yeah, but of course, you know, anybody can go to the website, it's website comes to life and just do it. We call it, you can produce your own custom book in three simple steps. Yeah, anyone takes, you know, as long as it takes you to do it. And where did you implement that? What year did you implement that? That was back in, I believe 2009. Yeah. So is that, that's a use case that Maclogic has been kind of- Yeah, so and this is something that I've, you know, because I only joined Wiley in 2006. So prior to that, they already had that content store, they built that custom application tool. But when I joined Wiley, one of my responsibility was to be in charge of the, is largest customer facing application called Wiley into Science. And we had a big acquisition of another company called Blackwells, which then sort of double our size. And of course, one of the things that I was asked to do is how do we combine everything into one single platform? And I took that as the opportunity to sort of create the next generation platform. I have to look into what kinds of solutions are out there that would help us to solve that problem. And originally, I was looking at Maclogic definitely as the XML store. But very quickly, I realized that, and it was also Maclogic saying to me, why are you not using our other capabilities? Because at that time, I was aware of the version three which was just an XML store. But by that time, there was version four. And version four comes with Enterprise Plus search engine. I didn't know that. So we had to take a chance to not only use the Consense Store but the search engine and also very quickly because of the limited sort of skill sets that we have there. I have to rely on my engineers and they're very great. And some of them actually work for Maclogic today to say, what do we do? And they say, look, you can actually do almost anything with Maclogic. So we also started using Maclogic as one of the application services. And we became sort of part of the application engine that we used to drive this Wiley Online platform. And it's our largest platform. We have 75 million page views a year, sorry, a month. And we have 270 million visitors a year. So it's huge numbers. Yeah. It's always an interesting debate between a platform and an application. And clearly these guys came into your world as really an application. But it was a fundamental platform that we keep hearing more and more, Jeff. People coming on saying that we're building new products, new applications on this platform. Sounds like you guys are obviously taking advantage of that opportunity. Exactly. And that's what I meant by, you know, it's a myth that we are followers because we had, we realized that we had to build those foundational things in there. And one of the stories that I probably want to talk about is the American Geophysical Union project because, you know, people asked me why that was successful. And I said to them, that didn't happen by accident. Right? It happened by design and it happened by the fact that we had already had that investment before having the right content store with the right technology, having shown that we can build a custom application too in a very sort of rapid fashion, having built the next generation sort of platform to serve that huge amounts of users. And finally, when we were being asked to do a challenge like this, where we only had four months to integrate, you know, 160,000 articles, you know, we had to integrate 60,000 customer data. We had to improve the content. We had to build 60 features in a six-week development cycle. Everybody said, wow, impossible. Of course it's impossible. But because of the foundation that we had, it became an enabler. And that's why we see technology as helping us through that journey to achieve different things. So for that one, it was an enabling technology, but for the other ones, it's more about creating the foundation. And are you seeing kind of a renewed entrepreneurial vigor inside the company now that people know that they can build some of these applications based on this platform that you put in to really go after new opportunities, new markets, new ways to slice and dice as info? Yeah, I think the way my colleagues and I were looking at the opportunity is not just from a technology perspective. It's about the fact that we want to be, we are on a journey to become a knowledge company. Probably, I would say 10 years ago, most of the things that we do are in print. And only about five years ago, we were at a sort of 40% mark. As of today, we are 60% digital. 60% of our revenue comes from digital. And our target is to be at 75% in 2017. So we are clearly on that journey. And part of that journey is to come up with sort of more products and services, not just being a content provider, but more products and services that will benefit our users. And we want our users and customers to be a lifelong partner with us, right? On the journey from being in school, in college, part of the higher education, getting sort of materials, not just from what we provide, but online and product services that goes with it all the way through when they are in industry and they are sort of working professionals to help them and also to help their organizations with tele-management, right? We have tools now that goes into sort of pre-hire assessment, to post-hire assessment, succession planning. So we're moving from just providing content to creating knowledge-enabled services. Talk about the transformation of going from the print to the digital world, right? A lot of people are going through that right now with their own businesses and clearly probably cannibalize some of your own business. And I'm sure there was some interesting debates around the table in starting to eat some of our own business with some of this digital delivery of the content. And yet, it's still an objective it sounds like to make that move. Talk a little bit about the business decisions and why that's an important move for you guys to go. Right, in fact, just before I came here, I sort of looked at some of the materials that we've put out there in the public domain and our CEO, Steve Smith, back in 2013, he actually, there was an article written about an interview with him and the title was Reinventing Wiley. And it was a very sort of a good story about why we're on this journey because clearly the print business has been sort of, a lot of that market has been eaten away by obviously electronic media. And of course, you're gonna do something about it, right? We can't just wait there and do nothing. Watch it fade away. Exactly. And no matter how hard we try, that sort of attrition replacement is not gonna be the same, right? We lose 50% in terms of what we used to get revenue from Printed Books. It doesn't mean that we get the same 50% from digital. So we have to obviously keep looking at different ways of achieving that. And I think one of the strategies that he mentioned in that interview was that we want to make sure that on this journey, the stuff that we are very good at doing for 200 years, that will still remain as part of our core business, but it's no longer gonna be 100% of our business, right? That's 75%. We have to look at 25% from other opportunities, from other revenue streams, and those revenue streams that I briefly mentioned earlier on will be into sub-knowledge and able services, tools and products that is more than just providing content. How important is that essentially that CEO mandate when it comes to adopting new types of technology, such as Mark Vodrick, does that make it a smoother transition when you know you've got top-down initiative to make it happen? Right, I think we all know that it's so important to get clear leadership because otherwise you'll be doing so many different things and what Steve has provided us is that clear mandate about where we wanna go and as a technology function, our job is to provide the best solution, right? Who knows what the solution might be tomorrow? And I think we are glad that at least we make the right bet in those early days to create a foundation who knows what would happen tomorrow, but at least we have given ourselves a chance to be successful in the meantime as we continue the journey. Yep, fantastic. Well, Freddie, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. Unfortunately, we're out of time and there's a great conversation. Right, great call. Hopefully we'll have you again on soon. Pretty quick from Wiley, thanks so much. Thank you for watching Stick Around. We'll be right back with our next segment live here at MarkLogic World 2015. You're watching theCUBE.