 From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads. It's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. A lot of software companies have developed here. It's got a long history. At one point it was really kind of the, all the software in Silicon Valley was based here versus chips in the South and kind of new media in the North. It's not quite the same anymore, but that's really the roots of the area. You're probably stuck in traffic if you're here. So look up, you'll see the SnapLogic sign. That's where we are at their new headquarters. And we're excited to have practitioner. We love getting customers on. He's Omar Navas. He's the global head of digital transformation and a CISO, small, not a small responsibility at Quantum. Great to see you. Well, thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here. Absolutely. So you are one of these, could be the new unicorn, the head of digital transformation. So you were brought in for that role. You've been with the company a little over six months, less than a year. Why do they bring you in and where do you get started? Well, you know, it's a very interesting role. It's, you know, what digital transformation is about change. And we all know that that's hard, right? And that's why I was specifically brought into the company to help really, you know, help change the operating model and the business model for the company. So what I really do there is work with the leadership of the company and understand what their ambitions are, right? And then the exciting part starts where my team and I actually help convert that ambition into reality, right? And so that we can create a measurable way to understand that the reality that we're creating or that ambition that we want to achieve is it really meaningful for us or not? And who do you report to? Who brought you in? So I actually reported the CFO of the company, which is the CFO. So I mean, you see there's sort of different places where they, you know, these roles fit in. But in our organization, it made a lot of sense because as we're going through the transformation, it was important for us to sort of be close to the money. Right, sure. You know, because there's investment required and you want to manage the cost as well. So that's where I'm at. And it's also very interesting that you're a CISO as well, Chief Information Security Officer, for those not following on the acronym world. So security is a really important piece that is not an insignificant job. So how much of your time is transformation? How much of your time is CISO? Yeah, I think so. Most of my time is through transformation. And you know, as part of when we look at the security, we look at security as part of the transformation because as we evolve the company to a new model, it has ramifications on how do we secure the new environment as well. So there's a split, right? So I have more than one full-time job, I guess, you can say that. Right, right. Welcome to Silicon Valley, right? Yeah, but yeah, I mean, you know, I spend most of my time focused around digital transformation, but security is a very important aspect of my role. And we want to make sure that the environment continues to be safe. Right, so there's somebody out here watching this video, they're sitting in their office, they just got the edict that they're now in charge of digital transformation at their company and they're pulling their hair out and hopefully looking for key interviews to help them out. So where do they go? How do they get started? What kind of resources should they be asking for? Should they be leveraging? Should they expect to give them some chance of success in this very, very difficult role? So you know, I think there's a lot of places where companies can start. And I think one of the things that you have to understand is how digitally mature you as a company are. I mean, one of the key things in this industry as we all see the speed and the rate of innovation is so tremendous and we see these waves of disruptive technology that comes in and there are companies who are adopting or embracing those technologies and think about, you know, mobile or cloud or analytics and social and those companies that adopt those technologies, they can gain a certain level of efficiency and performance improvement. But the cycle is very, very fast and now we're seeing yet another wave of technology innovation around IoT, API, artificial intelligence. And so if you can quickly jump to that next round of technology innovations you can continue to build those efficiencies within the company and gain that competitive advantage or maintain that competitive advantage. And I think it's important for the companies to realize that they have to engage in this very, very quickly, right? You know, and it's not a one-time process either. It's never going to end. The transformation is never going to end. So you have to continually invest in it. And where you start with and where you go is to make sure that you understand where the company wants to go and how the technology can help you get there. And that's sort of my hardest part of my job is to really convince the leadership and say this is where we will gain some significant benefit. And so when I go to my CEO or my CFO or the board what I'm trying to help them understand is that by investing in technology, A, B, C, whichever it is, this is what we achieve or this is sort of the picture that we're part of the puzzle that we're trying to build. I love this concept, digital maturity. I've never heard anyone say that before. So it almost begs the question is there's some type of a checklist that you have to have made a minimum either acknowledgement, I don't know, commitments are the right word. Obviously you got to be 100% on cloud, blah, blah, blah. But it does beg, is there some type of, have you adopted some cloud? Have you adopted some of this, some of that, some of this to demonstrate, A, that you are digitally mature or headed in that direction and B, these are kind of necessary conditions to execute the digital transformation that I'm trying to put in place. Yeah, and I don't have a specific measuring stick of where you measure your digital maturity but the things that you talked about, for example, if your organization is still dealing with sort of maintaining their own data centers and you're investing resources to that, right? You have not adopted cloud, mobile applications, your applications cannot be accessed remotely, then you're certainly not very digitally mature, right? You know, how much self-service is available for your users internally or for your customers? Those are other signs of digital maturity. Another way, another area to look at is, you have a lot of data within the organization. How are you using that data, right? Is the data sitting in silos or is the data being integrated and now you have analytics running on top of it? That's another measure of your maturity and as you look across the companies, you will see that there are companies who are sitting there in sort of the old traditional model of we're going to build these long-term strategic plans and that's also a sign of accepting or adopting these technologies because they're hoping or waiting to really fully understand what the technology is going to be when they get there and they need to know all of those how and what it would look like when they get there. And I think that's also, to me, is a sign of digital maturity of a company is do they understand what waves of disruption or of technology is coming out? Right, so it's interesting. You said your biggest challenge is going to the board and the C-suite and telling them how this is going to work. The other hand, they brought you in not that long ago with this very specific objective. So clearly you've got some great executive support. So how do you convince them? I mean, what are some of the things that you found just work? What are the right stories? What are the right examples? What are the right use cases that even the digitally immature finally go like, ah, okay, now I get it? Yeah, so it helped that they were already thinking about it before they brought me in. So that helps a lot, no doubt. I think so the things that when I came in and I looked at the company, so there's many places where you can start, right? I mean, some of the areas that you can think about is, how do you improve the customer service, right? That's a very important aspect of how do you become a better organization? So another area is process improvement and a third area is business model improvement. So I came in and I talked more about is before we actually start looking at modifying or enhancing our business models, we need to get to a better, higher performance level within the organization and therefore I'm more initially more focused around how do we improve our processes internally, right? And for us, based on our situation and varies for different companies, for us the first step in that was really to make sure that the people, the systems and the data are more interconnected, right? So even within that, first step for me for the first phase for us was really to make sure that the people are connected. So do we have the right set of collaboration communication tools, right? Do we have the right set of analytics to sit on top of it? So we just finished that phase. Again, we want to make sure that these are tangible, small steps because you need to show some wins very, very quickly. And so for us, the first step was let's get the people connected. So we just did that. Now the next step for us is to get our systems connected, right? So again, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of data that's sitting there. It has to be integrated. There's tremendous value that you can gain from that. So that's what we're getting into. This is our second phase of how do we connect the data together so this way we can now start to get the next level of efficiency out of the company. So I am guessing after sitting here all day that the integration of your data, obviously where it's not logic, is going to be easier than getting the people to change their processes and the connected people. What were some of the tricks to get people to adopt these new tools before we even start talking about the data? So I think you have to show them the value obviously. So if you're talking about communication and collaboration tools, I think the first thing is really about awareness, right? Then there's a little bit of a sort of top down sort of mandate or you may want to call sponsorship that I think that helps. Or stick. Or stick. That helps because for some companies, I mean and for Quantum it was true, is that we did not have a corporate collaboration, sorry, communication tool. There were multiples, right? So within the groups they were fine because they were able to communicate but within the groups, between groups they were not able to, right? So we had to standardize on that. So I think that you have to kind of show these, there's always skepticism because everything, when people are used to certain things, it seems to work for them, right? I've always done it this way. Yeah, exactly, right? And so you have to show them new things and you have to create the awareness and then they start to see the value. It's not a one time thing. It's a continuous effort. So we do lunch and learns, we do webinars, we do sort of support sessions and things like this. So this way people are more comfortable sort of taking on the new technology. But it's so important, right? Because your probability of success if you don't get the buy in from the participants is not very high. So the fact that you started there on the people before you really dove into the technology, I think it's pretty insightful and will probably increase your probability of success on the next phase tremendously versus if you just integrated all the data and you integrate all the apps and you still don't have people talking together, we're not going to be very successful. Exactly, because the data is in all these different business units and different groups and if they're not talking to each other, connecting the data has little or no value whatsoever, right? So to me it's really about creating that connectivity. So for us, I mean you asked me sort of how do we start? So we start with connecting or so connection is the first sort of phase of it. And then the second is to empower people to create more self-service and create more sort of autonomous units so that they can start to create value for themselves and for the company. So it's really about enabling the whole organization sort of the groundswell type of approach. But you know you kind of very strategically, you're going to first bring the people to that sort of common place. So it's easy for them to work. You bring the data along with it and then you standardize the environment or simplify it if you can and therefore it's easy for them to start taking on the services themselves. Right, so you finished the first phase and now the next phase is now you're going to start integrating all the systems. Correct. So obviously we're sitting here at SnapLogic, it's a big piece of what they do. So why did you decide to go with them and how are they helping you in this process? So for us, for this phase of digital transformation, there were two things that were really, really important for us. One was really about how do we connect these systems together in a simple standardized way. So that was one criteria for us. And then the second, and I think I believe SnapLogic does a great job. We're going to build it out at the back, sort of core of our network. And then the second piece was really, can we take this platform and make it available to our end users so that they can create the connections or access data that they want, right? And that's again where SnapLogic was able to demonstrate that this is very easy for them to use. So those were the two sort of the very pivotal things for us as part of this phase of digital transformation as to why we picked SnapLogic. Yeah, well it's funny, because you used the word self-service in your first phase. So I think kind of this thing, we are over and over and over, it's so important to drive innovation and big companies is democratization, democratization of the data, democratization of the tools, and then let people find out things and then actually be able to execute it. Exactly, yeah, because IT, there is a constant pressure on IT to cut cost. And so we cannot serve the whole company for all the things that needs to happen and the technology and the business is changing at such a rapid pace that unless we have experts who really understand that business unit function that well, we are not the best people to build those things for them. They are the ones. But then you have a technology learning barrier or the learning curve of, do you need to put developers in there? So that's why to us this SnapLogic technology helps us that we believe that we can extend this ability to those users who really know their business, they can make the changes as they come, right? And the IT can help make sure that the right set of infrastructure exists and the right level of connectivity exists. So I'm just curious, I know you're still early days in this project, but are there any Luddites that have kind of come around since you've been on this journey that suddenly kind of woke up and said, oh, okay, now I get it. Now I see the value. Now I kind of understand where we're trying to go who maybe didn't think that way at the beginning or they all just know that they gotta go. No, I think we're constantly learning along the way. I think one of the key things that we learned just recently and SnapLogic is gonna help us with that particular aspect of it is that, we saw that there were a lot of systems that they work fine. I mean, we don't use them, like it's not a daily use type of thing. They get used quarterly or annually, but we realize that if we can just sort of bring more automation into those processes and we can tie it back to the longer historical data, then we can build more insights around it, right? So I think when we showed this to the users and especially the CFO, then now all of a sudden the sort of the light bulbs go on is like, oh, this is great, right? That I don't have to rely on only a small window of information, now I have a much broader window, yeah. All right, well, Amar, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your story. I wish you nothing but success on this journey. I'm sure it'll be long and exciting with twists and turns and highs and lows, so good luck. I'm looking forward to that. All right, he's Amar, I'm Jeff Rick. We're SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching.