 The conference co-CEO is Jim Schnabe, Bill McDermott about to come on in about 10 minutes. But obviously we're here at CUBE, we're getting all the action and we want to get as much content as we possibly can and we have a customer from SAP Pierre Bobanier. Welcome to the CUBE. Tell us a little bit about what you do and then we'll dive into some conversation. Sure, I'm head of marketing for the STM which is the Société Transport de Montréal which is the bus and metro system in Montreal. And we carry about 1.5 million people a day in our metro. And what we wanted to do with SAP was to launch a loyalty program. We want to think totally out of the box, come out with a program that would be different than what you see out there today with the cards and points and all that. We wanted to innovate completely. We had a co-innovation session with several co-innovation sessions with SAP. And we did come out with a program which just launched a week and a half ago and we're very proud because the results are tremendous. We're talking about a iPhone application that our customers will use. They will enter their smart card number in it and the smart card is what you use to charge your fares and to validate your fares. And when you enter your Opus card number into the application, we get to know instantly who you are and then we ask you to give us your preferences and all that. And then once we have that, we're in a position to send to you on your iPhone app some very relevant information and offers. So therefore I can tell you that you spent, let's say $20 too much last month on the public transit and therefore recommend a monthly pass. I can recommend that you go from nine monthly passes a year to 12 giving you a small incentive. I can tell you that if you take the metro at eight o'clock in the morning and your nose is right on the window that perhaps if you were to take it 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after, you would be sitting probably in the metro. So I can give you relevant, but also I can talk to you about what you could do to really improve your experience with the STM. Yeah, in addition to this, we have about 340 retail partners into the program. So retail partners which are in the category of transport. So it could be a car rental, it could be big C like the bike rental service. It could be a community or a car sharing program via rail which is a Canadian train transportation. So that's the transportation partner. We also have retail partners for everyday purchases such as grocery and pharma, but we also have lots of mom and pop operations throughout the city where our customers live and these mom and pop operations cannot afford to have their own loyalty program. They cannot afford to communicate to the people in Montreal and therefore what we're allowing them to do to this program is to target this group of customers and talk to them and give them some offers. So examples of this is I'm sitting on the bus 168 and I'm going to Nunn's Island which is a suburb of Montreal and suddenly I've got a pop up on my application saying, what have you decided to make for supper tonight? And by the way, we have a new arrival of lobsters from PEI and if you check in now and show up within the next hour, we'll have a 20% bonus or saving on your lobsters and we'll have the sauce that comes with that. We'll match the wine. We'll give you the baguette to go with it and then we'll deliver it to your home as soon as you tell us. I'm hungry already. I want some mussels too from PEI. Get some mussels and lobster. For the opera house in Montreal, for example, two hours before the show has 100 seats left and these seats, as you know, are perishable, right? If they're not sold, they go empty. So they tell us, why don't you offer that to your customers? The first 10 customers that will check in on the application will get free tickets. The next 10 will get a two for one. The next 10 will get 20% off. So that's how you add value. The key here was instant gratification. We didn't want points. We didn't want people to accumulate points to eventually win something or get something. We wanted to have our partners to interact with our customers. Advertising is now commerce. And for the folks out there watching, might not know that SiliconANGLE Wookiee Bond, going back to 2009, was really one of the first media companies focusing on cloud mobile and social. And one of the things that we really saw was that with big data and with cloud, you can transform industries. And with mobile, it's great. And you see things on the transportation side, which you're in. And we see things like Uber and these really high-flying startups. That's where the people are. It's when you touch the person, this comes back to Jonathan Becker and Bill McDermott's conversation around marketing to the persona of one. Using analytics, where you can actually use data and applications, mobile apps in this case, with GEO and everything else, to really target a great experience. And so with that, I want to ask you a question with that as a kind of a setup is, you know, okay, I got a nap. This is maps in San Francisco. Oh, here the bus is coming on this time. It seems like a really basic utility, but at the end of the day, you have a consumer touch point and when you have that, you can expand. So I want to ask you, when you went into this, did you have that idea like we're going to expand into other markets? And it seems to me that you've been enabled to go in and do so much more. Definitely. You know, what we wanted to do, the key phrase here is the right product at the right time for the right customer at the right place. And this has a certain level of relevancy which basically ensures that a customer will transact with those customers of ours. Definitely, there's some interest out there for us to expand to other markets, whether it's public transit, but other retail, other industries completely. And definitely this is where we're going with that because that makes so much sense. Yeah, it seems to me that transportation is particularly well positioned to take advantage of data. You know, when you've got a smartphone application that you're, you know, you basically can, you know where all your customers are going, when they're going there, you can collect all that data, analyze it, potentially do some predictive analytics, figure out where they may be to help package offers that are most appealing to them. And one of the things we've talked about on theCUBE is while there's, you know, there's the tension a little bit in this, in the big data space between kind of privacy concerns, but also consumers, you know, want targeted offer. So if you can, as a service provider, if you can offer, use all that data you're collecting to put offers in front of people that are really relevant that they want, they're more, they'll be less inclined to be concerned about some of the privacy issues. How do you balance those types of issues among your, I guess, riders? Has that been an issue at all? And how do you pressure? That was one of the first objections that we discussed with the SAP people is we have probably one of the strictest laws in the world about privacy. So we wanted to do this so that the customer really didn't feel that big brothers was, you know, on his back. And what we've done is like privacy laws require that anything that you collect on a customer has to be critical, mission critical to your enterprise. Well, what we've done is we've separated the data. So anything that is mission critical to the enterprise is in one database. And whatever is preferences and information on that customer and personal information is in another database. And there's a Chinese wall in between the two and these cannot talk to one another. So I cannot go back to one individual with all of this information. I can go back to a segment of my customer base and send them some offers. And this way we manage to satisfy our lawyers and make sure that our customers don't feel that we're going beyond really what we're allowed to do. And I wonder, you know, as a marketer, you know, we hear a lot about really big data in analytics is really changing the way people do marketing. It's changing, we've even heard that, you know, the CMO and the head of marketing inside enterprises is really going to start to be the lead buyer of technology essentially over, even over the CIO. And then we're seeing that shift now. I wonder if you could talk from your perspective how the emergence of new technologies around big data, cloud, social and mobile are changing the way marketers operate. How has that changed your mindset about how you do your job? Well, it's for us, it's a completely new way of looking at things. Public transit, you would think that we're great marketers, you know, because we deliver a service and that's it. But we need to think beyond that. We need to think beyond who we are and try to see how we can really improve the experience of customers. And by doing this, by understanding really our customers, we can generate loyalty. One of the big issue in public transit is that our customers come and go. Every year, there's some people leaving us, new people coming in, and we want to understand why they're leaving us and these new customers coming in, why are they choosing us so that we can basically set all the right buttons really to track more and more consumers because that's our goal, is to increase ridership. So retention is the big game as far as we're concerned and using technology is really the way to get to it as far as we're concerned. And our aim is to increase by about 40% ridership in Montreal until 2020. So we feel that this is one, that will be one ingredient if you want, helping to reach our objective. Well, that leads me to another question around some really interesting use cases here for analytics. But how do you tie that to the business case? So the business case sense are, okay, we've got a goal to increase ridership. Analytics and social and mobile, the applications that you've been talking about are a tactic or a way to achieve that business initiative. Talk about how you tie those together, the technology and actually, to actually tying that to a business goal and delivering business value. Right, so what we're doing is we're comparing some of the tactics that we have with other tactics we've done in the past which have generated some gains. For example, telling people that they should move to the monthly pass or they should move to the 12 month pass by informing them, by talking to them, by letting them know that those products exist, we know that a percentage of our population will move from one group to another and then we will generate additional revenue and ridership to that. So that's one example. There are several examples like this of ways that we get influenced behaviors, to move from peak time to off peak, to travel more often with us because if you travel only 40 times a month, that means that you only use it for work. So we want people to come at night, to come during the weekend as well. So by talking to them, giving them incentives, we'll get people to use it more often and therefore achieve those more larger objectives if you want from a marketing standpoint. Pierre, how did SAP with their co-innovation get you through your spot? Because I think you're a great example of again this transformation where you have a business opportunity on top of what you built. How did that all come together? Well, as I mentioned earlier, we're a very conservative type of organization, right? And therefore, they've allowed us to brainstorm, to blackboard, yellow stick it and come up with a methodology that would ensure that we become very innovative in our ways. They basically created an environment really that made it possible for us to spell out truly what we wanted to do and where we're headed and come up with some solutions to objections that we had from other lawyers or different regulatory groups to arrive to where we are right now and also to come up with some ways that what we're doing is attractive to retailers, 340 retailers is quite significant. It's probably one of the loyalty program that has the most retailers and to get them excited. Retailers are also very traditional in their ways. They use flyers, they use mass advertising. This kind of a program for them is something that they have in their 2025 vision. And now we're allowing these mom and pop but also these chains across Canada to test the geolocalization, you know? So each food store of IGA in Montreal has at the very same time different offers. One is for the bread, one is for the meat, one is for the, they all have a different offer and this offer may change by hour of the day, you know? So for them, it's a total shift in term of... It's a great example and I think one of the things that's exciting about your application is that you have a touch point with the consumer, with transit, so that's a real good penetration. So there's some utility there. So but that's not just the business model. You have a retail back end. Now you're expanding out on that touch point by providing additional value that might not have been available without mobile and big data. So, you know, hey kudos to you guys, congratulations. And I think it's a great example of what we've been saying about other opportunities for other customers that might be looking at how do I evolve and modernize my business and get new opportunities, new growth? So the question for you is what advice do you have for other folks out there who are sitting there saying, hey, I have access to customers, consumers. How do I create a business model and a technology framework around this co-innovation? What advice would you give your peers? Well, do sit down with your experts in IT, that's for sure. But also go out of the box, try to come up with ways really that will ensure that you can really spell out what you're trying to achieve. But without these limitations that we always have in our mind and try to identify really these key objectives and try to find some solutions that are out of the box, really, truly. Okay, we're here live in the press area in the global communication centers of SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of Sapphire. Now behind me is the co-CEO's about to hit the stage and we're going to cover the press conference live here on siliconangle.com. We're going to go do some schmoozing with the CEOs. We'll be right back. But also watch the press conference we'll be carrying it live as they get set up. We'll be right back with more interviews after the press conference. So continue to watching and thanks for watching. We'll be right back.