 The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillan. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the scene of noise. Day two of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined by co-host Paul Gillan of SiliconANG. Next guest is Stephanie Trunzo, Chief Creative Officer at PointSource. Welcome to The Cube. Thanks, thanks for having me. Great to have you guys, apparently, in the finalists for this app throw-down. So explain what you guys do and what's this throw-down. Sure. Well, the app throw-down, you develop an app and then you throw it down. As hard as you can. Break the app on. Exactly, that's right. Is it a mobile app? Yes, yes. It works on Android? It does work on Android? Yeah, pretty easy. Yes, they do break really easily. So you have to really throw it with force and make it shatter. Honestly, what we've done is we have developed an app for HHGREG and they are a big electronics retailer. We actually heard Kevin Lyons at the keynote this morning talking about the solution that we developed for him. Some really cute commercials. He had the whole audience laughing. He got up on stage and took a selfie as the first thing he did. So yeah, we developed that app for them and that's what is in our app throw-down. So we used WorkLite and IBM Commerce and built an adapter and extremely high-performing app, really fast, awesome and amazing. Well, those people who haven't used the app, what is different about it? We've all used lots of retail apps. What's different about this one? What's different about this one is it is blazing fast. So as we know, the user is extremely discerning and I'm sure you guys can attest. You play around with an app on your phone if it's too slow to load, if it takes too long to add something to your shopping cart, if it's processing for too long, people get frustrated and give up. Abandoned shopping cart rates are really high because of that reason. This app is blazing fast. We actually improve performance on the mobile over the desktop by 1400%. So it's actually faster on the mobile device. Absolutely. Now this is a later issue we were talking about, we've been talking about earlier on theCUBE, is the decision that you make about where logic goes on the device or in the cloud and the latency issues that it introduces, what decisions did you make there? So at Point Source, one of the things that we do is we spend a lot of time in upfront investigation. So we do a lot of business requirements analysis and one of the things our business analysts do is spend time talking to the stakeholders about how the information is going to be accessed, where the users are commonly going to be when they're accessing it. And then you use all of those use cases to help you decide are there offline use cases, cases where they're not going to have access to the internet, but they still want to be able to browse, say their wish list, for example, or they have a cache of product information from something they've looked at previously. So we use use cases to drive the architectural decisions about how we actually build the application. This creates some interesting design issues though as well, because you may be able to actually predict based upon a user's behavior what information they will want. You can download that and cache it for rapid access at a separate time. Did that kind of, are you building apps with that kind of thinking in mind right now? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. We use REST APIs, so we try to keep everything as much as possible easily accessed. It's fast, it's quicker that way instead of continuously making calls to the server for information. So we are very thoughtful about that process for sure. I think most of us would agree that most apps are too slow. Oh yeah. Do you believe, why is that? Why aren't more apps more responsive? I honestly think that it's kind of a two-fold problem. One is that the people working on the applications are not thinking enough about the user and what that experience is actually going to be and that a matter of a second load time is actually make or break to whether it succeeds or fails. And the second thing is that I think people are not recognizing or they're working with agencies that don't have enough architectural foundation and understanding that design isn't just on the front end and on the glass. It's about how you build the services and the architecture underneath as well. So I think that a lot of enterprises are working with agencies of record or marketing firms that maybe can make something beautiful but they don't really know how to make it perform or they're working with outdated architecture perhaps. Stephanie, a lot of the things going on, certainly in San Francisco where I live, is design interaction design is huge, right? So I was talking to folks who are dealing with big data and software but they're dealing with on a physical plant perspective. But now with the Nest and the Internet of Things, the human interaction piece is a huge deal. Now on the computer side, we've been dealing with stuff going about the graph, please, interfaces. But now you have a whole new era of interaction. That's just different. Certainly the phone's different than a desktop. So how do you talk to customers who say, give me a mobile app? It's not that easy. So what's the process and what are the things that you've learned in going through those? What are the best practices for really nailing a roadmap for user interaction? Is it a pure mobile app? Is it web response, native HTML5, all of the above? I mean, how do you sort through that? Share your experience. Yeah, sure. Well, you actually raise a lot of different topics there. There are a ton of issues. And actually what you just said highlights how complicated these decisions are. And that's why you need to partner with someone who is extremely expert in the mobile field. It's not the kind of thing that you should necessarily take your in-house web design firm and ask them to develop your mobile strategy for you. You really need to make sure that you understand all of the facets of the full lifecycle, the full solution to ensure you know what you're doing. Give an example of what might happen if someone does that, for instance, if they go there, we have geologists building the mobile app. What would be the consequences? Sure, sure. So I think one consequence would be that you have really slow apps. Another consequence would be that you have non-intuitive interactions. So take, for example, if you are typically familiar with designing for the web, for a browser. If something is off by a pixel or two, maybe it's going to catch the designer's eye, but it's not going to make or break the experience. If something is off by a pixel or two on a device, you may have just changed the touch size or the touch space to the point that it is no longer responsive. So it is absolutely critical that you understand those interaction patterns and you understand the metrics and parameters that you need to work within. Stephanie, looking longer term, from the front door of this hotel to here, I passed I think four different signs encouraging me to download an app. Yeah. And we know there's how many hundreds of thousands of apps out there. Is the app really sustainable in the long term? The metaphor of the app, or will be migrating to, as John Warnock has suggested, the app is just a stopping point on the way to a more universal access method that is not dependent on downloading. Right. That's a great question. I just recently read a study that said something about how, I think it was 60%, some majority of users that still prefer in the retail space to go to a browser rather than install an app. And the context in which I read that was saying that mobile developers should be worried because that was still the user's preference. But what was interesting to me about that was, actually that is opportunity the way I read it. So there's an opportunity because the reason that the users are preferring to go to the browser is because they're so much better, well designed than the apps. So I think that there's a huge opportunity still for apps. They're context rich. And I think it's going to be very difficult to get that amount of context. So I know where you're at. I know what you're doing. It can collect information by using the operating system of the device. And you're not able to get that kind of rich experience in a web browser or a mobile web. So. Talk about your company. What do you guys do? You guys provide that mobile services? So you made an app so you were on the throw down competition. What does your company do? So we do everything end to end for mobile strategy. And what that means is, you could say, as an enterprise, we know we need to get started and we sit down and build a strategy. You could say we already have a start at something and we don't feel comfortable with where it's at yet and we need you to progress it. We go through the investigation process to understand the business goals and we have a design team, digital experience organization that takes that to wire frame concept, high fidelity mockups and then the development organization that actually executes and delivers. And then we'll also support mobile launch. So one of the things that we learned early on was that we worked really hard collaborating with our clients to come up with an amazing and beautiful app. Get it into the app store and nothing happens. And what we realized was that we need to also help our clients figure out how to launch the app. How are they going to enable their users? So for example, if you're in retail and you develop an app and your customers download it you have never enabled your store associates to know how to use the app. How are you going to succeed? Now your customers know more about the app than your employees in the store. So we also work on doing training. Allstate is one of our big clients and we released an app for Allstate dealer services. We actually went to their agent conference and trained their agents on how to use the app. Now you're setting them up to succeed. You are actually going to get the value you hope for out of that mobile strategy you built. So I did some researching around and notice you guys are tied into the Jazz Hub. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess you've worked in that group at IBM. So you have an IBM background, you're in a business partner. So how does that all take us? That's DevOps. So essentially are you the front end to the outcome oriented of the DevOps piece? Yeah, so Jazz Hub is amazing because what it allows us to do is provide complete transparency to our clients. So often when you're working our clients when they're working with vendors, there's a lot of times where they maybe had a bad experience in the past where they worked with a vendor, gave them requirements but they were sort of in a black box. They went off and developed, came back with whatever they produced and it wasn't what they had asked for. So with Jazz Hub, we're able to say we're going to work collaboratively together. You mean in terms of the solution where it's hosted, compliance stuff or is it other stuff? The actual development. So to say, okay, all of our use cases are written out there. They can see the work items on the development as we're progressing and often our clients are actually collaborating with us in that project area. So we use it to facilitate all of the collaboration around the actual development process. Presumably you have experience with WorkLite already. You've been using WorkLite? Yes, absolutely. So what are your early reviews? How good is it? It is fantastic. So I am a former IBMer but I'm a business partner now. Of course I support IBM but we don't have to use tools that we don't want to use. If you had no, I mean you're not being paid to say this. That's right, exactly. That's a good question, yeah. Exactly. That's exactly right. That's the alternative. You think it's the best? Absolutely. So anyone who's worked with developers knows that they can be very finicky about the tools that they have to use and if they don't like the tools that they're being asked to use they will find ways around it to not use them. The developers at Point Source choose to use WorkLite even on the projects that we develop in-house for ourselves. And I think that's a strong testament as anything that the developers are choosing to use it for their development. And in terms of the back end, I mean are you moving toward a software environment or using software right now? What's your experience? So you are. So what has your experience been as a software whether it's for cloud bursting or your primary platform in terms of the performance that you're getting? Sure, so we just started investigating SoftLayer. We actually are looking at doing the first WorkLite implementation on SoftLayer. So we're not very far into it yet so I can't really give you a ton of feedback but it is something that so far it's looking like it's going to be fantastic for us. So back to the mobile again. I want to re-ask the question about mobile response, web response versus mobile app pure. A lot of people think I'm just going to build a mobile app. Total self-contained mobile app. When does someone decide when not to do that? Yeah, so I know I keep mentioning retail but they just seem to be the best examples to the question. So there are a lot of retailers that are in a position where they've spent a lot of time and money in building their e-commerce solutions and they know that they need to evolve and they need to get to an e-commerce model as well or an omni-channel model really. And they, but however they can't afford to sort of just shut down business for three months while they rebuild a new strategy. So what we do is help them by beginning with a responsive web-based mobile web with phone form factor. Then we'll expand it to tablet size and then slowly you're able to replace your desktop site with a single site, single code base. That same code base can be used for installable apps as well. So now you have a single code base serving all of those needs and really it's sort of an iterative model that gets you to that sweet spot at the end. So I got to ask you a question about your solutions because a lot of companies that I talk to are like, no, no, no, I need to bring that mobile in-house. I'm not going to deal with an agency. I mean, agencies, a lot of these firms like yours would be pigeonholed as, oh they're just like you throw money at them and they do a promotional website and it's not core to my business. Where core competency mobile is. Whether, so the app development process comes into question. So how do you guys answer that? Because more people have to outsource to designers. They don't have the expertise in-house. They can't hire fast enough. So how do they determine an agency versus a real development shop? What's the, how would you, I know it's a controversial question but some agencies just aren't that good. Yeah. I mean, we are positioning ourselves in a place that's sort of in between because we can do the design work like an agency can but we also have all of the experience and expertise to understand how to do the architectural underpinnings as well and so the interesting part is that it depends what organization you're talking to. If you're talking to a CIO office, then they're interested in how do they compliment their existing in-house skillset and if you're talking to a CMO office, they want to work with an agency because they want it to be beautiful and it's important that they're bringing the brand through and so we are on kind of in a nice place where we can bridge the gap in those discussions and so for us, we haven't really had any difficulties because we kind of get to a place where we're looking to make sure that our clients are see us as a trusted advisor and we're bringing enough value to them quickly that we can prove ourselves and they're happy to continue working with us then. Is feature creep a problem, a growing problem with apps now? It seems to me that apps more and more have lots of stuff that I never use. Yeah. Do we have the same problem that we had on the desktop where there's more bells and whistles? I think that is a place where you really do need to be extremely rigorous about your decision making and I don't think that we would condone putting out an app with features that we haven't proven have some value so we do a lot of validation along the way. Have some value versus are used. Yes. Presumably these features actually have use to the 5% of people who want them. Yes. We do friendly user testing so we always ask our clients to help identify some opportunities where we can get early feedback and so yes to your point not just valuable but making sure that they actually get use. So when we do friendly testing, I mean it might be that just to take the retail example if it's a retail app then we would find out when are they going to have an opportunity to talk to the store associates, let them try it out, see if they're going to use the features and we can pay attention to that and adjust based on it. Speaking sort of a related question, speaking retail apps in particular, what are the most common mistakes that you see companies making when they develop their retail apps? Going too fast, definitely going too fast, not thinking about, you can go quickly, you can move quickly but if you develop before you think then you're going to end up with something that isn't performant. It probably has a cluster of different features that might not be functional or useful. I think the other thing that I see a big mistake is content that's hidden, so you have to navigate through multiple different menus to get to the content that you want and not really thinking through the user interaction flows well enough. So the user gets frustrated so quickly, you really can't afford to neglect going through that due diligence at the beginning to make sure you've got the flows down pat. Steve thanks so much for coming inside, you really appreciate it, it's great to get the fresh insight from the outside the IBM family but apparently you guys are all IBMers, founders, is it mostly ex IBMers? No, no actually we have, I don't know, maybe 16% of the company IBMers, so it's not really that much. We have around 100 people worldwide. And where's your main office? Raleigh. Raleigh is our headquarters, yeah. Anything on the west coast at all? No, nope, not yet. We're up in Durham. Gotta come to California, a lot of business out there. You guys work with any startups at all? Do you do any work with young companies or mostly big companies? We do, we have some partnerships that we're exploring. So we love working with other local businesses especially, so we support local businesses in Raleigh. We've been around for 10 years, but we feel like a startup because we pivoted to mobile only two years ago, so yeah. Well thanks for coming on the queue, really appreciate it and congratulations on the throw down. I love, throw that phone down. Yeah, you guys have to vote. Everybody has to vote for us for the pro down, app pro down. You just tweet, hashtag IBM impact app at point source. Hashtag IBM impact app, that's a big hashtag. It is. At point source. At point source, yep. Okay, we're here inside theCUBE talking mobile with Stephanie, we'll be right back after this short break, this is theCUBE.