 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and I'm with wikibond.org. My regular co-host John Furrier is out in California. He has a personal commitment. Jeff Kelly is here. Jeff and I did the MongoDB days in New York City. Jeff, always good to be working with you. We're here live at the Tableau Customer Conference. We're here in Washington DC and going wall to wall, Jeff. Indeed, as we always do. Talking data. So Koi Gupta is here. Koi is a global search architect at Paychex. Everybody knows Paychex, or maybe they don't know Paychex, but we're a client, so we know Paychex. Excellent, always good. Anyway, welcome to the queue. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about your role at Paychex. Tell us a little bit about the company. So Paychex being the number two payroll provider in the United States, have over half a million clients and lots of data. So in running global search for Paychex, we're in Germany, we're now moving into Brazil. There are a lot of challenges we face going to new markets and let alone the US market itself. Managing paid search, organic search, affiliates, paper leads. So there's lots of different types of needs and different data sets that need to be analyzed in different ways to look for the insights that allow us to build our competitive advantage. And so I came across Tableau and when they announced Tableau 8 with the connection to Google Analytics, that was a huge win for me because my objective is to take dashboards from our web performance, our AdWords performance, internal customer acquisition and merge them all into one cohesive dashboard that I can deliver to the C-level senior management that they can drill down in with all the granularity they want as they wish to click down into it. And Tableau now gives an ability to do that. So I don't have to give a separate report for Google Analytics, a separate report for AdWords or a separate report for what's going on in our CRM. Or put it all together yourself in an Excel spreadsheet. No, no, no, no Excel spreadsheets. I want to stay as far away from Excel as possible, so. So, okay, diversity of data by region, I would imagine, is something that is a challenge and something that you can deal with Tableau. But I want to go right to the chases. Are there, does that introduce other complexities like privacy that you have to be concerned about? Or are you far enough for moving that, doesn't really affect you? So on the aspect of privacy, all of the data I work with, I stay away from the PII data. And that stays within different systems within our organization. So most of the data I work with are prospect and lead, not customer data. So we have an internal group called RISC and they manage a lot of the PII data and that's what they work with. I work strictly in the acquisition phase. So I don't have to worry, I'm not touching Social Security's credit cards or anything like that. Lucky for me, it makes my job a little easier. So is your objective transaction, ultimately a transaction or is it brand awareness, a combination, can you talk about that a little bit? My objective or as a role within the organization is to build brand awareness and it's drive customer acquisition and improve ROI. So that's my core function as far as once a company becomes a client and then that's where our RISC group takes over and does a lot of analysis to figure out ways to move them forward through our product life cycle into other products within our core offerings. Okay, so that happens through online advertising and the like. Presuming you're using a variety of outlets for online advertising. Oh absolutely, yes, we're quite diverse, everything. So I mean we've got content strategies, you've got your AdWords, variety of different types of vendors, radio advertising, so it's a good mix. So you guys developing a lot of your own content? Yes, internally we have an advertising team and a web marketing team, so we develop a lot of the content. In-house, we produce our own videos and we do research with other groups and produce all this in-house, then we publish it. So tell us a little bit more about how you use Tableau, what life was like before and after. Paint that picture for us. So Life Before Tableau was a lot of Excel sheets with bright yellow in certain places with red and other places and charting was an art or a very dark art. So Enter Tableau and now as opposed to the pretty pictures you see in Google Analytics and then something else in Excel, now you've got a seamless view from GA to something internal. So if you want to look at the conversion velocity of leads coming through our CRM, I can build out a report that shows that and you can drill down into a specific lead and see how quickly it's converting. But it's just a lot faster. Speed to view just clicks away. It's not, send down a request, four weeks later here comes back a report. I'd like to see this and okay, give me five minutes and here you go. So, and we're getting better at it. So emphasis, we're getting better. And now the goal with Tableau is powerful for the few that know and build everything in Tableau, but the key part is, one of the discussions we had here is there's a lot of data. Tableau allows you to put multiple dimensions of data within a single frame. So if you add motion that you can go from one, two, three, four dimensions of data, add movement, now you've got five dimensions of data and not every user can consume that or understand the value of it. So it's important to segment this data into strategic layers that the normal user can click through and drill down into increasing levels of complexity. And that's one of the key learnings that you take away from here to deliver a better experience for your users in the organization. So you're the global search architect. Are you the global search data architect as well? No, no, no, I'm not the search data architect. I'm building out a data platform for a lot of our reporting needs within the marketing side of the organization. So if we want to be able to dive in and have insights onto what segments are performing better, I can build that out. So as opposed to using different reports from across the organization, we have our own reporting platform that allows any of our users to dive in and look for the data they want without having to put requests out to other parts of the organization. You're an expert at understanding what the users want in terms of how they want to consume the data. Yes. And then you drive the technical team or the data teams to actually produce it and shape it, is that right? Yes, so basically looking at the needs of the organization in terms of the ability to report on it or be able to analyze certain segments or how to grow specific product marketing segments, I'm looking at a variety of these data sets from different parts of their functions, pulling it all together and establishing a single source of truth so that they can go to it when they build a report and turn it into an executive or a C level and say, this is exactly what our acquisition is from this campaign. So that's the level of granularity I'm working towards. And I think it's what most marketing organizations strive to work towards to know exactly what campaign is performing at what level and where should more investments take place. Cool, can you talk a little bit about that, kind of the structure, the organizational structure a little bit in terms of, so your group does a lot of, building a lot of the dashboards of the visualizations and then kind of pushes that out to the end user. But the end user of course with Tableau is all about self-service BI and they can start drilling down into different data sets based on the visualizations that you push out to them. How do you kind of determine, all right, here's what, here's the core, how do you determine what your core function is in the organization and where the end user can pick up and start doing some of their own analysis? How do you kind of, is that a blurry line? Does it depend on the skills of the end user? How do you kind of manage that process? I think that line is, so paychecks, we're big on innovation and we're big on collaboration. So I think, I don't really see a line there, I call it collaboration. So I invite users to come. We have meetings every couple of weeks where we invite users to come in and just join us and see what we're doing. See what you can do with this tool. I may not know what your data set is, but I do know how to get this tool to make it look pretty or let you look in for insights. So my objective is, not through trying to break down the walls and get people to see it, it's more the case of collaboratively invite people to come in and see what we're doing, give us ideas on what they think we should do or what they would like to use the tool for. So on the HR side, I saw a recent video that Tableau published about how other organizations are levering each Tableau to understand what's happening in a 10,000 person organization or more and what's happening with the life cycle of their employees over the two year, five year, 10 year life cycle. And that's a very interesting point. We have 13,000 employees and so I see that video. I'm going to share that video with our human resource and organization development, Vice President, so she can see it and now we have the tool. I don't know her data, but I do know the tool. So she can see that video and say, watch that, understand what they're doing and I can say, well we have the tool so if you'd like to try and use this tool for your data, provide us some data, we'll see what we can build out for you and we'll show your team how to use this tool. So really it's always looking for, it's finding ways to empower people to leverage the tool. I enjoy Tableau, I enjoy getting better every day, I get better the more people I help. So learning how to visualize and drive insights out of data when it's other people's types of data only makes you better at what you do for your job. So well, something you just touched on there about the idea of it kind of expanding the use of Tableau throughout your organization. So Tableau talks about how they kind of have a land and expand strategy. They'll often start at small in an organization and then the use of the tool will expand to other people in that department and other people in other departments and et cetera. Is that something that sounds like that's a similar, is that a pattern that happened at your organization? At Paycheck, so how did it kind of work? Well, it's interesting. So from zero to bringing Tableau in happened at record time at Paychecks because I was really pushing for it and I have some great partners at IT that saw the tool are familiar with it and said, this is interesting and they have all the tools that they offered but they realized Tableau does things that those tools do not do. So they said, okay, let's let him do what he thinks he's going to do. And after we brought it in and we started having some of the Tableau sessions and started having some visualization sessions, we'd have sessions where we'd say just bring somebody for data, let's connect to it during a four hour session and see what we can do with it. And so partnerships went from to the Salesforce team, went to the IT team now where they're trying to look at their dashboards that they monitor all of our internal application systems, the client-facing applications. They're looking at this and saying, well, this is great because we can actually tap into different sources, have a dashboard that's used to monitor and manage that can be circulated around the organization. So the IT side, the Salesforce side, Tableau can be used to build out demos for customers. So you can build out applications, a Tableau applications that can be used for sales demos. So there's a variety of places where Tableau can be applied and I think it's really a growth process over time but I can't say this, more and more parties, every month there are more people showing up asking, how can I use this? When can I get a license? So that's the right question. So actually, so you mentioned licensing. We don't want to get into too much detail but I am pretty sure it's easy in terms of the license structure to expand out. If you'd look to go to other departments, other users, is it something that's relatively painless, if you will? I mean, sometimes licensing with traditional BI can get very complicated and incompletely. That's because BI is mine. I will not pass you the power, the power is mine now. So the new IT organization at Paychex is very, they want to empower users to be able to empower themselves. So their approach is you go on to our intranet, go to the request, IT request, what you want. Your boss approves it, your manager approves it and it'll be delivered to your desktop. So that's the good news. So pretty much for us, if anybody wants Tableau, they just go and fill out the form and they'll get a license. And so it's relatively seamless. Going from servers to cores and that sort of enterprise level upgrade, that's a longer term decision for any organization. But for us, yes, users want it, they can get it very quickly. Yeah, so right, there's two models, right? There's the per core pricing or there's the end user. Yeah, there's the desktop. Or there's, of course, the SaaS pricing, right? Yeah, so they got the SaaS, so it's end user desktop licensing always, but they have the, what is it? Okay, so they have the servers or you can buy cores, depending if you have large, I think when you're like 100, 200 users, companies move to core models. And I think there's quite a few core clients here. Very interesting to see how they've done that transition. And then there's clients, one client I ran into here is 30 servers. I was like, well, why would you have 30 servers? Why didn't you just get a core model? But there is a cost hurdle that you go over. So I think it's a very good model, but the key piece I think is for the average user or the initial user is you can get the desktop and produce something useful very quickly versus I need to get a server, I need to install this and all that infrastructure because then IT becomes, there's a lot of getting in the queue at IT and then have to go through that process. So does the SaaS model appeal to you, the Tableau online? Well, the Tableau online is interesting. I think it's a good strategy and I've seen other companies in this type of industry take that model because they know the burden that an individual organization has to go through to get something like this in the door. So you've got maybe some organizations three months to get through the IT procurement process. You've got to get a server deployed and make sure the network's all there. And so whereas you just take your credit card, SaaS model of server, as long as you're not putting, well, I think certain companies are not worried about what data's out. So the companies are much more strict about that guidelines around security of your data. And even though it is secure, they are concerned. We just don't want it in somebody else's cloud. Well, but in your case, Koi, you're really not that worried about it, right? Or are you? No, no, I, security is, the paycheck security is the primary concern always. But like the data I work with, I was able to bring it all internal anyway. So I didn't have to worry about that. It's all within our network. And I have our security team that takes care of my security needs. But for most customers, especially in the marketing and acquisition side, they can take their data into the Tableau cloud, which is secure and perform the analysis aggregated there. So in your case, you wouldn't necessarily consider the online piece or you would? The online piece, I think is a very useful solution. I could use the online piece. And the online piece to me is a very useful solution for any company that wants to aggregate their Google Analytics data on an ongoing basis and have that look back to all the granularity that they want. And to be able to do a variety of measurements that you can't do because Google Analytics stops at 30 days. Right. Okay. If you connect your GA to Tableau and aggregate it in Tableau server, while you've got all the data, you don't have to worry about the 30 day look back and certain calculations that you want to do. So let me ask you differently. So Tableau online is relatively new. If it were a solution, when you first got to introduce to Tableau, would you have likely gone that direction or no? Because of the team I work with and we work very fast. Yes, I would have tried Tableau online first. Let's swipe the credit card. Swipe the credit card and we'd have tried it out. And it may be brought it in-house, right? Oh, we would definitely brought it in-house. No, our partners in IT are very proactive in terms of embracing new technologies, ways to be more efficient and streamline their resources and delivery to market. So when they see an opportunity like this, they want to bring it in-house and be part of that holistic solution. Not say, oh, just go to a cloud vendor and don't come to us. No, they want to bring it in-house. They want to participate and they're starting to use it. So that's good for us. Yeah, I was just trying to squint through that only because a lot of the statements that Tableau executives have made say they see Tableau online as complimentary. I'm just sort of testing that with some of the customers. Clearly privacy and security is an issue. And then data movement. If you're moving a lot of data, you don't want to be moving data in and out of the cloud. That's- But that's specifically why I use the case of Google Analytics. So Google Analytics lives in the cloud. So living in Google's cloud versus living in Tableau's cloud does not break that barrier of corporate security that your organization's going to argue about because it's already outside. So for an organization that really wants to take advantage of web analytics, you can run a cloud instance or use their software service instance of Tableau server, aggregate all that data, and then use that to drive your internal reporting. But when companies take Tableau server and it's set up internally with internal infrastructure and your financial data and everything's going into it, that we would not want. We would not want outside the organization. And I think most organizations would feel that way. So for aggregating data that's already external, especially your social data, your analytic data, customer segment data, you can aggregate that all outside because it's coming from the outside anyway, and then bring it into one source, your Tableau extract. And of course for a lot of smaller companies, I'm sure you'd agree that the Tableau's cloud or Google's cloud or Amazon's cloud is going to have better security than a lot of smaller companies would have. Larger companies. No, this is true. For smaller companies, your front office is your business, your back office is somebody else's front office. Spend a little money, let them take care of everything for you. Don't try to build out your own infrastructure. It's much quicker to pay for somebody else's. Now what about mobile, Koi? How does mobile fit into your delivery, right? More and more of your users presumably want to access from mobile. So how are you dealing with that? So Paychex has a variety of apps for different softwares that we provide to our clients. But as far as Tableau, I think in the course, over the next six months to the next year, Tableau dashboards will be available to our C levels via a tablet device. There are certain security protocols that we have to go through to make that available, but it is one of my goals is to make sure that executives that want the dashboard available on their iPad can get it. And because that's going to drive adoption. It's going to drive consumption of those dashboards. And there's nothing better than not having to pull out your laptop, log in, get on the VPN, this, that and the other and then say, oh yeah, here the dashboard's going on versus you open, put your code into your iPad and then pull up Tableau and you're already synced to your server and you've got your dashboard, then you can have a discussion. So I think that's a powerful play for any senior executive when you're in front of a group of people or you need your dashboard quickly. So that would drive value for your organization. Huge value, I think. What else is on Tableau's to-do list from you? I mean, we're independent media so we love to ask these questions. I could ask you what you love about Tableau. Let's start there. What do you love about Tableau? No, I love a lot about Tableau. I think everybody knows what they love about Tableau. What's Tableau's to-do list? I think they said they're coming out with a MongoDB connector sooner than you say you're coming out with it. But no, I want Tableau to come out with that sooner. So we're- You want to see the MongoDB, right? The MongoDB, because we're using MongoDB and a lot of large organizations that are trying to get into, that are trying to solve these big data problems that they're finding themselves in with multiple silos, you can't connect the data, the dictionaries are different. MongoDB is the fastest solution to market if you're trying to fix that problem. So you pretty much are in the partnership of you've got Tableau, you've got whatever high-speed database that you do have, a lot of data that you might have aggregated from different parts of your organization in a data management platform, you're probably going to need to connect all that data into something like a MongoDB, which is one of the leading solutions to do that. And then, using a tool like Alteryx, you can, as opposed to writing all your own custom queries to connect, to make that data available for Tableau, Alteryx gives you the ability to do it faster and make all that data that's in your MongoDB once it's all correlated, claims transposed and what has to be done, make it available to power your Tableau dashboard. So that's where I'm looking to go. Right, and Mongo deals with diversity very well, so that's Tableau. Jeff told me that Mongo just, or TenGen changed its name to MongoDB. Yeah, TenGen changed to Mongo, but the unique thing about Mongo is the reason we end up with these problems in organizations and many companies from Fortune 10 to the Fortune 1000 is every group has their own set of data definitions that they live by, and they spend two years building infrastructure while technology at the rate we live today has completely changed. Those definitions are different now. So when you get into a solution like Mongo, where I can take your definition, mine, and has put them all into one place and then allow somebody else to create a custom query to extract the right report out of it, that's what Alteryx can do for you. It's a much quicker solution than to get us all to the table and say, we're going to migrate all of you into one house. Mongo says, hey listen, everybody's welcome. So that's the way I would translate it. Following on Dave's question about Tableau's to-do list from your perspective, I want to talk a little bit about, obviously they went public a few months ago, they're kind of the darling Wall Street, they're doing very well, stock is up significantly since then, but sometimes when companies go public, now they've got quarterly pressure. Do you have any concerns about Tableau, specifically Tableau because they're so well known for the kind of the culture inside the organization and they're very, very customer friendly. Do you have any concerns as they start to really, this growth trajectory is probably going to only increase? Do you have any concerns about them maybe taking their eye off the ball in terms of continuing to develop and innovate around the types of data visualizations you can do and maybe focusing more on sales and expansion? Any words you'd like to share with Tableau as they start to continue on this journey as a public company? Well I think, I wouldn't say so much on the visualizations part because there's always going to be visualizations that you can do in other tools or with J3 packages that developers will create and as a company's supporting a global base of customers, every customer does not need all those visualizations and so there's always going to be the top 20% of visualizations that people like that you may not be able to create and put into your application and also you've got to have very specific data sets to drive those visualizations and the one thing you will learn very quickly with Tableau is if you don't have the right data it's the quickest way to find it is to try to visualize data that is not the best for that visualization and it falls apart. So some of these visualizations that I'm a big fan of I know you can't do in Tableau but I know do I have the data to deliver that visualization I have to custom prepare that data I could never have it populated on a regular basis so I think Tableau is sensitive to that so they look at what can be used by 80 to 85% of our customer bases and used a lot not so much the 15% that are constantly asking for 20 new features that will take us two years to build. So I think something like a MongoDB connector that's much more ahead of adding more visualizations in my books. I don't question the passion of the company and their ability to meet the customer needs I mean their websites full of videos on just about how to do anything you want. So I would say as they grow I think adding visualizations is a key piece making sure there's more and more training available because they've got no shortage of it but keeping that up so the people that have questions find answers it's much easier to have the web do it for you and have to get people on the phone and train them. So I think they've got that covered solidly. I'm looking forward to... I'm always looking forward to the next visualization I will admit that but my challenges are bigger in terms of helping the organization adopt it and I'm definitely enjoying expanding that collaboration because there's a lot of use when people see what they can do quicker you create efficiency, cut down the number of hours take someone to Dover report that goes up the food chain they've got more time to do more useful things with the data so... Excellent. Koi, well listen thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the paycheck story. Pleasure, thank you very much. Pleasure meeting you and Jeff Kelly and I will be right back. Steve Keller's up next. He's with Citrix and we're going to talk about what metrics Citrix is driving, how they use in visualization, how they're using data. This is theCUBE, we're here live at the Tableau Customer Conference we'll be right back after this word.