 Welcome to the weekly enablement session. Joyce Thompson will be presenting the topic about how do we work with analyst reports, understanding them, and how to use them. Joyce, take it. Great. Can you turn on the recording there? Yes, it is. It's on. Excellent. Okay. Hello, everybody. This is part two and our ongoing analyst relations explanation. I've got on my shared screen here. You should be able to see the open issue under point one. You'll see we there's a link there to the first session. If you missed that where I talk very basically about what analyst relations is. So today we're going to look at more at what GitLab is doing with analyst relations. So what I'll start with is a summary of the highlights and kind of a lead into analyst relations. So there's really essentially two things we do with analyst relations. One, we get evaluated by them in comparison to the rest of the industry at the moment of comparison. And that's really important because they're not looking at us in an idealized world with an idealized product. They're actually looking at us much more like a bake off, right? Right in between here are all the people that have something right now and here's how you compare the other thing. And I'm going to talk more about that in this training. The other thing that we do is we talk about inquiries with analysts. And in those inquiries, that's when we approach the analysts to get more information on a topic. For example, here are some personas we're using. Do they make sense in the market? You mentioned such and such a report. Can we understand more about it? This is a feature or a terminology we're seeing. Do you agree that that's taking off? What do you think is the timeframe? What are customers saying to you? Our analysts are not technical experts in the sense that we would go to them and ask them very technical questions. What they are good at is these are market analysts. They look at the aggregate. So if we see a behavior in our customer base or we see a behavior that we're trying to emulate or understand, they look at a broader, bigger sense of the market and help us compare our understanding of the market to where they see it going. So they give us an extended view and extended reach. They also, a lot of our customers are their customers and they will come and ask questions to the analysts about us. So the more we're talking to them and sharing with them, the more confident the analysts are going to be talking about us to customers. So what I want to talk about now is the evaluation process. There are two main processes we work with. Gartner has something called a magic quadrant that we call an MQ. Forrester has something called a wave. You've probably seen them. We get little graphs and where do we place in the wave, right? So the way this works is a Gartner or a Forrester analyst generally about every 18 to 24 months runs these waves in major product areas. Now, if you're in traditional spaces that have been around a while, those things happen with irregular cadence. One of the challenges in our industry is everything's changing so much that a wave they did two years ago may not make sense anymore. So we're keeping an eye on what areas they're looking at and where do we place. So they generally decide where we place and they approach us with an email that says, we're considering you in the next few weeks for this magic quadrant, for example, who are your main contacts. So I give them my contact and I usually give them the PMM contact as well. And then after a couple weeks, we get an email and invite to a call and all the vendors come in on that call. We can't hear each other. We can't see each other and they lay out how the process is going to work. You have this amount of time to look at the questionnaire and provide feedback. Then you have this amount of time to answer the questionnaire. Then you have to provide several customer references. You have to do a demo. You have to do a presentation. So they lock all of that in. Then we run through it over the next month and a half. And this is why it is so important that we get good customers because those customers are going to tell the analysts how they're using us and how it's working. So we always want customers who are going to say really good stuff about the exact subset of capabilities that we're talking about in the moment. Then we run through all of that. We demonstrate. We answer all the questions and then we wait. And we have no idea what's going to happen while they analyze it and process it. And then at the end they send us a preview of here's how you've done so that we know what's coming. They will also ask us to fact check it. So did we get the product spelled right? Did we get any of the details wrong? Their opinion, we can't do anything about, but we can make sure they have all the right facts. So we fact check that and then it gets published. It gets published and then we have the right to buy rights to that report to share it with our customers. So Ashish, did you want to add something in there at this point? No, I think not at this point. One thing I would like to maybe reinforce is we don't know when we go into an evaluation where we are going to land. And that's one thing. So it's not every company that gets invited to a product category. You have to be pretty strong to even be considered and prove that through the number of inquiries and briefings that we do throughout. That's when we get invited. When we do get invited, there's no guarantee where we will land. So it's not like we have a choice of knowing beforehand. Look, if you're going to be extremely strong, we're going to participate or not. Once they do the evaluation and the results are shared with us, it's done. So knowing that we do take the risk because if you really think about the industry and who we're competing against, we're competing against like nine major industry categories and lots of vendors out there. So our goal first and foremost is to show that we are a strong enough player in all of those categories. And the goal is to then keep improving and try to reach the top of the quadrants for each one of these. Now, we know ourselves as a product, we have great strength in some of these and, you know, we're still working on some of the other, you know, product categories. So, for example, you know, we've been pushing and we have not been invited to both the Gardner and Forrester, you know, security reports, the Way Report and the MQ. Customers will help actually reinforce that why they're buying us and we're going to put our best foot forward. It requires a lot of work from across the company where we land. We don't know. But, you know, I just want to make that kind of process very clear so that you understand what we are doing and what's the thought process behind it, what's the strategy as we move forward. That's what I wanted to add, Joyce. So, and what I will add to that is a very natural thought might be, well, what if we choose not to participate? If you choose not to participate, that doesn't mean you will not be in the report. That means that you will have no control over what they put in the report because that is very good point, Joyce, because once they decide that you are a credible player, they do the evaluation themselves or give you a right to or access to provide input. So it would never, ever be a good idea not to participate. Let's put it that way. That's not actually a choice. It's a non-choice. The other thing I will say is that if you're curious about a report in either Gardner or Forster reports, they have two levels of criteria for choosing to have you in there. One is they have a set of criteria for that capability, that product, that space, and they elaborate what those capabilities are. So if you want to know kind of the best thing you can do is look at an older report, the last one they did, or maybe look at the research they're writing about in that space right now. The other thing is they go off their inquiries. So if they see a customer calling in and asking questions repeatedly about GitLab, that will make them go look at GitLab, right? So it's a balance of those two things. Are the customers asking them about us and talking about us? And when they look at the capabilities and features, is our product resonating in those spaces? So those are two of the main reasons why they consider us. Now, one of the things to think about is, what do we do once the report is published? Well, in the case of CI, for example, we were the top, we were number one, so we're going to run all over the world with that, and that's really easy for sales, right? You can come out and go, we're number one, we're the best, we're great, and you know, the rest of the world thinks so too, and let's talk about it. So that's really easy. What gets a little more challenging is if you're not the winner, right? And so there's usually in the wave, there's a progression of capability, and in the quadrants, there's different spaces you want to be in. Well, the worst thing you can do is not say anything at all, because if you don't publish and you don't talk about it, then your competitors who may be placed better are going to own the message. They're going to own the story. For those of you who understand framing, they're going to understand the frame and they're going to lead with that. And again, you have no choice. So we are always going to give you a story. We're going to give you a message so you can go in and talk about that, because what GitLab is about, and we hear SIDS say this over and over, is we're going to play in all those spaces. We're not great in all those spaces yet, but that's where we want to get to. And we're open and we're upfront about what we're working. Everyone contributes and everyone can make it better. So with that philosophy in mind, that's how we're approaching analyst pages. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hop over here and get my mouse to work. So this is the main analyst relations page. Oops, that's the handle page. This is the analyst relations page. Now it's still in progress. My wonderful, wonderful web team is helping us make it look prettier all the time. So next time you come back, it'll look a little different. But here's the idea. We start with the reports where people are running. So here I have the Forester Wave for CI and I have the Forester Wave for VSM. Now what we're doing, we're in the process of when you click on this, and I'll go with the VSM, you actually get to the Forester VSM Wave page. So every MQ or Wave that we participated, we're going to create a page. We've done this for the Wave here for the VSM. So what we do is we put up the logo, the picture so people can look at the graphic. We talk about Forester's key takeaways. It was really important to understand that no vendor won this one, and these were the areas where all the vendors had some trouble. Then what we do is we go into lessons learned in future improvements. So we pulled up, this is the specific information about GitLab that Forester had. And then beneath it, the product managers, in this case Victor came in and did a summary of the areas where Forester said we could do improvement. We've got in here information on how we're working on that, what we're doing in that space. And then as you can see, you can click through to the issues and the epics where we're actually working on things. So if a competitor says, let's say you're in the VSM space, your competing competitor said, well, we did better than GitLab. They didn't do as well with mapping. You can come back and talk to that person. Well, here's what we're doing with mapping. What's important to you with mapping? Are we covering that? Are we in that space? But you have a story. You can demonstrate where we are, where we're going, and what's important. What do you want to see in there? And then we're back to the whole entire message of GitLab and how we sell and market. So what we're going to have at the bottom of this page then is the form where they can click and actually download the entire report. So as I said, we're in the process of getting all the graphics together and the links in place, but every time a report comes out. So for example, we have the Gartner MQ on application release, what was it? ARO. That one we're going to have information on as well as we build those pages. Final thing that I want to say is talk a little bit about the handbook versus the web page. The web page is a place you can bring everybody, show all of those reports, any reports that we have access to, they can link there and get them. On the handbook, I have a heck of a lot more information that may only be accessible based on how I set it up to you as a GitLab employee. So summary of interacting, there will be a link here to the different reports again as we have them in here. For the XDR enablement, we're going to put in reports here that tie into the various conversations you're having. And then these are other areas that we're following the analysts to see what they're doing that maybe reports we're going to get into. And these links here, if you click on these links, you have to have access to GitLab to be able to get into these. So if a customer were to click onto these, they would not be able to access them, but you as an employee could work on the access. And with that, I think I'm going to open it up for questions unless Ashish wants to add anything that I left out there. No, that's good. I think we should open it to Q&A.