 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org. And this is theCUBE where we extract the signal from the noise, we go to the events, and we share with you our audience what's happening at the shows. We're here at IBM Edge. We've been here for two days. We're at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Carrie Kiley is here. She's the Director of Marketing at Arrow, which is a sponsor of Edge. Carrie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you. You guys are a big sponsor. That's awesome. Thanks for noticing. I appreciate that. You got some good shout outs today. So what do you think of the event? What's happening here? What's the buzz? Well, talked to a lot of partners today. A lot of folks from Arrow, actually, we have a great showing, probably about 45, 50 people from Arrow here. And everybody's really excited. We were a little nervous coming into it. It's so big. There's so much to see and do. So we were a little worried about getting lost in the mix, but it's been great. It's been great. It's been quite the opposite, actually. Arrow is just an awesome business model. It's evolved over the many years. We've watched Arrow from the PC days, really grow up and cause a lot of action in the enterprise. So talk about Arrow's business a little bit and where you fit. Sure, thanks. So we are a premier distributor for IBM and we are focused primarily today on five different solution areas to help our business partners capture the growing markets. Data center, convergence, security, mobility, and those types of solutions. So we focus on enablement, lead generation, sales support and financing support for all of our partners to enable them to expand their reach and depth into the market as well as geographies and that. Yes, you mentioned mobile. I mean, it's just incredible to see how the consumerization of technology is really driving decisions, right? It used to be the enterprise was sort of the most advanced and now it's Apple's driving everything, it seems. But so you also mentioned data center convergence. What's that initiative all about? Yeah, thanks for asking. That's actually an initiative that we have seen really emerge as a results-oriented architecture instead of really looking at the products as great as they are and working towards a result. We're hearing about what our end-user customers through our partners, what they need, what they're looking for in terms of saying competitive in the market and working backwards into technologies and solutions and allowing our enablement strategies to reach our partner sellers with that in mind so that they're approaching their customers in a different way. So that's what that program is about. So let's talk a little bit about the cloud. Somebody talks about the cloud and how disruptive it is and how it's going to change the channel and then you've got sort of different partners, I'm sure, that are embracing that. Others that are sort of going in with digging their heels in. What are you seeing in terms of what's happening in the cloud? How are you guys responding to it? How are your partners responding to it? Well, it was a lot more mysterious, I think, last year than it is this year. I think people are really embracing it again really from a results-oriented way. Instead of looking at it as something that's new, people are looking at it as a route to market. It's not a different thing or a product that's a route to market. And I think that our partners and customers are embracing it as such in learning how deploying certain solutions and methodologies and business practices through the cloud can help not just save money but make money, become more competitive in the marketplace. And I really think that's resonating more so in the last, I'd say, eight months than it was in early part of last year. And are the companies that you typically work with, sell through, how are they transforming themselves to take advantage of that trend? The partners? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It is a different selling approach and it is a different really approach for the sellers to go into their partners and look at workloads and specific competitive initiatives that a end user might have. And so I think that the difference today is they're selling a bit of an insurance policy or something that is viewed more as an annuity than just a point product sale and kind of go on to the next. So I think it's something that partner sellers understand now as a relationship builder as much as it is just a selling tool. Has it affected the way in which you market this whole cloud trend? It has a bit in that we're much more focused in a lot of cases and again results oriented selling rather than point product oriented selling. And in terms of enablement, focusing on different ways of selling rather than again the approach of maybe a procurement officer or an IT director sometimes going up the chain a little bit to CFOs, CMOs. So let's stay on marketing a little bit. In your role as director of marketing, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how marketing has changed. We hear so much about cloud and social and mobile and big data. We hear the CMO is going to outspend the CIO in terms of technology. How has marketing changed in the last five or seven years? Well, Facebook and LinkedIn and all of those great tools have changed the way that we market immensely. Not just market but how we find talented people to work for us and through us. So it has changed the landscape quite a bit. Not to say that the traditional means of marketing whether they be outbound telemarketing or mail even is going away. But the social element of marketing has changed the way that we shape our relationship with our customers and stay with them throughout the buying cycle. So many customers today are making so many decisions on the web without any people around or any mail or any phone call. So it's intensely important now for us to help our partners be visible and relevant out on the internet and the web and social media is a great way to get them into that. Yeah, I mean a lot of times customers have made a buying decision or are ready to buy. They're so much more informed than they were a second or 10 years ago. So that somewhat changes the way in which you have to engage with them. So how do you engage differently with customers? How do you make those engagements a source of value? Yeah, well at every possible turn, a lot of times we think of the sales cycle again beginning with say an appointment. And so because we know that we may not get the appointment because so many of these customers are looking at different thought leaders and things like that on the web. We have helped our partners understand search engine optimization, landing sites, multi-touch marketing strategies and again starting at the enablement phase. If you're doing a training session, involve your customers, educate your customers on solutions and results oriented solutions so that it is some place that a partner can go to get thought leadership and they're going to think of that partner much more readily because they understand them as a thought leader. We were talking to Tom Rosamilia earlier and he brought up the whole theme of marketing to the individual fingerprint of that individual whether it's there, I didn't hear his keynote but evidently this was a major theme of it since we were here of course on theCUBE. But he was talking about, look everybody leaves a social footprint, a digital footprint and it's unique to that individual. You obviously see that, but it's got to be hard to capitalize on that because it's a mindset shift. There's the technology involvement, there's content. How have you experimented with that and what successes have you had? What failures? I would love to spout out all kinds of wonderful statistics for you but we're probably in the early adoption phase of being able to capture our actual return on a lot of that but there are tons and tons of tools and great advisors actually within the IBM corporation that we've utilized to make sure that we do capture as much of that digital footprint or fingerprint, not with the tablets, it's the fingerprint and so we use several different tools to do that and hopefully by the end of this year I would think we'll be able to have specific statistics. Are you starting to, well how, I know you are but how are you using data in your marketing? How has that changed? Immensely, so not just our own data that we're collecting from a point of sale standpoint but how many times has a partner been frustrated? They feel like they're buying the same lists every time they go to a different marketing campaign so we have actually a tool called Arrow Insight that we use that combines market insight through IDC Blackbook and our own point of sale data as well as DNB data so that we can look at where our partners have sold, where the market is going and then look at specific white space areas where we may not have hit a particular segment of the market with a particular solution so we use data really as king and are constantly feeding that database and that tool like a living, breathing thing so it's changed immensely. So that's trying to understand, the database of that is trying to understand the total market, how much you can be penetrated by different product segments maybe even by different industries. Absolutely, yeah, it actually takes a look at industry, geography, solution type, you name it, it's a pretty complex methodology actually. Do you have a data scientist on staff? We do, we have two. Really? Yeah, so I'm becoming one. Yeah. Relatively new roles or? Relatively, I would say within the last two and a half years, relatively new. We work with our partners with custom engagements and we also have this tool available for subscription as well. So partners, if they become scientists themselves can actually tap into the tool and work with it. So it's a collaborative model there. Absolutely. What kind of skill sets do you look for in a person like that? Are they data hackers, are they math whizzes, stat jockeys, are they programmers? You know, a little bit of all of that to be honest with you and I'm really in awe of the way that they do look at data is again, you know, a cube almost. You know, they're picking up different ways to look at it in terms of presenting dashboards, not just data, not just spreadsheets, but dashboards to make decisions off of data rather than just pivot tables. Yeah, right. Okay, my last question is what do you want from the vendor community? What do you look for from a supplier, you know, like IBM, you know, generally or IBM specifically, what can they do to make your life better and make your clients' lives more productive? You know, I'll answer that from a marketing perspective first and maybe widen it after. I've worked with IBM for quite some time, about 25 years actually, since the beginning of my career. And from a marketing perspective, IBM is a fantastic partner, but they are very collaborative and share a lot of, again, market data and also, you know, where the market's going, but also some field hands-on expertise to help us and our partners. In general, so that's from a marketing perspective. In general, IBM is a great company to work for, not just because of technology and the solutions, but the field support. You know, to compete with the other guys, you really have to have some selling feet on the streets and I think that that's one of the main things that we look for in a supplier. All right, Kerry, well listen, thanks very much for coming inside the Cube, sharing the Arrow story, really pleasure meeting you. Good to be here. All right, thanks everybody for watching. Keep it right there, we're right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE live from the Mandalay Bay, we're at Edge.