 Hey everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm pleased to be joined by the CEO of Certinia, Scott Brown. Scott, it's great to have you. We're going to be talking about services as a business platform. Welcome to the program. It's great to be here, Lisa. You mentioned something intriguing and I want to really crack this open and tease this in the opener, services as a business platform. The video talked about some of the things that customers in every business need, that's agility, increasingly it's intelligence, it's certainty. Talk about services as a business platform, Saab, and what it really is, and how it's relevant in today's market. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's good to put this kind of in a historical context, right? If we looked at the global economy 200 years ago, the vast majority of it was products, very little was service, right? It'd be 70, 80% products, maybe 20% services. Today, it's completely flipped, right? 60, 70% of all global GDP of services, only about 30% is products. So the world has changed, but yet along the way, very few people have paid attention to what does this 70% need? What capabilities do they need to deliver that? And that's what services as a business is all about. What things can we deliver that are gonna help people in the service economy to effectively be able to deliver that customer experience? And it's a really difficult transition for most companies to make, to move from a product orientation to a services orientation, right? So when you look at the evolution of the global economy, all the growth is happening in services. It's a great place to be. The bad news is, if you're looking for automation, there's very little out there to allow you to actually deliver a great experience. So talk a little bit, and that makes a lot of sense. I read some articles that you wrote recently, a fast company article where you talked about as services as a business platform, as a reference model for really delivering those key capabilities for helping businesses run a services arm wing business effectively. And another thing that you said in that article that really struck me, and we've talked about this before, is services as a business platform is grounded in an innovative customer experience. The customer experience has changed so much, especially in the last few years alone, where we have an expectation we're going to always be connected. We're going to be able to access anything we need in our business lives, in our personal lives. It's going to be relevant. It's going to be, we're going to be able to trust it. So talk about delivering the customer experience that these businesses need. Let's really kind of dig into that, because it's all about the customer experience at the end of the day. It is, it is. So let me give you a, I love to give a customer example. So Avalara, everybody knows Avalara, right? They're incredible when it comes to tax automation, and lots of folks use them. We do, we have an interface to them. And Avalara is a customer of ours, right? Anytime they sign a new customer, it immediately creates a project for the implementation of their technology, and it immediately sets in place the milestones by which the customer is going to get live with their technology and their software. That automation, right? It used to take three, four, five days for them to get the project set up, and then inconsistent processes associated with the milestones in delivering those projects, and then the revenue recognition, the billing, the planning for the next project, all those things before were manual. Today at Avalara, the minute they get a new customer, they're off and running, and all the processes are tied together. And, you know, if you talk to them, they'll say, complex problems need complex tools to solve them. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's about creating the simplicity of the experience for the customer that's most important. So Avalara uses our system to do that. So at the end of the day, when you look at the experience, the experience starts in the pre-sales process. So what can you do to make that process great? Why did we enter the service as CPQ market? Because when you're quoting service, they can actually reach into the PSA system and see who are the resources we're gonna put on this project? When are they available? What are their experiences? What are their capabilities? What would the project look like? And actually quote the project. One of the big issues people have in this part of the economy is, they're as quoted to a customer versus they're as delivered, are almost always out of sync with each other. And what happens then to the business? You have revenue leakage, you have margin leakage, and you end up not meeting your customer's expectations. Or churn. Yeah. So from the very beginning, you're quoting a service experience that you can actually deliver over here. Those things are connected. It's very powerful for the people that are out there trying to create that great customer experience. I can imagine that is only a massive competitive differentiator for customers like you just articulated. Yeah, it is. That today is essential. Yeah, it is. And for them, the services are what are gonna distinguish the experience for the customer, right? They've already decided the product works. Avalara is a great product. But the service experience that happens post-sales actually distinguishes then NPS and the happiness of the customer long-term. I love the voice of the customer. You've done such a great job of really bringing in key customer stories that just really very ostensibly demonstrate the value proposition. And I think that's one of the most important things businesses can do. Because I think at the end of the day, there really isn't much more validating than not just the voice of the customer, but the metrics and the outcomes and what you articulate. I could only imagine the numbers that they're gonna be able to show in terms of how they really move the business forward and transformed based on certainty. Yeah, and you know, when I go in and I talk to those C-suite executives, I generally ask them just two questions. The first question is, what's your research utilization today? Right? Oh, it's 65%. What do you want it to be? 80%, okay, great. Second question, what's your margin per project? Oh, it's 8%. What do you want it to be? 22%, great. Then I grab a bar napkin and I'll write down, okay, 4,000 people, 15 points improvement in utilization, this number of projects, this margin improvement. Your payback is $100 million. You know, I was down in Australia with another customer. We literally went through this exercise, the payback for them is $100 million. This is not one of those things where you say, I'm a security endpoint, I'm gonna do a little bit better job at getting malware or I'm a collaboration tool and you're all gonna work together a little bit better. The hard dollar savings in doing this kind of automation is off the charts easy to figure out. Ask those two questions. If you know the answer to those two, you can figure out what the ROI is. I paid for this system as a customer in four and a half months, right? It doesn't take a long time to do it, but what was most important as you talked about before was delivering a great outcome for our customers. But the economics of this, a services business that runs at high efficiency, high margin, great project milestones, great progress billing, great revenue management. I mean, it's a great profitable business as well. It's a no-brainer. It really is. Cool things about you, Scott, is that you talked about being a customer of what's now search India at Cisco. And at Teradata. And at Teradata as well. So you bring a different perspective. And I think that's always so invaluable to companies to understand these are the challenges out there that the users are having. You talked about what services as a business means, but we know that these organizational leaders are juggling so many different things right now. They have to attract new business. They have to strengthen existing customer relationships, foster new ones. They have to optimize revenue. What are some of the challenges that maybe you faced as a user back in the day? And maybe some of the extant current challenges that search India services as a business is eradicating for your customer base. Because it sounds like the value of the ROI is there. Yeah. I mean, the number one issue I always had using the system as a customer was getting the right person on the right project at the right time, you know? And human capital, I mean, it's precious. If you don't utilize that human capital goes away. And if you get that right person that has the right background on the right project at the right time to the customer, it's magic, right? It gives them an experience that's unlike any other. If you get the wrong people, don't have the right experiences, don't have the right availability and you don't have the right plan, you're not gonna have a great customer experience. There was a great Harvard Business Review article that talked about the world is moving to projects, right? And all those people were putting them on projects and were managing those projects amazingly well for the benefit of the customer. If you don't have great project management at the core of what you do, it doesn't matter how good your resource management is, you're not gonna be able to deliver that great customer experience. So when, you know, HBR has said the world is moving to projects, well, you better have an architecture and system that allows you to manage those projects for your customers exceptionally well. For customers that are maybe nascent in or have a services business that really one of the challenges that a lot of customers face is this lack of connected software, not integrated. A lot of things just don't work together, data's in silos, users can't get what they need to in a timely manner. How do they start? How do you advise organizations that maybe have a cultural block? What's the game plan for a business that's really kind of behind and has to accelerate as quickly as possible? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, in the good old days, people used to pick point products, right? Lots of vertical solutions that were the best in their little area. And then they became the integrator and it's a nightmare, right? Every time I want to upgrade, anytime I want things to work together, I got 26 different versions of my truth. In today's world, you need to pick a platform, right? You know, in our case, it's a salesforce.com, it could be a service now, it could be another platform. But you pick a small number of platforms and you put everything onto those platforms and make that work together, make that your single source of truth. So for us, being on Salesforce, if I start an opportunity in Salesforce, it's there for us, it's the same opportunity, it's the same customer, it's the same resource, all the things that are there, none of it's duplicated, none of it you have to worry about synchronizing it. You never have to worry when you do an upgrade at API and things together. So the good old days was I had 106 of these products and my job was to make them to fit together. Today, pick two or three platforms and make those platforms the anchor of everything that you do, right? It simplifies your world tremendously. I love that, really talking about an anchor point. You talked about single source of truth. We talk about that a lot. It's really challenging for organizations to find. There's so much data duplication out there, it's not even funny. But in a blog post that I read that you wrote recently, you talked about finding one's business truth, which I love that. In Forbes article you called, I love this, a single source of truth, the holy grail of services business operations. A lot of folks, as we talked about, struggle with that connected piece. So how do you advise and how does Sartinia help businesses find their one business truth and really get to that holy grail so that they can really maximize the value and achieve the ROI that you're saying is sitting on the table? Yeah, it starts with the customer. What is the experience I want to deliver? How does that differentiate me in the market and go backward to ask yourself the question, what are all the capabilities I need to deliver? Again, go back to an Avalara. They said we need an immediate project to be created after the customer is there with standardized project milestones that deliver that outcome vastly faster than it did before. To time to value is a big conversation that you have and if you can get to that value quicker for your customer, you're gonna have cross sell, add on additional business with them. If you're plotting along through a very difficult implementation because you have all these disparate systems that don't work together, the customer experience is bad, but so is your business performance, right? Both of them suffer in that environment. So the more you can ask yourself the question, am I working off of one set of numbers? Am I working off of one customer, one opportunity? Is everything working together off of one integrated set of data, the more you're gonna be able to take your customer experience and put that top of your list as opposed to data synchronization and system synchronization as a thing that you're spending your time and precious effort on. I'm glad you mentioned time to value. We look at that and in marketing think, well, it's a marketing term unless it can be substantiated. There's a lot of unintended value in really accelerating time to value. Put some numbers on that. Maybe another customer example where they've really been able to just turn the volume up and achieve value from start to finish because a lot of times organizations struggle, we talked about the lack of connectivity but the certainty I think in certain years is obvious as what you articulated. But what's a great example that you think really articulates and demonstrates numerically and acceleration and time to value? Sure, a great example would be Salesforce. Salesforce uses our system to run their entire services organization and they were able to actually dramatically reduce their resource time. They scaled up to seven, eight, 9,000, 10,000 consultants and they couldn't over time effectively staff those because it used to be, oh, five, 10, 15 people that they were staffing. Now it's 200, 300 or more people on a project. They can staff those people immediately. They can actually start the projects immediately, right? The turnaround time for them relative to their ability to serve their customer went down dramatically. Their ability to deliver complex projects went up dramatically. And if you look at it for them, they have a core, incredible software franchise. If you can surround it very quickly with the services that help people to get value out of it, it's game changer for them. I was just, you took the words right out of my mouth. It's a game changer. So we talked about the name. It makes so much sense about, especially with the macro environment that we're in and the dynamics that will continue to exist. Last question, any feedback from customers or analysts that are really excited to demonstrate? Yeah, we nailed this. Well, it's fine. I've talked to a number of folks that were out there and actually did rebranding, right? Like UKG is an example. I talked to a former CEO and I took their CMO and I loved it when she said, that is the perfect rebranding. I mean, they're a customer, right? And she immediately said that completely resonates with me as a customer. I love it. I can't believe that name is still out there and available. And I believe every day when we wake up, we're looking for certainty out of the capabilities your system brings. So she brought a little flutter to my heart when she validated that because they went through the ultimate and Chronos merger and I was just calling them to learn from them on best practices. They validated back as a customer. This is fantastic and we think you nailed it. So I feel great about it. I think it speaks to the core benefit we provide which is certainty. And I think our customers that have been with us on this journey for a long time, they're gonna resonate with this. And I think they see that the company has outgrown our current name. There's no question about it. This shows what we aspire to do for them. And that's what's most important for us. I feel like you guys have hit the holy, you found the holy grail here with the name, but also just really doing such a great job of monitoring the maturation of the evolution and really being able to tell a very succinct story to not just your existing customer base, which we said earlier is over 1,400 across 30 plus countries. The value proposition is absolutely crystal clear like a beautiful sunny day. Yeah, it is. Really, I think this guy's the limit for you guys. I think it is. I think we're just getting started. All right, well, early innings, we're gonna keep our eyes on this space, Scott. It's been such a pleasure talking to you about this, the importance, the value in it for customers, for companies all across the globe. We can't wait to watch the space. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me, Lisa. All right, we want to thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. Lisa Martin with Scott Brown. Check out certinia.com to learn more. I know you're gonna want to. We'll see you next time.