 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Okay, welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE virtual. We're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews, bringing that content to you virtually. Obviously it's a virtual event over three weeks, wall-to-wall coverage. Got a great guest here, November Guadagnio. Chief Marketing Officer for Acoustic. Norma, great to have you on theCUBE. Great story I want to get into. Independent Marketing Cloud and all that good stuff. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, John. I'm excited to chat with you and it's exciting during re-invent. Yeah, a lot of great stuff. I mean, just every year I just get kind of nerdy and I nerd out on all the massive new stuff. And some of it's kind of futuristic, not yet available, but most of it is. But let's get into what you guys do. So first, tell me the story about Acoustic. You guys were originally part of IBM's spun out and now independent. Take us through what happened. Yeah, sure. It's actually a super fascinating story overall because in short, Acoustic was created last year, July 2019 as a carve-out from IBM. The interesting history is that over the course of, oh, about a decade, IBM said, hmm, this marketing technology space is pretty interesting. So it went and acquired a number of companies across multiple years, pulled it all together in what it called IBM Watson Marketing ultimately and said, we're in the marketing technology space. Unfortunately, it turns out that's probably not a core business for IBM. So a few years ago, someone said, hmm, maybe we're not in this space. Let's see if we can carve this out. And so we were born last July, we are private equity owned and from a great history became a great new beginning. Awesome. So talk about the value proposition. You guys are leaving here, says you guys are the independent marketing cloud. Does that mean independent in the sense of, you don't take a position on certain technologies or independent as a company? What does that mean? Boy, independent used to be a simple word, but it doesn't have, that's a simple anymore now, is it? You know, what we mean by that is very straightforward. One, we are private and we are focused on marketing and marketers. And we are not beholden to other parts of the business that may be trying to serve back office or finance or other elements in a business. And what we think that the marketer today, which as you know, marketers usually have the or one of the biggest IT budgets in a company, we think they need providers that are focused on their needs and their needs own. Yeah, it's interesting. The MarTech stack and I was just had a conversation with Adventure Capitalist live on the kickoff of the program for the show review. It is pre-cloud, there's cloud transition. Now you got all in cloud benefits of being cloud native, right? So kind of 2021, I think we're in this post COVID era. You're going to see a whole new set of advantages. Yeah, they'll still be hybrid. They'll still be on premise. But if you look at the all the MarTech marketing technology stuff, it's just so much stuff. And Salesforce just bought Slack. You have Microsoft, T and the big guys, all these things. And you only have departments don't have a lot of staff. It's not like- Yeah, I don't know. It's so new technology to try to do that heavy lifting. This is a big theme of the Amazon reinvent culture. Using tech, create the customer value, reduce the heavy lifting. How are you guys doing that? How do you serve customers in that competitive landscape? It's a well set up job because the reality is that we have a lot, there's a lot of companies in the marketing technology space. You can look at charts online. There are 8,000 companies, evidently. And the reality is that very few of those companies are trying to provide big for the band to end solutions the way that we are. And some of our large competitors are. But they're all at different stages of their evolution in the cloud because most of the bigger companies in this space got their MarTech capabilities through acquisition. And they may have to sort of carry forward a pre-cloud technology stack with them. What we're trying to do is really two things. One, we've moved our technology to the cloud in particular, over 90% of our workload is on AWS now. And we're trying to find the integration points with our customers where they're equally moving to public cloud like AWS and give them the capability of being able to bring up capabilities quickly, particularly in something like email, be able to scale, right? We're in the middle of the holiday season. It's the busiest time of the year for businesses to send email. And we wanna make sure that our customers can scale up. We want them to have that capability. And we wanna be able to take advantage of that. So we don't have to over invest in backend technology. We want marketers to feel as empowered as the CIO who's, oh, I'm all in on the cloud. Well, what about the marketers? They're the ones who should be using that. And I think something like AWS has continued to grow and the capabilities at every part of AWS will continue to provide value to the marketers, to the customer experience team, as well as to the IT team. How are you guys using data and AI? Because obviously seeing that huge part of every single product, it's one of those things that you see. And we've been sitting for years, now it's kind of mainstream. The benefit of the cloud is you get a horizontal scalability of infrastructure. Now you got Lambda, now you got containers. And then you got data, you can get vertically specialized within the app. So if you do the microservices or deconstruct the monolith, you could really provide point value and still get that data scale. So this opens up massive data intelligence opportunities, which every marketer wants to be data driven. So or use the data to make a great user experience or customer experience. How do you guys see that in acoustic and what are you guys doing in the cloud around that? Can you share? Well, first of all, somehow you got a fold of our confidential roadmap because you just laid it out right there and what you said, it's not so confidential. But the reality is that- It's market leading for sure. I think if you can, that's a holy grail. Right, it's where everyone wants to be. And we at acoustic have a very specific philosophy is that we want to embrace data. And we mean, of course, on behalf of our customers and we want to bring data to empower every application in every part of the marketer's business. And for better or worse, there's some marketing technologies to sort of have a little bit of a little hands off with data, particularly if it's not their own data. We believe that whether it's first party, second party, third party data, it needs to be brought into the marketing life cycle. And we are building or have built capabilities to do that. We believe in being open. We believe in being able to bring in all sorts of different data types and then use that to build the best marketing campaigns and experiences for our customers and for their customer. And if you're not embracing all the types of data out there and creating a unique formula for each particular customer, you're not going to deliver the best marketing experience. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think one of these things where modern applications, there's two themes here, modern applications and then completely programmable infrastructure for Amazon. And this is again, I've been covering cloud for many, many years since the beginning of cloud and I've looked at all the big three and I see Amazon's been clearly winning on the infrastructure at the service, platform as a service. They have SaaS apps out there, but they have an ecosystem. Microsoft has their own strategy, Google, the other. You picked Amazon as a preferred partner. Could you share why Amazon and what specifically does that enable you to do as a company? Because Amazon's huge and some people get nervous like, okay, Amazon, you're going to eat me up and you're a marketing focus, not a core, they don't have a core building block out there called marketing cloud like Oracle does or other companies, why Amazon? Yeah, I think that you really sort of laid the landscape out well and Amazon is very much a full stack. And there's so much maturity in AWS overall, which you don't necessarily see the sort of top to bottom maturity that you see in the other other clouds and Amazon and all clouds, right? We all want to be able to tap into microservices. So when we were trying to figure out what gave us the scalability that we needed, we were really focused on the ability to integrate at multiple touch points, the ability to scale up really fast because like during the holiday season, we're transacting billions of transactions, whether it be emails that our customers are sending or SMS messages that they're sending. So billions of transactions over a fixed period of time, we need to be able to scale quickly at an affordable price. And we also believe that actually a lot of marketing departments are going to start to realize the value of plugging into the services available in a public cloud, particularly as they see things such as taking data from third parties, right? How do they get that into the system? Or taking their marketing stacks and ultimately potentially putting those stacks in containers. How do you move that into a container and be able to quickly connect other microservices to that container? So we think that this is the absolute future of where the marketing department is going to end up. And we think Amazon and AWS can be a great partner because it gives you that global footprint, gives you that ability to scale and gives you the richest set of services available right now. That was a really easy decision for us. Awesome stuff. Thanks for coming on, Norma. I really appreciate you laying out your vision of the cloud. Take a minute real quick. We got a couple of minute left. Put the plug out for Acoustic. What are you guys looking to do? What's the value proposition? Give a plug for the company. Yeah, we left talking about Acoustic and you can certainly visit us at acoustic.com. Acoustic is a full service marketing platform. We are modern, we are cloud based. And one of the things that we do is we specialize and focus on marketing and the marketing function. And if anybody out there is interested in finding out more, you can not only come to acoustic.com, you can ping me because we believe that marketers are key decision makers and myself as our CMO wants to talk to every potential client. Norma, thanks for coming on. I'm in Guadalupe, chief marketing officer, Acoustic here featured on theCUBE, but eight of us are reinvented. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. It was a pleasure, John. Thank you. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. More coverage after this short break. Stay with us for more CUBE Live coverage.