 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Welcome back everyone to our live coverage, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, my coach Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Michelle, Michelle, Justice and Group Manager, Dynamics 365 and Marketing Technology at Avanade. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, thank you for having me. So we just talked about before you came on camera that you're in charge of global marketing practice, for Avanade. Yeah, so I'm what you call the global marketing COP-leaded Avanade and so basically what that means is I'm in charge of our marketing technology community, our marketing technology community at Avanade. A lot of relationships forming in the industry, a lot of discussion around open data, open APIs. How has the landscape shifted in the marketing technology realm over the past three years because you're seeing a lot of cloud computing like vibe going on, you're seeing agility, real time, AI themes kind of creeping into content development, marketing, it's changed a lot. How do you see it? It has changed a lot and I've been in the marketing technology industry before marketing technologists even existed so I've seen a lot of change. And I think the thing that I'm most excited about is the way I'm looking at things right now is as a marketing technologist you don't have to integrate anything anymore. You can put your data in the cloud and marketers have a specific need for a specific type of data, right? So I don't have to integrate my marketing technology anymore. I can put that data in the cloud, I can enable it with some AI and then I can send it wherever I need to go. So data's been the big flash point in terms of inflection point and changing the direction of the industry. It's how people are handling their data and the thinking around it, almost from an architecture standpoint or use cases. What are the key trends there around the data? What are the big moving parts? Well, I mean, one of the things that's always a pain point for marketers is all of those data silos that happen from all the different marketing tools that you have to use, right? So it's painful. So how do you report on that? What do you do, right? So what I really love is I love seeing how, as markers, we can now put data into a single source of truth, along with all the other data that we can use to enable our reporting. Like for me as a marketer, I've always wanted to be able to get access to my ERP data so I can really see the ROI on my campaigns and how they're actually doing. And if I can marry that up with the sales data as well and I can pull all that data from one place, I'm a happy camper. I got to ask you about being a marketing technologist because also we've been doing the cubes for our 10th year, covering thousands of events we've done over the years. First time ever, someone yesterday came on a guest and their title was Marketing CIO. Wow, that's fabulous. And we think that's going to be a big sprint but it brings up the conversation of what does IT do? What does systems people do? Because the notion of systems and data is not so much just in IT, in information technology, department problem or opportunity. There's new roles changing and coming together. How do you, what's your take on? I think we're going to ask me hard questions. This is an easy one, right? Okay. We'll get to the hard ones later. Okay, good. So what I've found is really interesting is the transformation of the IT department versus the marketing IT department, right? So IT has already, has always spoken a certain language, right? But marketing and the marketing lingo, it requires a certain amount of expertise. And when you have marketing technology, you need to understand the lingo of marketing and what type of data and what kind of strategies you go after. You can't expect an IT department to understand that. So that's why you're seeing a marketing CIO because they speak the language of technology, right? Marketing technologists, marketing technology, and they understand how to implement that technology. So that's where, you know, there's a nice shift in that going on. I love to hear that. So now the hard question. Okay. So all the people that are here with Adobe, Adobe's got an ecosystem, you're in it, sent you're interactive, everyone else. They're out there to try to sell services and products and experiences to the customer, the consumer or B2B brands. Who is their buyer now? Who actually, who are they selling to? Is the persona's the same? Who is the person who writes the checks and makes the decision? The CMO. CMO. The marketing CIO, right? I actually look at that from a different angle personally. What I am after is actually the marketing team, right? So of course, as marketers, we understand what the customer journey is, right? And we have to be able to, as marketers, I'm putting myself in that persona, of course, right? As marketers, we have to make sure that we can get to those potential customers, right? But one thing that I'd like to just bring up if I may is that I'm more concerned about how does the marketer get their job done, right? So for me, at Avonade, I'm super excited about how I can help them get their job done better. So there's two markets there now. And these roles are changing radically. We're seeing a lot of new things happening. So Michelle, I'm curious to get your take. You've been at this for a while, how things have changed from kind of everything lining up in a funnel-type situation to get to the sale. To now, the sale is just part of an ongoing relationship that people are trying to establish. So how has that changed kind of the things that marketers need to think about, the KPIs that they need to measure beyond simply correlating a campaign back to the ERP system to see if they got a good ROI on that effort? Well, I think what's really exciting about marketing now is that we have a bigger seat at the table, right? At that table for the business. And with the ability to report and really show the value of what we do, we're not just top of the funnel. Like traditionally what happens is we can do all the work we do to bring leads into a sales ecosystem. And then we're like, okay, there you go. Sales, do what you need to do, right? We don't have to stop there anymore. We can help with the entire sales process. And once that sales process is done, and we have a customer, we can continue to help the business engage with that customer. So we're part of the entire journey. Right, and I'm curious to your take, which I think has driven a lot by mobile, where your touch points are shorter, but more frequent, right? And more diverse, but a lot more of them, all different stages of that funnel, because they can get a lot of information on their own. So how has that kind of changed from a marketer perspective? How to think about content, how to think about that journey, not just as a simple funnel that drives to a transaction. Our jobs are not easy anymore. Yeah, we really have to be more strategic as marketers. So what's interesting about that is across that entire journey, we have to somehow be able to provide an experience in the moment, right? And the good news is, is that we have lots of marketing technology that can help us do that, right? It requires a lot of data, it requires a lot of engagement, and then being able to ingest that information and react to it as close to real time as we can, is I think it's a huge challenge, but that's what we have to be ready for. One of the things we heard from a lot of the practitioners that come on customers of Adobe and the ecosystem is getting more diverse data so they can get the blind spots identified where they think they don't have any visibility. And the white space? And the white space, where they don't have enough, well they don't know what's going on. So what they were mentioning was, is that, okay, funnel's great, but they're going into this other journey path, non-linear progressions, either organic or in other channels, and they want to try to identify what's going on there, so they need to instrument it, right? So the challenging is, how do I get that silo data that might be somewhere else, or if it's new data, new first-party data or third-party data, getting more data exposed into these new progressions as a real challenge. And they want to keep iterating on it, so that seems to come up a lot. What's your reaction to that and how does this new kind of, say, horizontal or horizontally scalable experience users are having? How do you guys view that? Well, I, again, I would love as a marketer to have access to all my data in one place, right? And not just my data, because we have, marketers have special data, right? I would like to make sure I have all my data in one place. So, Azure, put it in the cloud. I'm a data surface, right? Put it there for me so I can then enable it. I can start throwing some AI at it so that I can have AI working for me, right? So I can help. Tell us that dynamic. Take a minute to explain why it's important to put the data in the cloud, because there's benefits to that. You were mentioning earlier in the interview, why is it important? Just take a minute to explain why it's important to put the data in the cloud. Well, because it gets rid of the data silos that you have, right? So if you can put your data in one place and then pull it into the systems, just the amount of data you need, you can get to it in bite-sized pieces, right? So let me just inform the sales team with the information that just they need, right? And for the marketing team, let me give them just the data they care about, right? Because it's very different. But if we have all of that in the same place, then we can pull it in wherever we need it. Talk about your business and how you guys are doing in marketing. What's going on in the global landscape? What are some of the big trends that you're seeing? What wave are you riding? What's the big business benefits that you guys are going after right now? Well, right now at Avanade, we're really focused on this Adobe and Microsoft partnership, right? For me, it's a really exciting time to be a marketer because, well, to be a marketing technologist, to be at Avanade and helping with this whole new partnership. We now have the power of a whole marketing experience platform, Adobe experience platform, right? And the partnership with Microsoft and we can bring these two platforms together, right? And LinkedIn too, although it's still part of Microsoft, but you got the dynamic 365 and LinkedIn, which are kind of different groups, right? So, but still Microsoft. Yeah, and LinkedIn's a great example too. So LinkedIn has two places for marketers and sales to work. So marketers can do the LinkedIn lead gen, right? And then sales can look at the LinkedIn profiles and the company profiles right on that lead record in the Dynamics 365, right? So marketing and sales can work together. I can bring the leads in as a marketer and as salesperson, I can look at that lead on LinkedIn. So that's super exciting. What content types do you see working? Obviously, video's hot right now. It's just at the RSA show. Jeff and I were there. We saw everyone's doing videos from video blogging to full sets. So we're streaming here. Video seems to be a hot format. What other? Video's been a hot format forever. I mean, YouTube came into existence and all of a sudden, you've got citizen videographers, right? And you can put content out there like crazy. I see that it's still a very relevant platform, but I personally would like to see how we can use AI to start targeting content to people who are doing some sort of activity online. It doesn't matter where you're at to engage them, right? I think the machine learning is a big point for the AI and that you mentioned earlier, you don't have to worry about connecting stuff. I think if you look at the experience platform that they announced yesterday, they have all these connectors in the sides of their architecture, is that's where you guys are also connecting in, right? This is where you guys see that automation happening. Is that what you meant by auto-integrating? Yeah, so as someone that builds marketing technology stacks, right? Using Dynamics 365 is the hub of that. One of the biggest pain points back in the day, as in a couple years ago, right? Was, does this integrate with my CRM? Because it's a pain point, how am I going to integrate? I don't have to worry about that anymore, right? Again, going back to putting data in the cloud, you don't have to integrate technology directly into D365 anymore, right? And that kills- In the mark tech stack, what's changed on the table stakes? Because it's funny as evolution comes, these new capabilities become table stakes like integration. You can't integrate, you're out. What new things are going on in the marketing technology field? That was an exception or a luxury just a few months ago or years ago that are now table stakes for marketers. Table stakes in the marketing technology landscape, I think Adobe is really, you know, let me shamelessly plug that because I'm so excited about it, right? Adobe is really a leader in that. So how do you take an entire marketing technology platform? Right? And it's not just, it's email marketing, it's your web space, it's your, whatever other tool you have, right? In your marketing technology stack, how do you add them, aggregate them together in a way that makes sense for the marketer to use? So I think what you're going to see is things need to be really easy for the marketers to use on their own, right? You don't, sometimes you need developers to do a lot of things, right? These pieces of technology can be really tech heavy in that respect. And I think you're going to see a lot of drag and drop capability, let's enable the marketer, the citizen marketer, as I like to call them, to actually build what they need more on the fly. And you're seeing that a lot right now. You know, Marketo is very similar like that. Because when you said the good news is the marketers have all these tools, I thought you were then going to say, and the bad news is the marketers have all these tools. That's so true, yeah. Because there's so many of them, right? I know, influx of possibility, right? So to have an integrated platform that pulls a lot of the core pieces together, you don't necessarily have to worry about the laundry list of potential tools that you might leverage. Already pre-integrated, ready to roll. Super, final thoughts on seeing the Satya on stage. That's got to help your enthusiasm for the partnership. 100% I'm super happy to be here. And I'm a huge advocate of the partnership. So I'm really excited to see this happen. I think Adobe's done a great job. We're tough customers to please in terms of the tech, but on the cloud side, the way they laid it out, they got all the things we think right. The first party. The module and the data pipelining and semantics. Those are two, I think, beautiful architectural pieces. I agree. I think it's going to be, if they can get this thing automated and get it going, no more integration. Thank you for making my life easier. I know, right? We'll see some acceleration on your end. You're a technologist. Yeah, I'll help. I'm here. Thank you for sharing the data and insights on theCUBE. Of course. Great insights here on theCUBE. Adobe Summit. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick. Stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break.