 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are on the ground in San Jose, California. At the Adobe headquarters, we're really excited to interview our next guest. She is a, I don't know, Maverick, Maven, she's been to the business a lot. You see her on air all the time. Just Jerry Martin, Flickinger, CIO and SVP at Adobe. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you, Jeff. So we're excited to be... Who's on the name, by the way? Flickinger. Pretty close, not exactly. Yeah. But we're down in San Jose, really I think the only signature building still in downtown San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, and it's Adobe whose logo sticks up above everybody else. Yeah, we have three buildings. Three buildings. And we love it down here. San Jose is a wonderful city. And you have the bridge. That's the coolest part. Yep. That's great. So let's jump into it. Adobe's a company a lot of people probably know to some degree they're based on a product or from true type fonts as I look on the ground back when the early printer days and the conversion, but you guys made a tremendous business transformation a couple years ago, moving from a classic license model, we all know, not inexpensive to go get that Photoshop copy or go get InDesign, but now you're in subscription. Talk a little bit about that process and, A, what motivated it, and then we can dig into a little bit about the why's and then the how's. Yep. It's been an exciting journey at Adobe and you mentioned a couple of our brand names, Photoshop, Acrobat. These products have been around for a long time. Adobe's more than 30 years old as a software company. There aren't a lot of 30 year old software companies. We got to the point though in our delivery of product to our customers where we would be on release cycles every 12 months, every 18 months, everybody'd run and buy the new copy of Photoshop. And we really felt the need to start releasing new features and capabilities to our customers much more quickly. We were watching the world of consumerization occur across devices with smartphones and tablets. We really wanted to bring our innovation to our customers more quickly. And in order to do that, you really have to stop the model of, I'm going to build software and I'm going to put it on a golden master and I'm going to ship it to distribution and I'm going to put it in boxes and I'm going to sell it all over the world. That takes too long. And so we said, what if we just take it right to the consumer? What if we put it online? What if we make it a true services model? Where people subscribe to the software and that way we can give them updates all the time. And that's really what we've done. We've moved away from the model of 18 month release cycles for our major products and we moved them into a continuous life cycle that actually gives updates to our customers constantly. And because of that, we've also changed how you pay for it. So you pay for it month to month. And through that you get all of these additional new features which more and more are collaboration features in the cloud. So let's talk about kind of how agile software development as a methodology to get things done faster. And you mentioned, right? You would work on a spec, build a product, 18 months later it ships and I saw you in another interview and then the engineers get to take six weeks off because they had to get it all through the distribution channels. To really a method where it's build it, deliver it, fix it, build it, deliver it, fix it. But really taking that from a software development model now into really more the way you manage your big products and changing your big products into little products but then actually then executing at a business level not just a software development level. It's a very different model. It is a very different model and I think there's two keys to success here. The first is really changing people process and technology to be in an agile fashion. You have to change everything from what you think a spec is for a product to what you think a release cycle is to what you think QA is to what you think customer feedback is. And the idea of having DevOps teams, which we know a lot of people do of course read agile is one of the ways you can get there. But at some point as you're on this journey, the second thing I would say that's very important is to think about what can become shared platform components. You want people to be agile and rapid on all the stuff that's a secret sauce. You want them that next cool feature in Photoshop. That's what you want to have agile. How to run a server is not. How to keep a network up is not. There's probably even some common pieces of code component that can be shared and don't have to run and constantly be updated in an agile sprint. And so I think the second secret to our success is that we've thought very clearly about which things become part of the platform and get leveraged across all of the SaaS offerings as opposed to letting every single team build everything through the entire stack. And that's really important. And that's part of what I've done in my role as CIO and how IT is really engaged in product at Adobe. You couldn't do that when everyone has their own independent software component because I might miss out on that common piece. Because I've only got two of the three pieces or I got one of the pieces. But now, by having a creative suite concept, now I know that I can get the common components as well as the specialized ones that I use all the time. Right, and one of I think the most specific examples that make it really clear to people is common identity. You want to be able to log on to your product once and have access to Photoshop and InDesign and all your other products. And know that when you store something there, you can get to it from all the products. That would be an example of a shared platform component that all the products can engage with. And it makes the customer much happier because they just get one unified experience. So then talk about cloud. I mean, you just hinted on this a little bit about cloud. And cloud both is an enabling platform. Cloud is a go to market platform. Cloud is a way to really enable you guys to transform your business. And I think you have to think about cloud differently depending on what hat you're wearing. You know, when we think about it from a financial perspective, it means our back office has to deal with billing systems that now deal with usage monitoring and understanding how much of something people have consumed. It has to deal with the concept that maybe we allow you to share with your friends and family for free, but for pay, you have to have a different kind of relationship. We have to deal with the concept of licenses to major corporations that may have 50,000 named users. And that's very different than selling to a housewife or a dad who's doing pictures for his kid's ball league. So we really have to think about the go to market and the back office operation very differently. And that's required us to rethink our billing, our customer master, our pricing models, even the concept of a SKU, you know, which most people use to set price and track how much of something you sell has to change in this model. Well, I saw another interview that you did before, which I thought was really interesting to follow up on that where you talked about the concept of a SKU and distribution and channels and units and inventory. And now really flipping that on a recurring revenue basis in a subscription model into really it's an engagement now, really managing a relationship and an engagement. Talk a little bit about more of that. You know, when I first started in the software business and I've been a CIO in three software companies over, I don't know, 15 years or so, it used to be that when you started getting close to the end of a quarter, everybody got in a room and you simply talked about the inventory. How much inventory do we have in channel? What do we have to do for sell through? How can we, you know, push our product all the way through to the end user? Well, today we don't have any of those conversations. They don't exist. What we do is we look at a dashboard every morning and we understand what's happening in real time with our customers. Who's stayed on the subscription? Who upgraded their subscription? And unfortunately, who's left their subscription overnight? And it's a continuous quarter end. You know, the quarter end cycle is still, of course, an important aspect of our financial management as a company, but to be honest, we watch our numbers every single day now in a very real way. Incredibly different, which means everything has to be instrumented for that online right now business, which if you're building a company from the ground up, might not seem so overwhelming, but when you've got a $4 billion business in the air and you have to switch in mid-flight, it's pretty dramatic. So we've been talking for a few minutes and you're a CIO and we haven't talked about really the technology you're turning the lights on. We've been talking a lot about a business model. And this is consistent with a trend that we see over and over and we hear about. And I'd love to get your thoughts on it, because like you said, you've been a CIO to a number of companies for a number of years. Talk a little bit about how the role of the CIO is changing, both in the course of there's a never ending flow of interesting new technologies and you have mobile and social and cloud and big data, et cetera, et cetera, but more importantly, the role of technology in delivering the business value as opposed to just kind of keeping the lights on and turning on new systems. How has that changed? Yeah, well, I think it's changed a lot. When I first started in the industry, which was a very long time ago, there was usually a room of people who knew about how the computers worked, right? And there was another room of people who knew how the network worked and they were pretty sacred. If you think about today, most of us are consumers of technology and most of us are fairly intelligent consumers of technology. I work at a software company. There are 12,000 really smart technologists here. So the day of the IT department being the only smart technologist in the company who could make the call, I have been gone for a long time. So one of the things that I think is really important is that people recognize that. There's a lot of people in IT who still haven't quite figured out that probably the guy or gal down the hall is as smart as they are and as current as they are in a whole lot of technologies, which brings me to my first point that I think is really different today. I think a CIO or an IT leader today has to be incredibly collaborative. I think it's about hearing great ideas, but remembering great ideas could come from anywhere. They don't just come from the IT department. And figuring out that part of that collaboration group that you have is also people outside your company. It includes the small venture firms that are starting up with startups around the country that you want to hear their fresh ideas from. It starts with some of your biggest suppliers like, I don't know, AT&T, we've done business with for years, but you also need to tap in to find out what they're thinking about the next generation. It starts with your own employees. What do they know that's cool, that's hot, that they've heard about? And really collaborating more than just holding that nice business meeting where everybody goes away with a win-win, it's really about listening for great ideas anywhere and allowing the freedom for people to build on those great ideas. And I think that's incredibly important. I mean, I think there's the other things that are fairly obvious. I think a CIO today has to have a business acumen for the industry they're in and a passion for that, because you aren't going to be a standalone entity. You're going to be integrated with the business. I spend a lot of time with our customers, our real end customers, who buy Adobe product. And I do that so that I can have a better understanding of the value we play in their supply chain. How do we bring value with Adobe product to, say, you know, Fox News? How does that work? And by understanding that better, I can do a better job coming into the company and ensuring our internal customers have what they need to be successful. And then talk a little bit about, you talk about ideas coming from outside, kind of the whole consumerization of IT trend and how that's impacting you guys. Because it used to be, you know, the big companies had the best software, you know, the enterprise stuff was the best. But now everyone's walking around with mobile phones and, you know, the expected behavior of applications based on their interaction with Amazon and Google and Yahoo. This has really changed what people expect, especially with younger folks coming up. How has that impacted the way you guys deliver product and the way you think about things like UI and UX? Yeah. So, you know, starting quite some time ago, probably seven, eight years ago, in the world of IT, I certainly started thinking about user experience as a very separate layer in our platform stack. And I think if you go to most IT departments today, you'll hear a very similar thing. Most of us have figured out that the consumerized user experience layer is what engages people. It's the way it looks. It's the way it interacts when you touch a button. It's that user experience. The reality is that user experience may have no relationship per se to the technology at the very bottom serving up the data. It's how you hook those things together that can make it a wonderful experience or a bad experience. So I think one thing that's very different and people need to all really spend time thinking about is those most successful products we've seen in the last few years have started from the user experience design and then worked to the back office, as opposed to working from the back office up. If you look at a typical ERP screen, user experience screen from say the late 1990s, it would be horrific as a user experience today compared it to a tablet-based application. And that just shows how far user experience expectations have moved. It doesn't mean you have to blow up everything lower in the stack though. And that's where I think the power comes from IT departments that are thinking differently. They're working on how do we build a user experience layer that truly engages our customers? But how do we do it in a way that actually leverages all those legacy assets we have that are simply too expensive to take out right away? Or maybe they're actually really good at what they do. You know, like a billing system that's really good is just really good at spitting out invoices. You may not need to redo that, right? But you probably do want it to look differently. So I think the idea of user experience becoming the secret sauce, as opposed to the back office being the secret sauce is a really fundamental part of this transformation. Well, certainly Apple showed, you know, the power of what good user design is still a phone, but you know, they change the game with that, with the iPads, et cetera. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about you. You came on our radar really as part of our Women in Tech series and we're psyched, you know, to talk to another really senior woman here in the Valley is doing good things. Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get here? Mm-hmm. So there's a lot of women in technology. Totally talk to a lot of them. Yep, for sure. Well, I started off with a lot of interest in math. So mathematics was kind of my thing in high school and college. I have a degree in computer science and mathematics. And I started off, I was lucky enough when I was in high school to be one of those schools that got a computer. And at the time, and this is funny now, but it was really unusual to have a personal computer in the classroom at all. And so I had a trash 80. I don't know if you remember what that was. Absolutely. Come on, you left handy. TRS 80, right? You couldn't fit the vacs in the room, right? Oh, those are hot. Those were crazy. So I taught myself to program, you know, during lunch and breaks in high school and then went into college. Pretty typical experience, got a degree, got hired by Chevron Oil, worked there for a long time. I did some AI work there, did a lot of automation work there and then left Chevron after 12 years to become the CIO of McAfee and continued on that journey. So I don't know. I've never really thought much about being a woman. I just focused on doing a great job and focusing on what I loved. And always kind of in the CIO role, correct? Always in the CIO role. After I left Chevron, I was a CIO at McAfee. After that, I was a CIO at Verisign and now a CIO at Adobe. So I'll give you a chance to give some advice to families out there for people that want to get a career in tech. I think it's, for here in the Valley, I think pretty much most people's moms and dads probably work in the industry, large percentage, but for people that don't live here in the Valley and aren't really part of it, kind of what would you give for advice for people thinking, I want to go this way. I want to do what Jared is. What should they think about? How should they proceed down their journey? Well, I think the first piece of advice I give everybody is you have to do what you love. Because if you don't really love whatever career you choose, you won't have the passion you need to get through the hard spots. So if you don't really love technology and love solving people problems and love dealing with the challenges of aligning people and efforts and dealing with tough news and happy news, you're probably not the right person to be in high tech leadership. So do what you love. I think the next thing is find some mentors. You know, I think mentors have been really important to most people and that doesn't mean sign up for a formal mentor program. It just means find those few professionals or peers or friends who will give you good advice and let them tell you those things that aren't working for you. Like if they can watch you and observe you and say, you know that thing you did and that last mean did not work. That is the way to grow in your career. No matter what your career is. I was lucky enough early on to actually have some amazing mentors who happen to be people that worked for me who were never shy about walking in after me and telling me exactly what they thought I did work for. That worked for you. It worked for me. Oh, okay. And to this day, I've stayed in touch with those folks and most of them have gone on to have very, very, very successful careers themselves. So I, you know, I just listen for the feedback. Wherever it comes from, it's going to help you. That's really a great tip. We don't hear that very often, but, you know, good feedback, good insight, good information can come from any, you know, can support your earlier statement, right? Can come from anywhere. Yep. Be ready for it. Awesome. Well, Jerry, thanks for spending a few minutes with us here. Thank you. Give you the last word. If we come back a year from now, what's new and exciting at Adobe that we'll be talking about? Going to have to come back and find out. Shoot, I thought we'd get some little tips, but they're a public company. They can't tell us anything. Well, thanks again, Jerry. All right, so I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground here at the Adobe headquarters. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.