 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Pegaworld Inspire brought to you by Pegasystems. Everybody, welcome back to Pegaworld Inspire 2020. This is theCUBE, and I'm Dave Vellante. We're here with Adam Field, who's the head of innovation and experience at Pegasystems. Adam, thanks for coming on. How you doing, man? It's my pleasure, Dave. I'm doing well. How are you? Good, thank you. I'm excited. We're talking innovation. Innovation hub, but start with your role. I love the title. What do you do? Give us the background story. Yeah, I get that question quite a bit. So I've been with Pegaworld a little over 15 years now, and I've held many roles, but currently as head of innovation and experience, we have a team. I like to call them creative misfits, if you will. We sort of bridge that gap between technology and creative. We do research on emerging tech and try to understand how our clients might use it, how it's going to change the future of work. That's the innovation side. On the experience side, we do things like for these Pegaworld events, we match where art meets tech, and we build these experiential things that people come and see at our events. We build all the demos and all the production that you see on the main stage. So we kind of touch a lot of different things around the future of where technology is going. Well, I can see, obviously you're innovative. You've got the awesome setup there, the great mic sound, fantastic. You look good. So now you've been involved in previous Pegaworlds, both from behind the scenes and out front speaking. Obviously this is completely different. How did you prep differently for Pegaworld 2020 virtual versus what you normally do? Yeah, right. So this will be my, well, 16th, I guess, Pegaworld. And obviously this one stands out as the most different. Normally we'd be in Boston today. We would have been working on our stage production and on a floor that's 170,000 square feet big with dozens of booths and hundreds of demos. And obviously this was completely different. But as far as prep goes, I remember the day we learned that early March, this was going virtual. And after a few moments of sadness, the team really came together. And I remember the first thing we talked about is, we're not gonna take a three day event and try to put it all online. Let's, we know people's time is valuable. Let's figure out how to take just what's important and get it out to people so that they're inspired to move forward and engage with Pegaworld. So I think that's really been the biggest change in how we've prepped. Well, you know, I think that's a great point because obviously theCUBE has been very much involved in these virtual events and people send out the note, hey, we've made the tough decision to go virtual. That's easy decision. You really had no choice. The tough decision is what you want to preserve from the physical and understanding that you can't just pop physical into virtual and you got to create a whole new content program. I think, you know, Robert Skolba wrote a post, I don't know if you saw it, he talked about, hey, you better go out and hire Beyonce. Oh, you can't afford to Beyonce for Beyonce. Well, you better make your content interesting. So to me, Adam, that's the tough part. Help us understand how you thought that through and what the outcome actually is. That's right. We didn't have Beyonce, but we did have the Dropkick Murphy. So that was pretty cool. And they did a concert for us. So that's been great. But, you know, again, a lot of people talk about all this free time that they have. And I know I have two young kids who are schooling at home now, the job that's busier than it's ever been. I've tried to join a lot of these virtual events and frankly, I've gotten overwhelmed. So we took two days and we boiled it down into two and a half hours. And what we decided to do is we looked at all the areas which we go to market and how people design and deliver their apps and some of the tech like PegaCloud that they use. And we went to our, I went to my extended team and I said, normally you have 75 booths. We're going to boil that down to 25. Let's work together to figure that out. Normally your demos might be 20 minutes when someone walks up. We want to make them seven. But I think the biggest thing that we did, we said what we don't want to lose is that interactivity. And so we had online dozens of Pega experts we could ask questions live. Alan was online doing answering questions live. We made sure that we included live components. Our host Don Sherman was live from his house. We didn't just prerecord everything because then why would anyone come join when they could just go watch it 30 minutes later on your YouTube channel? See, that's innovation to me is having that combination of live. Obviously, you got to do some stuff prerecorded but having a live component adds a dimension. It's challenging but that's pushing the envelope and I love it. Adam is roles. The roles are different in a virtual event. Are they, you're not doing site inspections. Like you said, you're not dealing with 170,000 square feet. How did you guys rethink the roles for a virtual? Yeah, so there were some teams whose world was completely upended when this all went virtual. The people that do exactly what you were just talking about dealing with hotels and vendors and things like that. And I got to tell you one of the most events called Pega World Inspire and not to sound too cheesy about it but one of the things that was really inspiring was to see how everyone stepped up and said truly, how can I help? And what was really neat about it is we saw different skill sets come out of people that maybe they hadn't had the opportunity to flex before where they might have worked on one thing that was no longer needed because of the change in the format and they jumped in to become copywriters or liaisons between, because now we have new vendors in this tech world that we didn't have that we turned around in just a matter of weeks. We had people like on my team who normally last year built this massive physical exhibit containing mirrors and lights that became video producers to produce some of these live videos that we did. And one of the things that was really impressive, you asked earlier about how did we prep differently and what changed? We looked in the marketplace for different tech and how to bring our CEO and our host and our head of product and everyone together live and split screen. And when you're a big studio and you have that equipment ready to go that's easy, but when you're just getting average people in their homes and you want to put all that together, we're finding some of the tech in the marketplace just wasn't there. My team built some new video chat technologies that they actually used to produce this in real time. So that was really impressive to me how we turned that around and really innovated not only the things that everyone sees but all the stuff behind the scenes too. See, again, I think this is, what's amazing to me is as I learned more and more about Pega interviewed Allen earlier. Pega is all about being able to adapt to these changes. So a lot of the processes that we're using in virtual events, they're unknown. You know, normally software, right? Through the history of software is okay. Here's how the software works. Figure out how to fit your process into it. And very rigid. Today, you know, the last three months with this lockdown and this coronavirus have been completely unknown. And so that's sort of one of the hallmarks of your company, isn't it? That's right. I mean, we've had the tagline build for change for a really long time. And I will tell you, I remember in that first meeting again when we learned this was going virtual and someone stood up and they said, guys, we're about to live our tagline. And people really do believe in that because we go to our clients every single day and say, change is what's gonna make you special. Change is what's gonna make you different. Now is your opportunity. Seize that change and run with it. And so we said, look, we can't change the world right now. We know we gotta go virtual. All we can do is change the type of event that we do. We're not gonna do the standard event that we think everyone else is gonna do. Let's do it differently. And, you know, today was a pretty good example. I think we achieved that. I think a couple of things from a challenge standpoint, you mentioned the chat, how do you get people to engage? You had to sort of invent something and really think it through for virtual. And I think the other is tech. People come to these events, they want to touch the tech. And so you've got, you know, the innovation hub, it's where people get to play with the technology. You got to take us through how you thought through that and what the outcome is. Yeah, so that is the toughest part. And I got to tell you, you know, all of this being said, I'm looking forward to someday being able to get back and meeting my clients in person. And I'm the type, you know, when I see you on the floor of the innovation hub, I run by your booth and high five you for all the great weeks of hard work, you know, and I love to see people's face as they see the demos. And that's tough not being able to see them smile and get that moment of wow. But what was interesting was it really helped us hone our messages. I think we really realized when I went to everybody and said, you don't have 20 minutes, you have seven minutes. Here's a template, you know, to follow to be able to tell your story better. And people started thinking in that mode of storytelling. And what was interesting was a lot of people came back to me and said, actually, you know what? I can tell that story in a much more crisp way and really show people what they need to see in a much faster timeframe. And what it really allowed us to do was find those bits that we thought were most important, find those demos that we think are most important and just, and, you know, bubble those up. One of the things we also did too, we took the opportunity to say, you know what? We're gonna be online. I watch my kids, my kids are avid gamers, whether I like it or not. And they, you know, watch these Twitch streams. And we thought, well, we should be able to do that with even corporate software. So we had these live build sessions where we took some of our developers and I said, you're gonna be put on the hot seat for 15 minutes on script and we're gonna let people just guide and direct you. And they were a little nervous at first, but they went off great. And it was a new format we had never tried before. So if we keep doing these types of different things and we just embrace the moment that we're in, I think people will really, really come to it and get some value out of it. I mean, that's awesome. You've got to keep your audience engaged. And so you do lose, you don't have a captive audience. So you lose some time in terms of how much you can, you know, how much Kool-Aid injection you can give. You got to take 20 minutes down to seven minutes. But so you do lose some of that. But what do you gain with virtual? Well, I think one of the things that you obviously gain is you can be more widespread. So, you know, this event reached tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries. I did an event first week of April. So you can imagine, you know, we had two weeks of Turner and I was supposed to be in London and Amsterdam presenting in soccer stadiums. And instead, we made that a one hour virtual event. And we thought, well, we're just gonna get people from the London market and from the Netherlands market. And it turned out we got people from all over the world to join. So one of the benefits to this is the reach. So we're able to reach a lot more people. I'd say one of the other just things that we realized after too is we're creating a lot of content. We filmed all of this as we were rehearsing and we're going to put it up online later. So now we have all this great content that anyone can use and go view later. So that was sort of a, you know, unexpected outcome as well. Right, yeah, you lose the airline miles, but you gain those, I was going to say, you gain the post. I don't mind not traveling as well. Yeah, I hear you, hear, hear. But you do gain that post. And I think with physical events, people always at the end of it, it's like, I've never given birth, but I've witnessed it many times. But people feel like, okay, I got to just chill out now for a couple of weeks. And then when they come back, now they're swamped, they've got to catch up. And I think people are realizing, wow, there's a real opportunity to maximize the post event here, post nurturing, keep streaming out content and continue that engagement. That is a plus of these virtual events. Oh, for sure. And, you know, we started early on deciding, how are we going to do, what are we going to do as follow-ups? You know, that European event that I talked about, once again, instead of taking all these different markets and trying to replicate it, we did one one-hour event. But then because we were in the early days of COVID and some of our clients weren't able to get recorded and speak, we did subsequent webinars in the weeks following them and the attendance was fantastic. So it allowed us to plan ahead and have a lot of follow-up activities that were starting to launch right now because as soon as the event ended. How do you feel about the outcome for Pega? Do you think it was better, worse, or the same or just different? I'm going to go with different, you know, like I said, I get energy. I love being up on stage in front of 5,000 people. I love meeting my clients in person. I love the energy of being with my colleagues. But, you know, it is what it is that we had to do it. And I think what we really embraced it. So I'll say it's just a different way of doing things. But, you know, I do look forward to the day that I'm able to go meet my clients again and get back on stage and produce some really great things. And once again, being able to physically see our attendees go, oh, when they actually see the software in person, that's the most rewarding thing for me. It's going to be interesting as we come out of this. I mean, very clearly things are going to be different. Probably going to have hybrid for some time. Maybe even indefinitely. But I'm interested in some of the learnings, some of the things that you think will be permanent. Some of the advice, and one of the things I always say to people is don't start with what software we're going to use. End there for your software platform. Think about, you know, the experience that you want to work backwards from there. But what other advice would you give folks given your experiences? You're so right about that point. I remember interviewing a lot of vendors that we were going to use to bring this online. And we were telling them what we wanted to do. And some of them said, no one's ever asked about that before. We can't do that. So you're 100% right about that. The advice I will say, and the thing I do worry about a little bit is at first, people were a little bit more accepting if maybe the video quality wasn't as good or the content was like any old webinar. As months go on, expectations are going to be higher. People are going to have attended a lot of these things. So you're going to have to keep upping the game. And I think the advice I would give is try to take what's great about an in-person event and put it online. But don't try to replicate the event and put it online. And some of the best things about in-person events are just the live nature of it. Take the risks. Do some live stuff. People will really appreciate that. You'll get a lot of credit for that. The interactivity is what's important about a live event. So as best you can, figure out how to make sure there's some interactivity. Now, in the early days, I think it's going to be some live Q&A. As we move on, it'll be real private rooms with experts that you're able to have one-on-one chats and go through and bounce around and be able to talk to people, just like you would accept between two cameras instead of in-person. So I think everyone as months go on are just going to have to up their game. I think that's great advice. You're absolutely right. Up your game, up your brand. Get a good camera. Get good sound. And it's going to just help your personal brand and your company's brand. Oh, we learned what it was like to try to ship microphone and camera equipment around the world overnight. So we're experts at that. If you've got any questions. Well, I mean, what a difference it made. So Adam, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experiences. You guys have one of the best that we've seen at the virtual event platform. So congratulations on that and really appreciate your contribution to the community. Thanks, it's my pleasure. Great to talk to you today, Dave. All right, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of Pegaworld Inspire 2020, the virtual event. Right back for a short break.