 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with The Cube. We are on the ground in San Mateo, California at the headquarters of Keynote Systems. We're really excited to be joined in this segment by Jennifer Taha, the president and CEO. Jennifer, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for coming. We're really pleased to have you here today. Absolutely. So thanks for having us. Interesting times at Keynote, a company that's been around for a very long time, but recently you came in a little while ago. You went private. Talk about what's changed since you've got here. Fantastic. Well, it is our 20th year at Keynote. This is a business with a long history, serving customers in retail, financial services, telco, travel, media. And we have a long history of providing performance data to help customers understand what their consumers' experience is like. We took the business private in 2013 with Toma Bravo. That's how I came to be the CEO of Keynote. And it's been a phenomenal journey, one where we've really turned our focus and our mind and our innovation towards honing in on helping our customers make that digital experience count, which is increasingly important as our customers see their business models move from traditional brick and mortar to significant online e-commerce practices, and more increasingly to truly mobile or omni-channel experiences. Yeah, I was going to say the importance of the mobile was certainly not the same as 20 years ago. No, every industry we deal with is being disrupted in some way, whether it's just through mobile subscribership and that immediacy, that need to have an amazing experience in just a couple of seconds. The increasing demand of the consumer is really driving a huge impetus and urgency of companies to try and make that experience hunt, whether you're starting on your laptop or you're starting in a store, you move to your iPad at home, you finish it up on your phone later, so that omni-channel experience really matters. And there's a whole ecosystem sitting behind that, whether it's the network, the internet, your connection, how many apps you have open on your phone, your operating system. That quagmire of complexity is really challenging for our customers, right? And these are customers like USA Today and UK News or News UK, sorry, Commonwealth Bank in Australia, here in the US. Think of any retailer you can imagine, they're our customer, right, any travel website. And so when they spend all this time and effort building a great user experience and a great product and a promotion and offer, that audience acquisition, and something doesn't work and you start to see that spinner or that lockup, right? The customer blames that brand, if you're Chanel and you spend 110 years building a brand only to have it fizzle on a little tiny 2x4 screen, right, that's a real challenge. So we're really trying to put performance in the context of business outcomes, like customer engagement, like brand engagement, conversion, subscription, transaction volume. And that's what we've spent the last couple of years building towards. And last week, we launched a major innovation in that area, which we're really excited about. Go ahead, tell us what's the major innovation? Digital performance intelligence. So it gives you the ability to understand how you're competing against other competitors. So for instance, if you're William Sonoma, it's not just good enough to have a good Black Friday. You've got to know how you're doing relative to Creighton Barrel and Macy's and the other players in your space. And because we come at this from outside the firewall with synthetic and real user monitoring, we see it the way your customers see it, right? It's also understanding how third party attributes in your mobile website or your mobile app or your website behave. And if they don't respond well, and for instance, your payment gateway fails right when you're about to buy something right before you leave to go on vacation, you're never coming back to that sale. So every penny that that company spent getting you to their website or their mobile app, getting you to buy, when you didn't hit submit or it failed, by that you're not coming back. 90% of consumers won't. What's so different is 20 years ago, I as the owner of the website controlled the end-to-end experience. Now I'm relying on the mobile carrier that is not mine, the phone that's not mine, and then increasingly in this kind of API economy that we live in today, like you said, all the third party components that I'm leveraging. So how are people dealing with that? Do you help them across the board? I mean, that's really a challenge when I don't control it all. That's what's really exciting about our new product. Information is power. So if you can measure and monitor and over time optimize the performance of those third-party call-outs, those third-party APIs, you can increase the chances that your customer will have a great experience. If you're not measuring them, you're not managing them from an SLA perspective, it's really hard to have a dialogue. Equally we see companies changing dramatically in terms of how mobile apps are built and how the omnichannel environment is managed. So there used to be a distinct IT organization and a very distinct marketing organization. Now we're starting to see this being very fungible and the rise of the chief digital officer who's often technically capable but owns the entire product experience. And sometimes you see even mobile development reporting into the person who has the fastest growing but potentially smallest revenue stream, that of mobile commerce. That changes a lot of dynamics in the organization but makes it even more important that technical people can have a dialogue with business people that makes sense. And if you're talking about HTML5 and responsive and code instead of talking about conversion and time on site and bounce rate and account signups and subscriptions and impressions, people start falling asleep on both sides of that conversation. So part of our digital performance intelligence solution and also just a culture of really helping to drive that amazing customer experience is also about enabling that dialogue between the technical people in an organization and the marketing and sales and line of business people in an organization. Talk a little about the impact of big data, again, that's changed a lot in 20 years where now people are not only relying on the data that they get within their own systems but now there's a huge amount of data that's outside of their systems that they can pull and leverage. How are you seeing that impact which you guys are delivering and your customers delivering better value? People like to talk about big data but it's the small data, it's the information that matters that's important and it's about distilling all those different sources of information into a meaningful context that drives better decision making. So for instance, we track performance on all different parts of a digital transaction or digital journey. Which ones actually make the biggest difference? Where does revenue leak? Where do customers leak? Where are competitors winning or losing? Oh, I spent half my life in the last few years talking about the revenue gap. All this money, I was a CMO before I was a CEO and I deeply understand and have empathy for all the investment and the justification of that investment that goes into creating this brilliant consumer experience so that you drive revenue growth, top line growth and ultimately profitability. What if you're putting all that to work and you're failing in the last mile? And that's the performance and context piece of it. But understanding where you're failing and where your biggest issues are is what really matters. And in the future, thanks to big data and mobility and analytics capability and just the fact that everybody has a processor in their pocket, the democratization of computing and development, et cetera, in the future, I think our customers will be able to not only create a great experience but put high propensity, high value buyers in a VIP swim lane for their online or their mobile experience in real time. If you think about where micro segmentation is going, where our ability to drive performance data in real time is going and bringing the context of those things together, imagine the experience that you could have as a VIP customer in a virtual environment. I also think that the physical world is going to become increasingly more important. As things go virtual, there needs to be a physical closed loop and we see that in wearables, for instance. We see a lot of people think that some of the wearables products coming out into the market are gadgets, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. We don't even know how wearables are going to be used, but as people try and bring those online and they start dealing with sensor data to manage their health and wellness, to find their keys, whatever the case may be, they're going to need to, one, make sure all those things are performant, highly performant, to make sure that consumer can manage all that data and use it in a meaningful way, right? And three, make sure that they're actually creating long-term value because consumers are showing a propensity to quit really fast right now. I mean, really, we could go on forever and ever. I want to shift gears. But the consumerization of IT and the expected behavior of applications based on my experience with Amazon and Yahoo and Google really has changed what enterprise customers now expect with their interaction with those customers. But let's shift gears. Talk a little bit about you. It's great to look in your LinkedIn profile and see you came from Procter and Gamble, which is music to my ears because I used to always say there's just not enough good product management in Silicon Valley. You should just get the pipeline going and just ship all these well-trained right through Cincinnati. They had a little house shock when they got out of here, but that's okay. So talk a little bit about that experience because it's a big company. They've been doing it for a long time. How that impacted you and how you've been able to apply those principles out here in Silicon Valley. You just heard a bell ring and people clapping. That's an old Procter and Gamble trick. That means we sold something. But I learned that at P&G about 100 years ago. No, I feel like I grew up a Procter and Gamble. It is a place that invests in developing not only professional management and professional product leaders, but professional leaders. Right? And you really learn that the only way to be successful in a crowded, noisy market is to really find that ownable territory that sort of uniques two bell rings. The knife. It's the last day of the quarter. I can't even believe I'm spending this time with you. Exactly. Oh, it still matters. We still keep count. Absolutely. We're still very performance oriented around here. But so finding that ownable territory, finding that kind of unique fit with a consumer's need, or more importantly, an unarticulated need, and then envisioning and engaging and bringing people along on the journey to make that happen, that's one of the things I learned at P&G. The first product I sold at P&G was Sunny Delight. I'm a long way from dropping pallets of Sunny Delight into inner city Cleveland grocery stores. That experience are toughening you up though. Hey, scraping bubblegum off the shelves is good for you. Some of the principles that you learn in doing that, like where is the connection between what a customer thinks they need, might not realize they need, and what you have, and how do you bring those things together? Right? And also getting people engaged in that process. When I got here and said, you know this testing and monitoring thing, it's interesting, but we really need to care about is driving that user experience and putting performance in the context of how the line of business thinks about the currency trade that they've got with a customer, whether you're trading data, or their subscription, or you're using their time, or their eyeballs, or ultimately dollars and cents, it is that instant where you're going to succeed or fail. And I learned at P&G that all of the preparation, everything you do to build a brilliant business, a brilliant campaign, a brilliant relationship with the Walmarts and the targets of the world, it comes down to that second. Where the currency changes. Yeah, when they're standing in the aisle and they're deciding sunny delight or a 7-up, I guess, right? Yeah, so I'm ever so grateful for what I learned at P&G and I'm always rooting for them. I'm still a shareholder. I've never sold a dollar of P&G stock since I was an employee there. And I look back on that experience all the time because I find that fundamentals are the way I manage, the way I lead come from Cincinnati, Ohio. Absolutely. I'm going back there for a Reds game for my grandfather's birthday, but that's another story. So I just want to wrap it up, really talk about how you use that in your leadership. I think we were talking before we went on camera about this currency, and one of the few people I've ever really heard really explicitly talk about the currency of time, currency of attention, currency of money, and increasingly the currency of my data in exchange for services. Talk a little bit about what it meant to come here, 20-year-old company, public, not necessarily probably in the best of time since that IPO in 2000, which is kind of tough, and what you've tried to do here from a leadership perspective to bring that energy not only to the customers that you serve, but the employees that you have here in the building. Yeah, that's a great question. In my first year with the business, I saw over 100 customers myself, which meant that I was on a plane a lot. And I listened. I did a lot of listening. And one of the questions I asked those customers is, why have you been buying our product? 20 years, why do you keep coming back? What is it that we do well? I wanted to really understand what the cornerstone of our business was in the customer's eyes so that I could come back to the employee community and talk about what we do well, but importantly where we could go if we focused our efforts. And being private enables you to do that. I haven't wasted a second on quarterly earnings and SEC filings and a lot of the governance-oriented activity that you're responsible for, never mind the scrutiny that comes from the public market. We do have a highly focused owner. And there's a lot of performance management and reporting and visibility associated with how the business is going. So we still drive hard for results. But we have a lot more flexibility to make strategic shifts, to redeploy investment, to think differently about the market. None of that matters if you can't get your employee community and your partner community to come along with you for the ride. And they did look at me like I was crazy for about the first 90 days. Some of them still look at me like I'm crazy. But I think that making an employee person feel like they're trade-off, the time they're not spending with their spouse, their family, their parents, the things that they like to do, their travel, et cetera, making that trade-off hunt in the workplace and making them feel like they're part of something that's bigger and maybe achieving something they didn't think was possible is a really important part of leadership. And being honest, talking transparently when things are not going well, but also celebrating the success when things go well. We bring that bell at every opera, whether it's a $200 dollar deal or a $2 million dollar deal, that bell gets rung. We had to reinforce the screws. That's good, that's a good thing. You can come off the wall. All right, so last question before we wrap. You're a mom, you're a woman in tech. This is part of a woman in tech feature. And you have a daughter, I think we talked about before offline. What advice, and again, we offer this up to everyone that we have on, would you give to families, young women, not young girls, older girls, who potentially want to pursue a career in tech? You got here via Sunny Delight, that's a great story. Now you're running the show. But what advice would you give for families and young women that want to pursue a career in technology? Build self-confidence and self-belief. I was very lucky I had an immigrant father who raised me to believe that I could be anything, do anything, try anything and succeed in anything as long as I was willing to put in the time, be focused, surround myself by smart people and not be afraid to ask stupid questions. So that confidence and that will to try things to have a go and not be worried that you might not get it right or you might not get into the best middle school or whatever the case may be, I think is really important. The second thing is that you don't have to be technical to be a leader in tech. I have a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan. What was your major? Organizational behavior and business management, right? And I'm really good at organizing things. But you have to, you have to find, sometimes you have to find the opportunities yourself and you have to have that ability to sort of step out and go it alone because I haven't had a massive peer group of women in my career. I've always worked in industries where I was one of the few women at the table, not at a table full of women. I never felt like that was a problem if anything I felt like it made me stand out. It makes you stand out if you fail. It makes you stand out if you succeed. And I have a good sense of humor. So I would teach your kids not to take themselves too seriously, right? Have a laugh. We don't do stuff around here if it's not fun. We spend a lot of time, so last time I'm looking at our head of communications, we spend a lot of time talking about making it fun, making the trade off worthwhile, right? And I think you need to raise your kids to be fearless about trying different things about surrounding themselves with smart people and about making sure that when they do come into work every day or when they go to school every day that they're enjoying it, that they're doing everything that they can to make it interesting, to make it entertaining for themselves and for the people around them. Great, great tip. Thank you, Jennifer, so much. Jennifer, at the heart of the president and CEO of Keynote Systems for spending a few time on an exciting quarter because the bell just keeps ringing. Absolutely, thank you very much for coming, Jeff, appreciate it. I'm Jeff Rick, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time.