 Hello, welcome back. It's Jeff Frick here with Silicon Angles the Cube, where we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, find the smartest people we can, ask them the questions that you wish that you could if you were here, so that you get your questions asked. I'm here with Michael King. Again, we're at the Accelerator Enterprise Platform launch. Michael is the Director of Enterprise Strategy. Michael, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me here. So, a couple things. First off, we had a little conversation before we came on, and you said you spent a lot of time with customers and a lot of time helping them with their mobile journey and how to get started. So I wonder if you could talk about some of the kind of common mistakes, some of the common pastic success, and how have things changed over the last several years? Because you also mentioned you've been in the mobile space for a long time and clearly with the mobile social cloud trends we're seeing, I'm sure things have changed. Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. I do spend a lot of time with clients in the field, and I have for quite some time. And I find a lot of them begin to sort of start off making the same mistakes. And that is the first mistake is that well, this is just something I need to do mobile or social for that matter. Today, get it off my plate and move on to my next thing. In reality, this is the new way of interacting with customers. This is the new way of interacting with employees. And mobile does fundamentally change not just sort of the application attitude and the way that you build apps and the way that you connect them, but it changes relationships. It enables you to have a real time conversation with your customer all the time. The mobile device is the one device you have with you at all points in time. It's on your bedside table. I imagine if you left for work in the morning you probably turn around and go get it. My kids take theirs into the bathroom so clearly it is full time all the time. It is full time all the time. Exactly. And with that comes a privilege as well as a responsibility to provide compelling experiences, to provide rapid iterations of the application, to provide value. And that's really the first step I think that a lot of folks need to take. The other big mistake that they make a lot of times is they start thinking, well, it's an employee app, so it doesn't need to be really compelling. It doesn't need to be a great application because my employees have to use it. In a BYOD world, that doesn't really work because you're walking in with a smartphone with 70 applications or a tablet with 40 applications on it already. If you don't provide a compelling experience, the employees find somewhere else to get that and then they drop data into your system from other unexplored, unsecured systems. Those are two big mistakes people make often. It seems like a really the first one seems like a really big challenge. You're just going to be knocking people off the table. You know, I don't necessarily want, I don't necessarily want the responsibility that comes with the privilege of being always on and always there. So with that in mind, and that's kind of a global view, clearly the next question as well, how do I get started? Where do I get started? Do I just go port whatever I've done in the past over to a mobile application using something like titanium? Yeah, no, it's a great question and I think that's the first step that a lot of people take. I'm going to take this existing web service or this existing website or this existing application I have on my desktop and port it and make a mobile version. And that usually doesn't work so well. The nice part about this responsibility and this right that you have is you start off with a single application. If it's a good and compelling application, start simple. I mean, some of the simplest applications, things like Instagram, right? Interesting to add about Instagram. Facebook took four years and eight months to get to 100,000 users, where Instagram did that in 24. Very simple application. Take a picture, add a filter, share it. So what's the Instagram for the enterprise? Instagram for the enterprise? The easy way to get started. The easy way to get started is take a simple process that you do today, running a car. Think about how having that information, that application can change that experience. Zipcar, great example, right? They thought about, okay, running a car, I got to go to the airport or some office and I got to talk to them and I got to fill out some form. Let's think about that differently. Let's think about the fact that these cars are all over the place. Find me one. Find me the one I want. Let me run it right there. Let me unlock it and have the key ready to rock. And that transformed rental car companies. Think about Uber. Uber's a great example of another enterprise, right? Cabs. No one really likes using cabs. They use them because they have to. So instead, use the fact that the device is mobile. It knows where I am. It knows who I'm talking to. Transform that business. The insurance guys, great example. These guys, no one really likes their insurance companies to begin with, right? Sort of like you pay them a certain amount of money and you feel okay about things. But you don't have a good interaction with them. But Geico, great example, or some of these other insurance companies come along and they've said, we're going to transform that experience. We're going to provide value with this mobile application by giving you the ability to find cheap gas or watch funny videos of Geico's and Caveman and sharing with your friends. And so it's about taking something you do already and adding a mobile twist to it and then learning from that, right? Remember, the first insurance applications enable you to do what? Pay a bill, report an accident. Not really pleasurable experience as I wouldn't think. So think. Put off those for a little bit. That's right. That's right. And so what we encourage folks to do is think about how you're going to interact with that customer because you have that mobile app in ways or at times in which you're not going to interact. We have a bunch of clients in the hospitality industry and when they start coming to us, yeah, we want to enable people to book rooms and learn about the hotel. I said, that's great. But start thinking about that further. You're counting down to vacation. You want to start exploring things that you want to do. You want to share that with the friends that are going on vacation with you. Start thinking about how you can expand relationships with mobile. The same goes with your employees, right? You've got a ton of guys in the field and they're gathering tons and tons of knowledge for you. One of our clients Safeguard, right? They do building and home inspections for banks. They thought about this mobile device that sits in all their guys' hands that has a camera on it and has the ability to send emails. And all of a sudden they're filling out all these inspections and taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures with their mobile devices, transforming the entire methodology, the entire business, enabling it to grow at well over 200% year-over-year. So let me ask a follow-up question. I heard you had in a former life, you spend a lot of time on the analyst side. So you've seen this change over time. But as you also know an analyst, right, the enterprise guy, what's my ROI? What's my ROI? What's my ROI? So I wonder if you can share with the viewers an example of couple ROI examples where you've really seen or the business has seen definable, clearly stated a business benefit using a mobile application before they didn't. And the first advice there is look for these types of low-hanging fruit that are going to enable you to see that ROI quickly. Because that enables you to invest in the infrastructure, whether it's software platforms or training or application development resources, to experiment with the things that maybe won't have a positive ROI. And I always push back on the ROI question. I say, mobile email, right? What's the ROI on that? Questionable. But I think there are some really good examples both on the customer-facing application side, as well as the employee-facing application side. Probably my favorite example is mobile banking, right? And so let's take that check caching application. Do you ever use that? I have not used it yet. I'm always a little bit late on the banking I'm afraid I'm going to lose my phone. Got to get on that thing. This was how my mom finally understands what I do for a living. She had this iPhone for about six months and she said, I don't know what to do. So I went, I was with her over Christmas and downloaded a banking application and she said, well, I got to go to the bank to cash this check. I said, no, we're just going to download the application. Took the picture of the check downloaded into her account. Now, if she had gone to that bank and talked to that teller, it would cost that bank about $10 for the transaction, for the teller's salary and the IT and the rent on the building and the manager's salary and all the other things that go into it. She'd gone to an ATM. It'd be about 50 cents and that's again, rent on the thing, people to service it. She took a picture of it with her device over her network connection that she pays for cost that bank about five cents. Orders of magnitude less in the transaction cost. That's a good customer example. Yeah, that's a great one. Another one is a field force or a Salesforce automation application where you have all these assets in the field. Maybe it's just an inventory management type of application. We see guys like Medtronics and some other folks like that on the customer side that are able to see a positive ROI in eight months by just by making assets in the field more efficient. Another great example is Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi Electric is one of our clients, just a great client of ours. They build air conditioning and heating units on wall and they had this catalog that went out to all of their installers and all of their retailers on a regular basis and once a quarter they'd re-send that out and so there's a fair amount of printing cost involved in that. Just the printing cost alone, they're able to pay for that mobile application. But because the mobile app is so interactive and they can show the prospective buyer on a wall exactly what it's going to look like on that wall they can try different size units and everything like that. They're going to see about an uplift of about 30 million dollars in sales from one mobile application. Those are the kind of things you look for because those ones that provide that ROI rapid fix, that'll give you that ability to experiment on the next 10 or 15 or 100 applications you're going to build. Yeah, that's great. So again, tying back because you're out there a lot, I would never say give us a little view into the next five years because Lord knows that's forever. But in the next, that's right, that's right. So just give us your view on kind of what you see in the medium term. You know, a couple years out that's really going to continue this transformative way. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're really in that first phase of applications where we're taking business processes that already exist, whether it's caching a check or whether it's routing a tech somewhere to fix something, and we're mobilizing them. And that's an important first step. But I think what we're really going to see is new business processes and new capabilities that are enabled by these devices that no one's ever heard of before. You know, whether it's something like the lift guys who are able to do share rides or other things like that or whether it's something even further down the road that enables tablets to become the primary computing device. Again, a lot of questions about that. But what I also think is really interesting is that this enables a company, an enterprise, an information source to reach an amazing population, right? If you think about it, there are 6.5 billion mobile devices. That's about six and a half times the number of internet connected PCs. I was down in Brazil a couple weeks back and for every internet connected PC there are four mobile devices. So it's not just the technologies and the capabilities because those will continue to advance at an unprecedented rate. If you look at what Google and Apple and Samsung and some of these guys are doing in terms of pushing the envelope, it's amazing. The applications that can be enabled because you have information in your hand at all times because you know where your friends are, where your business associates are, that's really exciting to me. But it really is about the reach. It's about finding people that have never interacted with the internet before. One of the coolest applications I've heard of is in Sub-Sahara, Africa, and it enables farmers to know the exact point in time in which they should milk their cow and when they should mate their cows and making those dairy herds 20-30% more efficient. This is Sub-Sahara, Africa. Like that kind of stuff, that blows my mind. I thought you were going to say that they would know exactly when the rain was going to come and then I was going to call BS on you because nobody knows when the rain is going to come even here within the next 20 minutes. But thanks a lot Michael King. Great conversation. Again, we're at Accelerator. They're excited to announce their new enterprise platform launch. We've got a few more guests lined up so we'll be right back. Stay with us. You're on the Cube.