 Hey everyone, it's theCUBE Live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay covering Clickworld 2023. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had some great conversations. Today is day one, yesterday was partner day, today's day one, tomorrow is a day you will not want to miss. Lots of show and sell are going to happen. We have a CUBE OG with us. James Fisher is back with theCUBE after a long time away. The Chief Product Officer at Click. Welcome James, great to have you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Great to be here again after all that time. Yeah, right, yeah. So, you've been with Click for nearly nine years. You've seen a lot of evolution. Our first guest this morning was Mike Capone, your CEO with Crawford Dell Print from IDC. And he was talking about just all, so much change in innovation and growth in the last five years he's been here. You've seen a tremendous evolution at the Click platform. Talk to us about what that journey's been like. Yeah, well I'm going to actually talk a little bit about that tomorrow in the keynote. But before we get to that, I think for me I joined in 2014 and Click was just at the point where we were pivoting our strategy away from ClickView and purely guided analytics built by a few and consumed by the many to really opening up the aperture of the different types of analytic capabilities that were needed. Broadening that out into self-service, which of course means lots of many different things to many different people. But it's all about reaching more and more users in our customer base. And as we started to do that, it became like a snowball rolling down the hill. It gathered more and more momentum. And as that happened, we've gathered more and more capabilities to the platform as well. We've enriched the visualization framework. We've changed the paradigm of analytics, not just from diagnostic and descriptive, but now looking at predictive and prescriptive analytics, bringing in AI all through ML, augmenting the way people ask questions. So the analytic capability is built out. And as we've done that, the value of the pipeline has become more and more exciting as well. We're starting to bridge the gap between data engineers, data consumers with the catalog. And then recognizing that we've had so many conversations around the amount of data that's available. I think that's probably one of the very first conversations that Dave, you and I ever had on the cube here. But ultimately, what that's about now is recognizing that we need to help customers put all of that together, create a data fabric, and the platforms just evolved around all of that. So you're talking about data fabric. We've talked a little bit about data fabric, data mesh. What does that mean, data fabric to you? So I think there are lots of conversations and discussions around, is it a data fabric? Is it a data mesh? How does one relate to the other or not? For me, it's just quite simple. It's about making sure you've got all of the assets you need to bring all of the data that you need to answer a question. Think of it as treating data as a product, which is a term that I'm increasingly hearing from executives in organizations all around the world. You create that fabric, bring all the data you need to answer business questions, and then you focus on usability and the consumption of that. Yeah, I think data as a product is a powerful concept. The reason I ask is because we still have, think about the data lifecycle, the data pipeline. We still have these very hyper-specialized individuals, data, the quality engineer, the analyst, the data scientist, that there's been some, there's definitely movement on helping them work together. But you've talked about democratization all the time, and actually putting data in the hands of the users. That's what I think about when I think of data fabric, data mesh, whatever you want to call it. It's about being able to get the data when I need it as a business user right away, that it's accurate, it's trusted, it's governed, it's shareable if I want to share it. Is that where you're headed? Absolutely, I think for us, and certainly for me, my responsibility of thinking about our product vision, our roadmap, and our strategy, be able to articulate an end to end value proposition and tell that to someone that cares about it, right? You know, line of business executives, CROs, heads of the supply chain function, they're focused on solving real business problems, and we need to make sure they have all of the component parts to do that. But in order to get the right pieces in the right place, we need to still focus on the people that are using our products, that are building those data pipeline. So we need to give those capabilities that a data engineer needs. We need to give those capabilities that are sit as a data scientist. I don't really like that term, but they need, or the analyst, or the operational worker, or the knowledge worker. So we can't lose focus of those individual parts as we think about the whole. Yeah, data scientists don't like that term either, but it's interesting where you've come from as a company, because you came from the world of Viz and sort of worked into the data integration piece. It's, I don't know, I always thought that was the harder part, you know, the back end. But you've done it with a lot of M&A. So my question to you as the head of product, how have you created that singular customer experience? Is it a secret sauce that you have in terms of the types of companies that you have from a lot of companies? Take like a service now. Service now, historically, wouldn't buy a company unless they were sort of built in that service now. Platforms have fit right in nicely. You've seen so many horror stories of companies buying M&A for growth. Nothing sort of fit together. And then, you know, the company ends up getting bought. Right, and it's EMC, classic example. I mean, it's hardware, but still. You've seen it in the software as well. Very challenging problem. How have you been able to succeed in that challenge? So if you're talking about sort of how we think about solving customer problems and addressing those, bringing those components together. Integration from your product standpoint. So I think it all focuses on what do we need to solve? What is the problem? Part of the product management lifecycle, right? What problem are you trying to solve? Is the first question you absolutely have to ask. Once you know the answer to that, then you can start to build out the solution that sits around it. So we've built a roadmap of different capabilities that have come organically and inorganically into the portfolio. We talked about just a few of those in Mike's keynote this morning. But as we do that, we have to think about usability. Who the user is, how we bring it together. Take the time to integrate capability rapidly into a singular user experience. What is that flow? So all of those pieces have to come together to make that sort of dichotomy of organic and inorganic innovation work. Is it just easier to do today than when we met like 10 or 12 years ago? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I mean, you make it sound simple. But I mean, like, look at Oracle. They spent, wow, a decade plus building Fusion. Do you have a sort of secret sauce there? Did you build, is that the organic technology? I think we've had a singular vision in terms of what we want to do. And we've sort of held ourselves to that. We operate under three kind of key guiding principles. That we are a cloud company, so we'll deliver cloud first, but not cloud only. We'll respect our customer's data and the location in which it ever always resides. And we'll protect customers' investments. Every time we approach one of these challenges and we sort of analyze it against those criteria, then it guides you, it keeps you structured. And I think cutting some of the noise out of things is how it becomes a little bit easier. And the cloud platform certainly helps. That's the fundamental foundation on which we're building all of these services. And that's how it kind of hangs together. You say the technology's not the hard part unless you make it the hard part, right? A lot of times companies will start with the technology and try to force it in and figure it out later. That applies to analytics as well, right? The visualization is the easy part. It's the data pipeline that fuels that, that really creates the value. Talk a little bit about the culture at click. Obviously, one of the things Mike was talking about this morning is the 30th anniversary of the company, mature business, we talked about, you did a great job of talking about its evolution in your tenure there. But the culture has to be there to support change and growth and pivots. Talk a little bit about that and how that's a facilitator of today's point. All the integration, pun intended, that needs to be done with the strategy of growth that you have. Yeah, so I think that you're only going to look around this incredible venue, right? Just to see the passion that's in the room from all of the customers, all the partners, and all of the click folks that are here, right? You know, you cut us and we bleed green. Some of us bleed green with a shade of analytics. Some of us bleed green with a shade of data integration. And there, that's the real kind of foundation of everything that we do. That passion for solving problems, but doing that in a way that we support customers. And as long as we keep doing that, then I think the integration challenge is the decisions that we have to make. We can't do everything, right? And we have to make decisions, communicate clearly. That really, for me, sits the heart of everything that we're doing. So 38,000 plus customers to this day in over 100 countries. Talk a little bit about the customers. I know there's an executive advisory council. We had some of those customers on earlier today. The slide was shown. I think Chris Powell was saying there's about 50 of them. No, I think that was the luminary program. And I think that was the luminary. Okay, but in terms of the customer involvement in the product strategy that you're delivering, talk a little bit about what I am imagining as a very symbiotic relationship. Absolutely, and look, that's one of the themes of what I'll be talking about tomorrow, right? Customer feedback is at the heart of everything we're doing. It drives over 80% of all of our product deliverables come from customer and indeed partner feedback. And that is the start of our innovation pipeline. From there, we prioritize, we execute, we deliver, but then we monitor, we drive adoption, we test that adoption, we get great insight through the cloud platform on how people are using. So we now can create that closed loop cycle and feedback is valid at every single step of that journey. It's just got to be a good click on click story in there somewhere. I think, well, all of our telemetry is in a click application, as you can imagine. It's okay, so I get the customer, I mean, everybody's customer obsessed these days, right? So, do you have a secret sauce with customer obsession, right? I mean, I don't know one company that doesn't say we start with the customer, but when you really peel the onion, you say, okay, this one does. You kind of, you know what I'm saying, James, you can see the ones that say it and the ones that walk the walk, not just talk the talk. So what is it about click that you can tell me that gives you like the passion and the confidence that you guys actually are able to take that customer feedback and it's really important, decode it. It's like Steve Jobs says, ask the customer what they want. They're not going to tell you the iPhone, right? So there's an art there as well. I mean, you could set up customer advisory boards and you can look at the data. So how have you guys been able to be successful at that? I think it's just in the DNA, right? You asked for the secret sauce. I think it's the DNA and it goes back, go back 30 years to where click started. It started with some innovative guys in Tetra Pak trying to solve some business problems. And it was all built around the idea of how do we take the power of the human, right? The ability, the human intuition, the ability to ask a question and marry that with the power of the database, with the machine. And it was a very customer centric, sort of innovation that started 30 years ago. And it went from that customer to the next customer, which was AstraZeneca. And then it went to the next customer and then you get to 38,000 customers. And I think that's just been ingrained in everything that we've done and everything that we've spoken about. I think that's why that we, on all of our badges for this event, it says clickies. I like that, clickies. All right, so give us a few nuggets tomorrow we know. We want to be in the keynote tomorrow. A lot of hands-on, a lot of probably great news. What are some of the teasers you can give to our audience so that they are there online or in person tomorrow morning? Well, yeah, though, I want to see everybody there, bright and breezy tomorrow morning. The session tomorrow I think is going to really focus in on that evolution of the platform, why customer feedback is so important, the role it plays, how we think about that. Of course, everything that's happening right now around the potential of the future talent acquisition is really exciting. So we'll sort of articulate a little bit about how we're thinking about that. But then very quickly get into the value that we're trying to drive in our data integration portfolio and in the analytics portfolio. So we'll show how we think click and talent can work together, even today, as partners as they are at this event. And then I think we've got some really interesting demos coming in the analytics section, a little bit around generative AI and just sort of what the art of the possible art of the possible is. And for me, that's the big menu you can read them from the rest of the afternoon to get into all of these other sessions and stuff that's happening tomorrow. I mean, it's impossible to really predict what foundation models and what the potential can be other than, wow, this has a lot of potential. Are there specific use cases that you've honed in on that you're pretty confident that's something that you could double down on or do you not know yet? Well, the use case question is there always an interesting one when I get asked it, because it's a bit of a how long is a piece of string answer. I think as we think about data integration, from a click perspective, we've always focused on solving problems around data movement, change data capture and streaming, data warehouse modernization, data lake creation. As we think about how we're going to broaden our portfolio, we go from three to maybe seven use cases that really expand out into a much broader set of capabilities. On the analytics side though, it's almost what you can imagine. I mean, we've defined 23 different use cases by line of business for auto ML capabilities, whether that's customer churn analysis, whether that's sales pipeline forecasting, accuracy. So there are untold numbers of use cases and it's understanding those use cases by talking to customers at events like this that allows us to hone some of the features and functions we deliver in the roadmap. Yeah, and data is so complicated. I think there's got to be so many ways to really simplify that, that AI can support. I'm excited to see that. So in our final minute here, I want you to give us your favorite customer story example that you think really articulates the evolution that you started the segment off by talking about the journey that's been on. What comes to mind? Yeah, well, another little teaser for the keynote tomorrow. So I'm going to welcome one of the global award winners on stage. I won't tell you which one it is, but one of those global award winners who the nature of their business has just completely transformed. It's a business where it's foundationated in its heart. You'd never imagined that data would ever have played a role. And now it's intrinsic. It's pervasive in every single thing that they do. And they've been on that same journey with click view and guided dashboards. They've gone into that methodology around service. They've built a data pipeline and now they're in the process of moving into the cloud and embracing everything that that brings ultimately not driven by cost of ownership, but actually driven by the ability to consume all of these new capabilities that are available seamlessly accessible in the cloud platform. So that's the story. I'm not trying to give too much away that I think tomorrow really translates from data into real business value. Well, what you just articulated very briefly is clearly a business that has done a major transformation, no doubt, no wonder that they are a transformation award winner. James, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, giving us some teasers and some ostensible reasons we need to be there tomorrow. We thank you so much for sharing some of those insights and the evolution journey and kind of what's next, we appreciate it. Excellent, glad to be here. Yeah, our pleasure. For our guests, I'm for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE Live from Clickworld 2023 from Las Vegas. Stick around, Stuart Bond joins us next from IDC. We'll see you soon.