 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. We're here at the Aria Hotel. Covering Veritas Vision, this is day one of our two-day coverage. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman, Tyler Welch is here, the director of communities at Veritas. He's joined by Justine Velsic, who runs the VIP program for the Vox community and advocacy. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much for coming on. Hi. Thank you very much. So Tyler, let's start with you. What is Vox, what does it stand for? What's it all about? Yeah, so Vox is Veritas Open Exchange. It is our customer community where our customers, our partners, employees are sharing knowledge and information. Vox in Latin means voice. If you think about Veritas in terms of truth, this is a place where we're being very open. We want people to come share their knowledge, help each other and learn. Yeah, so I see the three bullets, is seek answers, share insights and make informed decisions. So these are practitioners in your community and your ecosystem just sharing ideas and helping each other grow. Is that the basic idea? Absolutely, if you think about digital transformation, to transform means you're going from somewhere to another location. And if we're sharing knowledge and information, these individuals are saying, hey, there's a lot of complexity right now, right? We know things are changing in our industries, how we store our data is changing. And in Vox, we've got users that are saying, hey, I understand this complexity. I can simplify that, I can help you. And I'm going to share my experience so that others can benefit from that. All right, Justine, let's bring you into the conversation. What's your role, what's the VIP program all about? My role within the Vox team is I lead the community and advocacy programs for Vox. So the VIP program, so Veritas Information Professionals is an award program. So it's a program essentially rewarding our super users, our top users in the community who are making outstanding contributions within the Vox platform. They, some of them log in every single day and jump in to produce content and help out the community answering questions and whatnot. So it's a recognition program just to say thank you. Yeah, I find some people that are in IT don't understand kind of the communities that are built. It still amazes me how much people kind of give back. I think back when Dave actually found Wikibon, it was around online communities and we said, I don't need you full time. I need just, if we could just take one of my favorite stats, it's like, if you took 0.02% of the United States television watching in one year, you could create all of Wikipedia. And it's just like, you know, just tiny little bits. Can you give us a little bit that kind of the size of the community? You know, right, some people are coming on every day. Tell us a little bit to help us get our arms around your, the voice of your community. Absolutely, so Vox actually launched just over a year ago. And we actually took a lot of the content from the Veritas technologies that were part of Symantec. And we brought them over, we brought those users over. And since then we've actually seen an increase of over 10,000 users coming to the site. And it's something that we've got a lot of active employees, a lot of partners, a lot of customers that are there asking questions. So, coming to the site, meaning they've come, they've registered, well actually you have information on them already, but they've agreed to participate in some way, shape, or form, and what's the hurdle that they have to go through to become a member? Yeah, well the join box just come to the site and hit the join button, pretty easy. Create a username and start asking questions. Most of our users actually come because they actually have a question and they'll come through Google, right? Hey, help me do this, I'm trying to figure out this type of deployment, they'll land on there and they'll realize, hey, there's a lot of good information here, and there's people here that are actually really knowledgeable and I want to come back because I'm able to get answers to questions, or I'm able to learn how to actually do things better than maybe I was doing them in the past. And the community comprises generally IT practitioners, storage admins, data center managers, all of the above. We also have blogs on Vox where our employees at Veritas are actually sharing their perspectives as well. And so we actually have a lot of different audiences that run from our executives that are blogging, Bill Coleman has a blog. We're talking about what we're doing all the way to storage admin, hey, I'm looking to do a deployment. What does this mean? How do I administer these types of things? And so through Vox, you'll see that there's a lot of ways to make different connections with different audiences. Justine, what are you seeing as far as some of the content trends? What kinds of things are people producing? Is it sort of forum posts, you mentioned blogs, Tyler, videos, what's the concept? So from the VIP side of things, in terms of the content and the types of participation in the program, like I said, it's our super users. It's our very active subject matter experts that are very passionate about sharing a community with like-minded individuals that are just like them. They are doing everything from creating blog posts to jumping in and answering troubleshooting questions and discussion boards. Actually, discussions are probably one of our busiest, high-traffic areas. It's quite technical in nature, which is what our audience is looking for. So it's, I mean, it's everything, all of the above really. And what's the reward system look like? It's not really a reward. It's more of an award for thanking them for the last year of their outstanding contributions. We didn't want it to be do this, get that type of an economy. It's more of a genuine effort when they can come in and just share their knowledge based on their passion for being part of a community that they get to fuel and grow. So their incentive really is that community feel, right? That's the primary motivation for them, right? Yeah. There's also a reputation around, if you're a partner and you're active in the community and you're sharing information, you've got that credibility and that's important. And some people, as they're looking at the next phase of their career, these are things that I'm doing. This is how I'm contributing to the industry that I participate in. And I think, especially with what's going on right now, how this industry is transforming, nobody's just one thing. We all have multiple hats. And so this is a place where people can expand some of the things that they're talking about, they're learning and they're sharing back. Is there a reputation system? I mean, does the community measure itself on the quality of the contributions or the frequency? Or how does that reputation get translated and quantified or does it? In terms, well, again, speaking from the VIP program, our super users, we didn't want to launch the program with a thousand qualified super users. There probably are a thousand super users on the platform, but we're really looking for quality content. So we launched actually just last night. So that was a big milestone for us. We launched last night with 28 individuals welcomed into the program. So we kept it small for a thoughtful reason. They are everywhere from, and you asked the type of people that are part of the community, but in terms of the VIP program, they're everywhere from a VP of a medium to large organization to a functional IT from an enterprise organization to a consultant and everything in between. They actually are represented across 13 plus countries and some of these people actually have known each other for decades being parts of other communities where they're talking about the same types of products. And so they already have built relationships and that's kind of what makes the community unique. Yeah, Tyler, yeah, please, if you want to. It's interesting you said rewards because I thought about that. The reality is is these individuals, people are out there sharing their knowledge. We're actually just thanking them for what they're already doing. They're already there. And I think that's the purpose of our program is to then give additional access to information, better connection with each other and allow those connections and those relationships to flourish because it's a community. That's really why we're here is to help make those connections for those individuals. Okay, so obviously you launched the VI program here. What else is happening at Vision? You've got the Vox online program, maybe talk, I always see communities, a lot of times there's planful things that they're like, oh hey, let's get a meetup together, let's do something. So what's happening around this week? So this week at Vision, our VIPs are obviously plugged into the sessions and they're attending those sessions. We're actually here on the Vision live floor talking to the session attendees about Vox. They're coming into the booth, we're showing them the platform. Again, we just launched a year ago. So we're still relatively new. One of the things we're doing if you are here at Vision and you're watching is come by the booth, we're doing professional headshots. And those can be things that are used in your LinkedIn profile. I don't know about you guys, but I think the last time I did my LinkedIn profile, I was on vacation and I got a good light shot. I'm going to use that and I cropped it a little bit. So we thought, hey, we could do a little bit better. So we're providing that right now, no selfies. We use cube shots, that's true. So that's one of the things we're doing to actually bring people together and share that experience of what community actually means to them. And we've got some interesting responses so far from our audience. Yeah, that's great. Maybe when they update their profile, they won't have that pixelated photo from like 15 years ago. I saw even, there was one customer in the keynote and they blew it up on the screen. It was like a little pixelated. So stop by the booth, they didn't get that. Yeah, pixelation's not really in style. I don't know if it was ever in style. I don't know, throwback, one dot oh. So you said you launched a year ago? Yeah, is that right? So you've, talk about network effects. I mean, any community like this, you want to achieve some kind of scale and you get this sort of flywheel effect. You've, I mean, 10,000 in 12 months, pretty good number. You know, of course, there's the number and then there's the activity and those are two different sort of dimensions. But do you feel like you're on the steep part of the S-curve or just heading there or have surpassed that? Talk about the network effect. Absolutely, so in my experience of launching communities, you do have that hockey stick where in the very beginning, a lot of people are coming and they're joining. The great news is we're seeing high activity on a monthly basis of people coming back. No surprise in a community in the very beginning, you're coming through search, Google, because you're typing a question into that box and where do you land? We want them to land on Veritas Open Exchange. So we can be part of that broader conversation around what's going on for information management. At Veritas, we believe that a connected experience across our different platforms. If you think about what we're sharing on social media, what we're sharing in our communities, those users that are logging in to get information out of our different portals, we want to start to blend some of those connections together and we see community as a way to do that. A great example is if you're on a product page and you want to look at information about a particular product, net backup, being able to access blogs, some of the community content's really important because there's a lot of authenticity that comes from a community voice, a user voice alongside our voices, Veritas as well. You talk a little bit about how you seeded it when you had some semantic relationship with the semantic data, but how did you actually get the seedling to not die? What was that secret? Because that's the hardest part, I think, or at least one of the hard things about building a community is cultivating it so that it doesn't wilt early on. Yeah, communities are about the value for those individuals. The value for us in the very beginning was the content that was there and the content that was created by the community. And so as we set out and our roadmap was to launch Vox, one of the early decisions was we need to make sure we can bring all of the content over with us that's relevant. And that felt like an easy decision at the beginning, but it got hard as you started to look at database structures and things. Yeah, content migration. Yeah, it used to be a lot easier to start over. And we stayed true to that. I think we would have launched earlier in the year had it not been for some complexity there, but I think we've been able to continue to grow because we've got good content and I want to stress the fact that that content is coming from our customers, our partners, and our employees. And those are the individuals that are sharing their experience, which is so valuable and it's authentic. And did you have an existing CMS or did you choose a new one when you started a content management system? We went from one platform provider to another. And there was some differences as you would suspect in those database structures. But we realized as we're thinking about a better experience from a mobile device, how do we actually start to connect our community into veritas.com? Integrated into our support portal, we wanted to have flexibility across some of those touch points, realizing that our customers and our partners are going to define where they want to go. And we want to be able to take that content and make it easier for them to access. So on Justine, you just launched the VIP program. You may have some new requirements or feature requirements. So what are you seeing there? What kinds of things do you envision your VIPs are going to require out of the system? Requirements out of the system. You follow me? So it's sort of a new thing, the VIPs. I mean, does the system accommodate those? Do you have to add new features? I mean, these are challenging problems, right? There's underlying infrastructure that you have to deal with. So how do you sort all that out? I think, well, in terms of being able to maybe plug in new requirements, especially with different types of technology, we're trying to introduce new types of content into the community as well. That would hopefully be appealing to newer advocates that would be welcomed into the program in the future. Like what? So podcasting is something that we're actually doing. We've paired up with the social team as well and we're running podcasts here on the Vision Live floor, which is really exciting. So we're going to have new content up on the community shortly. Hopefully we'll be able to plug our VIPs into those new types of content and just provide different avenues for digesting content. Where do you want to see this go? What's the vision? Yeah, success for us is we make Veritas Open Exchange, Vox, an integrated part of being a customer, a partner, or even an employee of Veritas. And there's relevance there. This is a place where I have presence. I'm able to share what I know and participate in a broader conversation. Talked a little bit about roadmap. One of the beautiful things about having a close relationship with a very passionate group of individuals is they want to make things better. They want to make it easier. We see that through requirements that are coming in and questions about how to make Vox better, but also about our products and services at Veritas. And there's a rich dialogue that we can have with them as a result of that. So we're constantly evaluating, looking at those things of like, how do we actually just make things easier? So easy to make things complicated these days with features, right? Oh, let's do this, let's do that. We're looking at how do we actually make this simpler, provide a better experience. So you can be on your mobile device. You can be on your tablet. You can be at your desk and find the information that you're looking for. All right, folks, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming in the Cube. Thanks for having us. All right, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back. With our next guest is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back.