 San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Conga, Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Salesforce Dreamforce in downtown San Francisco. 170,000 people, as I said before, please take public transit, take a scooter, take a bird, but do not get on the road. But we're excited to be here. We have our first guest from Salesforce. We're so excited. It's Greg Azell, he's the VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce, CPQ, and Billing. Greg, great to see you. Hey, really happy to be here. And along with him is Ken Cavalon, the EVP of Conga. Great to see you. Nice to meet you as well. Thanks for having us here. Oh, for sure. So first off, Greg, I want to get, you've been with, said almost your 13th anniversary with Salesforce. Yeah, that's correct. It's my 13th, 34th, I've been in the company for 12 years. First band I saw was Train. It was Train. And there was about 5,000 people at the conference. I was going to say, I wanted to get your perfect, there was 5,000 people at the conference. Yeah, maybe a little bit more than that, but it was right around there. So it was much smaller. We only had one of the Moscone buildings, but we were still, you know, growing as fast as we could back then. Did they bring this cruise ship in this year? I can't remember. I remember Lynn Voidovich brought the cruise ship in a couple of years ago for Rooms. The dream boat has not come back. It made one appearance and it has not been back for the conference yet. Okay. So, a lot of stuff going on. Obviously you guys worked very close together, but today some big product announcements are within the last couple of days. What if you can kind of run through those for us? Yeah, it's been super exciting. So we've been working with Conga for a long time. They've been a great Salesforce partner since 2006, I think. And now we just announced a brand new product, Conga Quote Generation for Salesforce CPQ and Conga Invoice Generation for Salesforce Billing, which is a purpose-filled application that allows our CPQ and billing customers to build pixel-perfect quotes using Conga right inside of Salesforce CPQ. So it's a really great product. So you've integrated the Conga functionality into the Salesforce application around that specific. Exactly right. The application. Exactly right. So why did you go that way? And you just build it yourself? You know, so we do configure pricing quotes. You're generating a quote and a quote's not good unless it gets signed by a customer. And so generating the documents is such an integral part of that process and Conga's one of the leaders. So we decided to make this partnership and bring it all together. That's great. So Ken, you got to be pretty excited. You got to like that. I'm extremely excited about this opportunity. I've been working with Salesforce for the last 10 years in many different capacities as a partner on the outside looking in. And this has been an amazing experience having Salesforce bring a partner to the inside and say help us solve these customers' problems. I mean, Salesforce is all about customer success and helping customers be more successful. And it was phenomenal to see an ecosystem owner like Salesforce realize that they could use a partner to actually drive more success for their customers. As the leader in document generation on the Salesforce platform, we help make those pixel perfect format-friendly documents out of the customer's data in Salesforce, applying their rules and their templates to their format the way they want it. And the CPQ team, the CPQ and billing team came to us and said, as the best in Doc Gen, we want you guys to produce the quotes that come out of our quoting system. The Salesforce CPQ system is amazing. We're also a customer. We use the technology, not just the Salesforce platform, but Salesforce CPQ as well. And we know what it's like to actually meet a satisfied customer in getting that sale through their funnel faster. And so being able to tie these two technologies together and allow the Salesforce field themselves to take this to the customer, they now have one point of contact where they can get all of CPQ in the way they want it. It's really interesting. As people think about kind of the generation and kind of the mechanics of working through the configuration and all the options, but the really simple thing to generate a document that somebody can actually sign, pretty important step that, you know, a lot of people kind of don't tie the whole bow back together. That's right, that's right. And so now we've got the best in breed of both solutions coming together and being able to take the market by the Salesforce team. I actually am not really familiar with another opportunity where there's been a partner that can actually support Salesforce in that way. Generally, Salesforce takes Salesforce products to market and to have them take us to market on their price book and their quotes to their customers is a great privilege and we treated it that way. Working with Greg and his team on the product marketing side with Dan and his team on the technology side to build a net new product on Lightning as a Lightning component to take it to market. It's a great experience. So Greg, I'm just curious, great, you know, that's a super development. You've been working on the CPQ and the billing for a while. What are some of the things on your kind of roadmap? What are some of the priorities that you got as you kind of look forward? Sure, for CPQ and billing, you know, we just launched billing about three weeks ago. So billing really completes the last mile of the sales cycle. So it's where we've really been focused and billing allows all of our customers to generate invoices, to collect payments, to automate the renewals and really transform to new business models. So it's really enabling our customers to take advantage of kind of the subscription based or recurring revenue based business model. So we hear so much about in our consumer lives but really bringing those business models into new companies and enabling them to launch new products. So that's where our heads at. We've been really focused on billing and we're really excited to bring that to market here at Dreamforce. So I wonder if you can unpack that kind of some of the complexity around subscriptions and some of these new kind of business relationships between vendors and customers because it's not just the, I buy it, you get an invoice and we can finish the transaction but there's all these new variants. The subscription thing is huge, right? In a growing important piece of the economy. Subscriptions are nothing new, right? The newspaper subscriptions have been around for hundreds of years. So it's not a new concept but taking that and applying it in a B2B setting actually is really new because it gets really complex. The devil is in the details here. And traditional backend systems, your ERP, were built to quote a widget, sell a widget and bill for a widget. Then you correct, you collect your money and you move on. It's not that recurring relationship with billing and with subscription based products and recurring relationships. Now midway through that contract, you could upgrade, you could swap out a product, you could renew early. There's so many different variations that you could do. You actually have to go in and amend that contract. In the past, all of our customers had their contract. There's a piece of paper with an actual signature on it long before a conga sign that sat in someone's folder in a drawer in the basement. It's very, very difficult to actually go back in and amend that contract in your ERP system. So we see lots of challenges, the scale, manual processes, manually updating data that physically prevented companies from moving into this subscription model. But now with Salesforce billing, built right on the Salesforce platform, we're able to unlock that, enable all these new dramatic changes. Right. And then we talked earlier, Ken, with some other people from conga about the contract management piece of that too, that's got a dovetail in with the billing and everything else because the fees and fees, depending on what you buy, how much you buy, when you buy, could be very, very different, right? Can govern the next sale. And as Greg was talking about transforming that configure pricing quote process to modernize business, to allow for these new business models, conga wraps around Salesforce CPQ and billing to help digitally transform the sales business process. Better presentations built out of data that are customized to a specific customer engagement. Better proposals that can lead to the quoting process so that you can make sure that a customer really knows what they're buying and then is able to get a quote. A better set of reports that come afterwards to show that consumption and visualize it for the customer and help them understand what to buy next. And then conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing generates that actual invoice document for them. This entire sales business process, digital transformation journey, a lot of customers are in that journey today and they just really don't know how to do it and they can unlock the power of Salesforce and all that technology they've got with the customer master record so that they can move that throughout the entire sales process. That's what conga is here to do and we're here to do it in partnership with Salesforce CPQ and billing. I'm just curious how much of the push to these types of development to the application are driven by the customer requests? Like, hey, we want to do some of these new things. Can you please put it in or is it more, hey, now you have this, you know, it's classic chicken and egg, now you can start to explore some of these transformative ways of doing business. What do you kind of see in the field? Is it more of the, we want it or the here you have it, not going to do it? You know, different customers are in different points in their journey in that digital transformation. This is the fourth industrial revolution where we're going from, you know, where we were in the past of that transactional business where it starts and stops and then you have to restart it again to a constant flow of business that they have with their customers. So depending upon where they are in that journey depends on whether or not they're pulling us along saying I've got to innovate further or we have to go explore with them what's possible, the art of the possible. And I have to give, you know, Mark and the Salesforce team a lot of credit. Salesforce over the last 20 years has done such an amazing job at helping business figure out how to unlock that potential that they've got. And this platform has allowed Conga to thrive. We, Conga was born on the App Exchange a little more than 10 years ago. We've grown with the App Exchange ever since. And as you can see from this great event we've got going on here today we're able to solve a lot of customers' problems. And so to answer your question directly it's where they are in that journey depends on whether or not they need a little push or they're going to pull us. Right. So Greg, a little shift in gears I'm just curious from kind of a product marketing product development point of view when you operate with such a robust ecosystem and you're making decisions as to, you know what do we buy? What do we partner? What do we integrate? I mean, of the 100,000 plus whatever people here a whole lot of them are partners. Sure. And it's a super robust ecosystem. So as you look at that how do you kind of prioritize are you kind of looking for partners for new things? Are you looking for them to fill holes? How do you kind of fit that portfolio into what you're trying to build natively in the product? And it always just comes back to customer success. We listen to our customers and we see what is available out there and we look to partners like Conga and the rest of the 3000 or 4000 plus applications I think on the AppExchange to make sure that we're filling all of our customers' needs. It's always about what is going to help our customers be the most successful in the fourth industrial revolution like Ken was saying. All right. Well Ken, Greg, congrats on the announcement on the integration and I'm sure it will have tremendous success for both of you. Right. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm Greg. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Conga Connect West at Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear. Come on down. Free food, free drink and free, I think entertainment. Thanks for watching.