Checking in with the Analysts at #GartnerAPPS, with Rita Manachi (Ep. 44)

Episode 32 · 53:43 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, here we are in lovely Las Vegas at, where are we, Caesar's Palace? Who is it that asked, does Caesar actually live here? I think that's from a movie. Anyways, we're here at the, what is it? This is the Gartner Application, no, what is it? Application Strategy and Something Summit. Yes, and I think it's normally called A-A-D-I, right? Application Architecture, Application Strategy and Solution Summit. Yeah, anyways, I mean, well, first, why don't you introduce yourself, guest? Hi there, I'm Rita Manachi, Head of Analyst Relations at Pivotal. I think you were on our maybe second or third episode, or maybe earlier, I forget. Anyways, so welcome back. Thanks for having me. Good job. So how would you characterize this conference? Like, I mean, as far as like what the topics and attendees are. So this is actually the first year they've combined their Digital Workforce and Apps Summit with the A-A-D-I Summit. A-A-D-I used to be really all about for application development leaders. So they talked a lot about application integration, application development, development languages. Now this explains why they have these little fish bowls of buttons where you pick out a button of like what you do. And one of them was, what was the phrase you used, workspace? Digital workplace. Right. I saw that as one of them. And I was thinking like, what is that like using Slack? And so now I understand it's a whole... Yeah, it is. It's that, it's also actually something we talked, that we talked about during one of the meetings earlier, I think physical space, which we haven't talked to Gartner much about, but, you know, or how Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester might look at it as developing spaces for developers or developer spaces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, making sure you have a good garden for all your flowers. And they say it, topiary. Topiary. Topiary. Did you pick up the button? Are you wearing all the flare today? No, no. You know, there was a time in my life where I would try to get buttons and then I found that they just fall off. Right, like I would try to get the buttons that you put on like your laptop bag.

But then like you'd be like getting your bag out of an overhead bin and they kind of fly off and it's just, it's just tragic. It is. Yeah, I feel like at a bunch of analyst events about, this is 2016, maybe about eight years ago, there was a lot of those little buttons that would be given up where there's a brad on one side and like you punch it through and put the thing over here. Like I've got like a Z one for mainframes and there's a 451. I haven't seen those too much. I think Salesforce is giving some away at their booth here, by the way. They were at reInvent last week. This is a little negative two item. Salesforce. Yeah. Well, so we're having a read on just because as promised, we wanted to have read on every now and then to tell us what's going on in analyst land. But before we get to that, we have our usual little spate of news. What do we have this week, Richard? Yeah, there was another conference in Vegas last week. A rodeo. Qualifying. Yeah, I think there's a lot of cowboys here this week. And at some point, I was a rodeo because it was freaking me out. There's a lot of cowboy hats. But yeah, no, last week there was a little cloud conference with some company in Seattle that's doing cloud stuff. So reInvent was last week. It was a big deal. Tons of announcements. I guess I don't know what the right metaphor is for what it's like. Disneyland for cloud people. Just it's the event. Everybody gets excited. Yeah. You fall asleep quickly. So it was a big deal. Lots of cool announcements. I don't think it defied any sort of classification. It was just, we're going to release a ton of stuff. Expand data and compute instances and app services and deep learning and all these really cool things. But yeah, no big theme short of we ship lots of things, which is a theme in itself. Yeah, it's like as one of my favorite books is called The Everything Store. They're like the everything cloud. They have a ton of stuff. Yeah, so you wrote like a summary of all the announcements, right? I did. I took a few hours on a Sunday and wrote up a summary of all the 28 whatever announcements. And again, I think for most, there's no way everyone's using all the services in AWS. It's almost like me with Microsoft Office.

Like I use six features. Sure. But at least you know they're there if you want to use them. It's got to be the strategy at this point because this isn't like one thing is going to use all of these different parts of the platform. But hey, you have a lot of different choices in one place. It's just the deluge of keeping up. Yeah, so since you wrote a summary, what do you think was the most weird in a good way thing that was announced? Sort of weird like, oh, I guess novel is a word people would use. I mean, novel was the physical tractor trailer that moves data to AWS data centers. Is that like the mega snowball or whatever? AWS snowmobile. Yeah. So when I'm literally going to pull up a truck and load my data into it, it takes days, right? Yeah. I load up my data, which can take up to 10 days for whatever exabyte I'm loading and somebody drives it up. So that was pretty crazy stuff. Yeah. I forget the name of it. There's some old ancient IEEE jokester who there's a quote about like never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon with a bunch of tapes in it. And like, I remember people talk about data gravity a lot still, but like back in the height of data gravity talk, I'd always think like, well, you just go to Costco and buy some hard drives and stick it in an overnight FedEx thing, right? Like, I mean, obviously it sort of, you know, if you have petabytes of data, that's one thing, but still, you know, you just get a teamster. Well, you can get to the bandwidth story because clouds still notoriously charge a lot for bandwidth in the scheme of things. So uploading, you know, 50 petabytes, that's a bill. So it is cheaper to, you know, rent a couple of guys in a truck. Yeah. You know, what I've realized in looking at the rest of our news items is that you have now, you're filling out my other podcasts. I've got this guy, Matt Ray, and basically his job is to do all the work of the agenda and the news. And then now that's your job. This seems like a common co-host pattern that I have. I'm someone who loves summarizing news. Right. You're coasting on your looks with people who look for the chance to raise up the profile. So well played. You're not a seek out weakness. That's right. Well, there's one of these I know about. But that said also, so what's this thing that Netflix came out with?

I mean, it's an OSS project per week at Netflix and they do a great job of it. Something called Holo. We've got the link in the notes here. It's just another interesting caching tool for how do I take advantage of caching in a different way. And I pointed it out mainly because since we're pretty good with Spring and Spring Cloud of trying to make these things easier for developers, it'll be interesting to see how do we keep following some of these. We've done it with Spinnaker. We keep building onto these Netflix things and making them Springified. Yeah. So I guess keep an eye on these. And really the call to action for listeners is if you want these things in Spring, it's good for us to know that. Because maybe we would actually prioritize making these into Spring Cloud projects or things. So I guess keep an eye on these Netflix projects and if they get you amped up, let us know. Yeah. You know, that makes me think. I remember speaking of the old days of when they used to have pins. Like I remember back in the open source days of the mid-2000s, there was always a lot of talk of like enterprises need to get more involved in open source. And I don't know if I really thought about it too much, but like there's a few other exceptions. But I think Netflix is like the first company that does that, like in a big, impactful way where a lot of open source software comes from Netflix. Whereas, you know, in let's say 2004, you wouldn't really expect that to happen, right? There were all the vendors doing open source things and they would always be clamoring for enterprises, they would say, to get involved. But not really that many would. And there must be other ones that I'm not thinking of, but there's, I don't think it's incredibly shocking. It might be mildly surprising, if you will, that like when an enterprise open source and stuff, but it's a lot more normal nowadays than it used to be. It is. But even at the same time, our friends at Allstate and Composed, I mean, they've open sourced a few different libraries and build things. And it's always fun when we do see that and can promote that. Again, I like that. And I think it's companies loosening the reins a little bit on their own open source strategy. Don't just consume it, actually contribute back. Yeah, yeah. That is handy. And then there's a new RabbitMQ release out? Yeah, I mean, you know, PCF and Pivotal really doubling down a bit on some of the data services now and into 2017. And RabbitMQ has really gotten a whole other investment from the company.

And so you see a new Java client. And then what I thought was more interesting was there was some new components for things like metrics and performance that can integrate with things like Spring Boot. So if I like the actuator and I hit, you know, slash health and I want to view, hey, how much memory are things using? Now it can also pull in Rabbit metrics like, hey, how deep is my queue and what's going on there? And, you know, in the new PCF version coming out in the next couple of days, we're actually pulling Spring Boot things into the Apps Manager console. So as we have more data available, I think it makes things a lot more interesting when you're doing health monitoring and scaling and what have you. So just a cool advancement. RabbitMQ is a little engine that could just kind of continues to be, you know, power some of the biggest companies in the world without us making a big deal about it. Do you know at the top of your head how many, like, tiles we have now in Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Like, last I remember it was, like, 40-something. It's a lot, which is great. At the same time, you know, part of my job now in marketing is to help people understand when to use each. Ah, yes. Which is a great problem. When you hit the critical mass point of, like, when do you actually choose among them, that's a great point. And we must have, like, four or five data ones, right? Like, I mean, I'm kind of, if you match in queues, I mean, queues are sort of kind of data, but, like, we've got the MyraDB one and, like, and Redis, right? Or Redis. We have some Redis. We have some MySQL options. We have, there's a number of these that... There's a pop quiz here. Yeah, I know. Exactly. You're making me think through them. You know, and then you get integration, Azuqua, Solace Messaging. You just have a lot of different things, not to mention, look at the Google broker that lets you talk to Bigtable or lets you talk to Cloud SQL or Azure broker. So the data choices now, AeroSpike, there's others. All these different choices now. So what do you need when you need a relational database or NoSQL? Yeah, that's been one of the sort of undercurrent conversations around here at the Gartner conference we're at. I was trying to remember the name again. But it's sort of like, everyone's like, oh, databases. We should worry about those. Like, there's been a few people talking about how they have more inquiries about databases and how it fits in and things like that, which is...

Which, I mean, it seems like a good sign of maturity. You sort of, like, learn a new way of development, learn this new technology, and you're like, oh, now we have data. Now we have data. Now I know. We've had a lot of conversations about that this week. And with a bunch of analysts as we get to that topic in a moment. But I like that some are actually trying to lead the conversation. Totally. It's not just waiting for their customers to ask them. They're also thinking about it because they're like, how come nobody's talking about this yet? I like that, when they actually try to lead an agenda. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So then, this is the last news item. The one that I actually know about. Well done. Yeah. I was trying to do some work this week. Like, so Anne Thomas, and you can speak to this too, Rita. I mean, you could have on the other things, but you need some coffee. I should have gotten some coffee. I was trying to be all nice, like I don't want to kill myself. But like, you know, why else am I alive? I should have some coffee. Anyways, so she came out with a, what's it called, a market monitor? Market guide. Market guide. And, you know, I think obviously from a pivotal perspective, the main takeaway we had is she's recommending doing all new application development in a cloud native style. And to maybe soften even the strength of her language is essentially like, you don't need to use JEE. I mean, she was essentially saying that the era of JEE, I still always want to say J2EE. I know. But that the era of enterprise Java was more or less over and that you should look to do cloud native things. I believe the word obsolete was used. Obsolete. Whoa. Yeah, I mean. Fighting words. You know, analysts get a good perspective of what vendors are doing, but then what customers are using. Like, we all say things as software vendors to try to help analysts know what's going on, but they're also listening to the customers. And, you know, in this case, I think it's looking at the trends that I think are pretty visible slash obvious for a little bit about, you know, lighter frameworks, 12-factor apps, cloud native stuff. That that is how, and again, her recommendation was, I don't care if it's a public cloud or not. Like, every app should be cloud native. I think for us, the reason we even highlight is I think it's a good validation that we bet

on the right horse with application platforms and lightweight frameworks and that most importantly, that's what helps companies develop software faster and better. And I think it's just nice to see people, not us, saying that. Exactly. Yes. So what is that type of report? It's called the Market Guide. The Application Platforms Market Guide is the full title of that. And like, I mean, I think everyone knows the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which is sort of like, it's sort of like a multi-purpose other than being sort of like the equivalent of a Cinebite for vendors. Just come in and torture them gleefully. Like, it seems like it serves the purpose of, one, describing the leaders in the industry from a pure industry perspective. Oh, the MQ, you mean? Yeah, yeah, the MQ. But it also just feeds into purchasing behaviors and sort of like trying to rank, basically short listing. But so like, if you look at the, man, I don't know, I can't remember. The Market Guide. Like, what's the sort of like functional, does Gartner have a functional explanation for what it does? Yes, they do, actually. So they usually do them for markets that are either, have gotten, no longer require an MQ because the technologies are getting old or they're not being adopted. So markets that are kind of, not dying, but fading. Steady. Yeah. Steady to fading. There you go. Not really that interesting. Like ETL. Right. Well, application platforms, right? Yeah. App servers where it's like, well, here are your options. They're all kind of the same if you do feature for feature. Year over year. And here's the definition. It hasn't changed in 10 years. Right. But that's, obviously it has. Or brand new technology areas that are hard to, are like still being defined or there isn't as much revenue momentum that would warrant. So if you were to have like some circle diagram, the magic quadrant would be in the center and the market thingamajiggy would be around it. Like a layer of protective fat. It's either either old or new. Like in between. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We keep going to, how do you say it? Pay yards? I guess so, yeah. Apparently, I've discovered I have a weakness for French pastry. I just, I can't help myself. So were we going to like license that or something?

Yes. Yeah. So that will be, you'll be able to download that off our website any day. Yeah. We'll have to put a link to it in the show notes. That's right. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. But it is a good report. I mean, it's a, it's a nice overview and it, and it, it does like talk about pivotal in it, but it's not like highly recommendation. It's not comparative and it's not a comparative report. It's more about practices. Yeah. It's like, here's the market, here are the changes, the trends in the market, and here are some sample vendors. Right. Right. So it's a nice. Well, so, so on that topic, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's been great to hang out with you guys in Las Vegas. Yeah. I think it was probably almost a year ago that you were on last time. And, and last, so, so last time. It was a year ago. Wasn't it? It was like June. June. Time warp over there. Only June. Wow. That's great. Time's moving a lot slower than I actually think it is. It was before SpringOne. I've still got more time to enjoy coffee, but anyways, so last time you gave us an overview of like what analyst relations or AR does, but like for people who, you know, the one listener out of our many who hasn't listened to the entire Canon and like, as, as I know they all do, like, why don't you give us like a, a, a little summary of what AR does? Like what's, what's your role around here? And, and, you know, in general. So I mean, ultimately, and I said this last time I enable, um, I raise our visibility among a specific constituency in this industry, technology, um, technology industry analyst firms, like Forrester and Gartner and 451, Redmonk, Ovum. So those are the folks we work with. And, and, I mean, it's, it's, it's, that's, it's pretty straightforward. Yeah. So that, I basically make sure that those folks know what we're doing, know, are up to speed on, uh, product versions, like, you know, features. That's great. And we'll talk later in the show, I think about what are they being asked about these days? Yeah. When, you know, 10, 15 years ago, they were like, show me a feature, feature comparison between these two, uh, app platforms and which one should I pick? They're getting different kinds of questions, but that's, I'm digressing.

Um, so. But it's not like one analyst. I mean, it's, it's, it's bizarre walking with you here cause you're like some mini celebrity that everyone tells you and it's, it's freaking me out. But you know, what's interesting though, and you've, I think you've spent so much time this year doing it is it's not like there's a Rolodex of four people that you talk to. It's like one person at each firm and I just keep them up to date. Is it, in fact, as you're Gartner and you're growing like crazy year over year and analysts and stuff, I think a lot of your job is just keeping a pulse on who's, who covers what and how do I keep expanding who knows about us, right? Exactly. I mean, for example, DevOps, right? They have a bunch of folks who cover DevOps and we need to be talking to those folks. So in addition to the pure tech, the guys who cover Pivotal from a pure technology perspective, we need to be talking to the folks who are covering things like DevOps. And there's also the whole CIO practice, the analysts who talk to the CIO audience and both Forrester and Gartner have these analysts and we're talking to them because we're pretty close with our CIOs. We listen to them and they listen to us. And as we talked to an analyst earlier today, they're asking a lot of questions that are actually not so much about technology. They're about skills and culture. And that's also a trend I'm seeing with analysts in general is that, again, back in the day when they would just get asked these straightforward technology questions, vendor for vendor, now they're having to talk about the cultural implications of how these app dev paradigms are changing or having to go to cloud and what's this agile stuff and stuff like that. So I'm sure it's interesting. I always have analysts dealing with most of the infrastructure teams and things like that. And so now it just seems like there's so much more about app dev and lifecycle and leadership and DevOps and management. And I think that's exciting. But I'm sure as an analyst, it's like, gosh, it was a lot easier when I just talked about upgrades to JBoss. Yeah, I mean, there's a role of AR that I think at this conference, I've noticed I've been seeing more, which is that you're kind of talking about, which is the you should be talking to these people, right? Like there's almost the I mean, there's many parts of AR as far as I understand it.

But there's a fair amount of the transactional part of like if you've got like a person talking to the analyst and the analyst, I'm wildly moving my hands around for the people who can't see it. But it's sort of like this person has a question for that person and you can kind of facilitate and hook that up or whatever. So it's like very pat and dry. But then there's another thing that I think as a new field comes about and people are interested in it, like you kind of just like move around like, oh, these two people should be talking and we should talk to those people. Like we just had a meeting with someone that was basically that. It was like this person covers something you guys seem to be big into and you haven't really talked with them before, so you should go talk to them. Exactly. Yeah, I could know seriously, I could sit and just mind the firm's coverage and be like, we could talk to them about this, this or this. I mean, really, I mean, right down to, you mentioned RabbitMQ. There's an analyst who doesn't cover PaaS or app frameworks, but he's the main guy who covers messaging for middleware. And so I'm like, oh, does RabbitMQ come up in your conversations? Yes, it does. Well, we should probably be telling you what we're doing with that. But I mean, really, I could spend all my time just figuring out who else to be talking to at these firms. And to a customer, I mean, to a company who listens to this, why does that matter that they know about us? Like, I mean, what are we trying to do? Are they, I mean, an analyst probably looks at the landscape and there's a lot of providers and is our job making sure that we're top of mind? Clearly, our job is not to make them say something because these are very independent people who don't care if we want them to say something. But is it just, is it awareness? Because when then they write or when a company reads something, they can see, they feel like they're getting a good look at the landscape. Like, why does our customer care that we've talked to now 50 Gartner analysts in the last two days? So what I think would hurt, what hurts me to hear, ever hear, and hearing it less and less is an analyst not, is an analyst getting a question from a customer that they can't answer because we didn't keep them informed of what we were doing, whether it's about our strategy or new features of our product. Right. So that's, that's why, you know, customers who need to, may not have time or for some reason

or just not up to speed and need to get the quick thing, they should be, the Cliff Notes version, they can go to the analysts and if we've done our job, the analysts know what we're doing and where we're taking it. You know, there's a lot of, you know, some, some analysts and some customers want to know what's the prospect for this company in the long term and, or where are they taking this platform? Is it going to be in line with, with where I want to go in the future? I think one of the guys we were talking with today was talking, was, was saying about that, we're like, what about, is it actually was the guy, the CIO guy, right? About, is it, are they helping you move forward? Oh yeah. Are they keeping you from moving forward? That's got to be a lot trickier to be like health of company versus like who does cool stuff in continuous integration delivery? Like, all right, I know about Pivotal, they do that. How many employees do they have? Uh, I don't know. I mean, it's got to be trickier when it's like business level info versus who does interesting things in app frameworks or platforms or cloud or what have you. So, so then, so then since last time we talked, what do you, how do you, how do you think the, uh, the analyst people, what's going on with them in Pivotal? Like how, how's, how's, uh, how do you think let's, let's say there's at least two categories. Like one of them, maybe we don't know, but like what do the analysts think of us Pivotal? And the other one is kind of like, have, do you think that there's more conversation between Pivotal users and customers and analysts? Like how's that relationship going? I think there has to be, yeah, no, the analysts have told me they've seen an uptick in questions and inquiries and about Pivotal. So that makes me very happy. You know, I think they all knew about us a year ago. Now they know more about us. So they feel more comfortable talking about us. And, you know, and I think it's not just a, this isn't just because of analyst relations. I think in general, you know, marketing and yeah, awareness about Pivotal is increasing and, and, and as a result, that's kind of, it's this kind of feedback, you know, like conversation loop. And I was talking to, I think last time about this, uh, continuous conversation. Yeah. Um, and that's what it is, you know, AR is part of that conversation. Um, so yeah, I think it's great to hear that.

It's great to hear when I get out of, when I do an inquiry with an analyst, they're like, Hey, I've gotten a really tremendous uptick in inquiries about you guys this quarter. Why? Yeah. Yeah. Like I was sitting next to someone last night at a dinner and I was asking him the analyst version of this question. So like, what do you hear about us nowadays? And he was, he, he, I don't think he was even half joking. Cause I thought he was, but then I asked him and he's like, he said, uh, yeah, I've, I've been reviewing a lot of PCF contracts. And, and so that's like, that's pretty crazy. I mean, in, in a good way that like, he's, uh, he's being pulled into like compare and contrast, you know, pricing and contracts and stuff. And those are straightforward questions from my understanding for the analyst. Yeah. Yeah. And, but you know, it's, it's a good, it's a good metric of like, if he uses the phrase a lot, then like there's, there's, there's a lot of contract too. So we're selling these things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just anecdotally myself, like I, I mean, as, as people can imagine, I pay very close attention to this stuff. Like there is, even if it's in, there's always a certain part of lots of analyst things. That's kind of the, um, what would you call it? Like, not the penalty box, but the didn't qualify footnote. And if, if we only show up in there for some reason, like we're pretty much in all our, we're mentioned in all the reports that we should be, which, which is gratifying to see. Absolutely. It is nice. That's increased. I actually would like to do a little study to see how much, how much like actual print, print, how much we've come up. Yeah. And we can do inquiry analytics. I mean, we can find out like inquiries too. Or I can just ask them, are we getting, are we getting? Yeah. You know, it's making me think like, like I, I haven't like in the meetings we've had, I hadn't used the opportunity for, to get like free consulting out of the analyst. Like I, I, I, I keep trying to. Yeah. But, but like, you know, one of the things it's, it'd be interesting that I would ask the analysts is, cause I get asked this a lot, is it seems like we're at the height of like, for lack of a better phrase, platform fragmentation madness, right? There's all these different like container driven things. And like, we talk about this a lot of my other podcasts, software defined talk. I mean, almost every episode, but it's just like, I wonder how analysts deal with that.

Cause it is like, cause their, their job, I mean, you know, their job is to give, I would say a helpful, expansive answer with lots of opinion. Right. Whereas like the answer that I can give just has to be like entertaining. But, but like, you know, I, man, sorting out all that stuff seems really like difficult and which, which is all to say, I think we show up in that whole mess of stuff a lot more than, than we did even like a year or so ago. We forget the stakes are high too. Sometimes it's easy for you and I to give a blustery opinions on podcasts. Like Gardner Magic Quadrants, people lose their minds when they're not positioned in the right place. Or if you get left off a Forrester wave or like there's financial implications if you're not mentioned in these things for the companies that actually manage by these things. Yeah. You worked on that at like CenturyLink, right? If I remember you. Sure. Yeah. I filled out a lot of quadrants and it was fine because again, for enough customers, it's not their criteria, but it is something that helps them down select. So very few companies I think would tell you like they manage by quadrant, but at the same time, if they're looking at like who are the five I should invite in for the first call, like that's a real thing. And so when you get left off, there's real implications. So that's tough for an analyst. I'm sure they filled a lot of calls as they ship things and have to deal with angry, angry paying customers. Yeah, it's true. I've, I've, I've experienced that. It's a weird fact of life. So, so are there any other like, like interesting changes in our, what our relations with the analysts and what we've been doing with them? Like, like if, if you look at like the, the smaller firms, like what, uh, what do we do with those people nowadays and vice versa? So it's the same thing, keeping them informed, I think. Um, and they talk to different audiences, for example, I mean, Red Monk talks to more developer audience. So we definitely make sure that they're informed and know what we're doing, like, especially with things like Spring and some of our open source things. And, um, and they, they sometimes surface, but like, again, I'm going to use Red Monk as an example, uh, like Steven O'Grady wrote a piece about data and DevOps, right?

That's a pretty forward thinking topic, right? And so, and a topic that Pivotal can talk to or is at least exploring and thinking about it. We're asking questions similar to, to those guys. So we'll do some work with them on that. You know, we'll, we'll kind of riff, riff off the topic on a phone call. We might, you know, do a podcast or a webcast where we have them and some of our smart folks just, we do those things here too, which is nice. I mean, it's not like our analyst relations are, we get on the phone and we read through our latest product sheet and then we ask some questions and hang up. I don't know. A lot of the ones that Rita has set up this year were a lot around, like, let's just talk about an idea that maybe we're going to be baking into the product. Or here's like a fundamental concept, like data and DevOps. If there's no product around the corner, you're pivotal for that because no one's really even solving that problem well. So to just riff for an hour on something that's tricky and how are we going to help customers solve that? Who's innovative in the field? And we do this with Gartner as well, all of them, which is really fun to be able to help that. I think that's maybe an incentive as well for regular enterprises who call up and talk to analysts or even sometimes act as references as you get that chance to riff on tricky concepts. But, you know, do you see that? So when we ask a company to talk to an analyst on our behalf or just to talk to them because analysts love case studies, why do that? Like, why would a company choose to call up a Gartner or a Forrester or a 451 and give them an hour of their time? You mean to just talk about pivotal? Yeah. If we're saying, like, hey, talk about your transformation, why would you do that? You know, I think, and this may seem hokey, but I do think people like to influence a conversation, right? I think that's part of it. I think it helps position them. Actually, the more kind of, you know, self-serving thing is if you are an enterprise who wants to be seen as, not only are you going to be able to survive some disruption from some more agile competitors, but you're ahead of the game, you know, you're forward thinking, this

is a great way to do it, right? Like, this is kind of the first, this is like the first line, right? And then, of course, press and all that stuff. It's just hard to argue with that. I mean, when, you know, Doug is on the, in New York Times, talking about the Allstate transformation, like, that's a real thing. Yeah. And when you're in a Forrester report. And that's because material is your business. Right. Like, those are real things when you're listed in analyst reports or press. Yes. Because, you know what? That's an interesting place I might want to work. Yeah. I mean, among many reasons, among many reasons, I've always weirded out why people, why, to use the phrase again, enterprises don't talk more publicly. I mean, I know there's always, like, procurement reasons and stuff like that, but then it's also, like, it's my observation is that, like, those IT people, whether they're leaders or not, who, like, talk more publicly end up getting better jobs or promotions or career or whatever. And so, it seems like, and I mean, I have to imagine, like, if you're not someone who, like, has, you know, chronic has to publish all the time, scoliosis or whatever, that, like, like, how do you build up any sort of, like, fame other than code, right? Like, you could do some, but, like, you need some hook of, like, why you're valuable and interesting. So, it seems like, of course, you don't want to, like, be excessive about it, but, like, any opportunity you get to talk about, at the very least, how you succeeded or even better, how you failed and then succeeded, like, would be great. Yeah, yeah. A lot of transformation, for example, since that's the buzz phrase du jour right now, digital transformation. Yeah. That's what it is. And, yeah, so, I mean, I think, number one, I think I answered that backwards, right? My first answer would be is this is a great way for our customers to be showcased as vanguards of their industry. And I use that word a lot because I do, and I think our analysts, I've had analysts say that to me about our customers. You know, they're ahead of the type A organizations that the firms talk with. Yeah. So, it's, why wouldn't you want to be positioned as that? You know, it makes you look like, you know, I mean, whether it's for just profile, but also for business. You want the people who are interested in your business to know that this company is

not going to lose revenue or lose market share or they're not in trouble. They know what's up. They're going to survive. And they're not just going to survive. They're going to thrive. And, you know, that's another thing that we talk a lot about in digital transformation. It's not just about surviving anymore. It's about thriving. Yeah. It's fun to trace to those two areas, like the technology and the culture stuff. So, I have two more, like, technical. I'm sure we'll, I shouldn't reuse my metaphors. I'm sure we'll stumble onto other topics. But, like, so there's two more little technical things that I want to talk about. One of them, so, we have Tony from Home Depot here. He's giving a talk here. And he's been hanging out with us very nicely. And we were talking about how, what you do in one-on-one meetings, just comparing notes. And so, I was curious to hear your answer. So, like, at an event like this, there's often, like, a giant room with a bunch of tiny, painfully small round tables. And they've got numbers on them. And you're waiting for someone to bring you delicious food, but it never comes. And so, because of numbers. It's like speed dating. Yeah, exactly. And so, that's the one-on-one meeting. So, like, I'm curious to hear from you, like, what, there's two, well, at least one thing. So, like, what do you do in that meeting? Like, what is, what's supposed to happen? Okay. Well, I think of them as a start of a conversation. Often. Like, oftentimes, it's like, let's, you're not going to have a deep conversation in 30 minutes. It's just a way of figuring out what, where the coming ground is between us. And then you leave here. And then you continue the conversation. It's like forced small talk. Yeah. Yeah, it's like being a little party, forced small talk. And then after you leave here, and then you continue it in other formats. But do you find that you, or, if you're, I guess, either part of the one-on-one, the one-or-the-one, are you going in there with something you want to get that one answer to? Like, I know I've had a, you've set up a few of them for me this week. And I know out of each one, I've gotten at least some thought that I want to do something with. Because we had, we said something, or the analyst said something interesting I wanted to investigate. Are you better off, if you're going into those, going, I'd really like their take on X.

Let's see what else they come up with. That's a good question. Well, yeah, so that's how you spark, I mean, because otherwise, well, it also helps with that kind of first awkward silence. Like, oh, hey, how's the show going? You have a beard, too. Yeah, that's funny. I love the how is the show going question. It's such an easy fallback. Because you're not ready for the negative. If they go, this has been terrible, like, everything has gone wrong. I've been locked out of my room three times. But, yeah, I lost all my money last minute. I'm not ready for the negative. Yeah, so, but it's definitely the, when you have a specific question, that definitely is a great way to break the ice and get it started. And then from there, you just flow. So maybe that's a good Salem thing is, like, you should probably have at least one thing that, if not that you want to accomplish, that you want to talk about. Right. Like, oh, I said, in your report, I really liked what you said in this. Or I was at your talk yesterday. Like, I kind of try and go to the talks before I have it. And how long are these meetings usually? 30 minutes. 30 minutes, okay. Now, end users, I would probably have, I would imagine, end users go with more specific questions than the vendors, right? Yeah. Either because they are here trying to make a decision. Right. They're buying something. Yeah. You know? Or they went to a session and want to dig deeper into something they said. So I think it's a little different whether you're here as an end user or as a vendor. And for an end user, do they, I don't know, I was going to say advertise, but is a feature of one-on-ones that it can be a quick consultation? Or do they steer the analysts away from actually doing consultative stuff? They're more like inquiry, so it is more consultative. Okay. It should be more consultative than briefing. And for the listeners, inquiry is basically like a 30-minute phone call that you have where you can ask a couple questions. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then, so, okay. So we got that down, what you do with the one-on-ones. And how many do you typically have at a conference like this? You have two per pass for every ticket, but they also put a limit on how many, for vendors, they put a limit on how many you can do total. Right. So at least two, but no more than eight. Unless you're like the triple platinum sponsor or something.

That's right. Yeah, I didn't realize this about Gartner until, you know, we started working here on this stuff. But there's like not only, I mean, yet another weird separate, not weird, but what was the word I liked better than weird? Novel separation of things is the event people and the research people. And they're like separate concerns of business, which totally makes sense, but I would never realize that. And so it's interesting to see how when you're in an event like this, how that intermixes with the research side. So then the other thing as far as technicalities that I had is, I had forgotten about this, but Richard remembered, is you actually, you ran, I don't know, I think it was Pivotal's first, like our first AR day at SpringOne Platform. And so that's, what's up with that? I loved it. I love those things, you know, being how I, I love bringing people together. Yeah. So, so first of all, explain what, what an analyst say is, like, what, what would that be? It's usually you take the analysts and you lock them in a room with no windows and you just fire hose them with information about why your company is working. And if you wanted to hear James Governor Nightmares, there would be no Wi-Fi or PowerStream. That is a nightmare. Cell blockers. No, that's, that's, there, there are people who might run their analyst days that way, but we do not. Yeah. So you bring them in, you give them a sense of, I mean, if you're having, if you have big announcements at the show, the fact is, the analyst shouldn't be surprised about anything you're going to announce at a conference. They're just not. But again, I think some of them are run as, oh, here are the announcements we're going to make at the show. They might be reminders. Hey, we already briefed you on this, but just FYI, this, we're going to talk about this at the conference if you're asked. We talked to them about roadmap. Right. We had some customers talk about their journey with us, which was one, which is their favorite. I mean, their favorite thing is customers. Always, always, always. They loved it. They were over the moon about the panel we had. And then access to executives. Like executives, they don't get to talk to very often. And of course, then they get to ask them the really hard questions like, who are your competitors? Like, who do you consider your biggest competitor, which was asked?

Or, you know, questions about revenue or go-to-market and things like that. General strategy. Yeah. So. Yeah, I mean, I was fortunate enough to attend. That's for you to let me sit in on it. And I think, again, why an end user cares that we have an analyst day is the point is for people to be pretty up to date. So if you do call a Gartner, a Forrester, any of these and say, so what's going on over there? You know, who's doing interesting stuff in containers? You know, they're not just saying, well, I read the blog, the same blog you did. I just read the same stuff. Yeah, exactly. But, like, they're the ones that should be a little bit ahead. And this is one fire hose day. Because I can't imagine. I mean, you set up a lot of briefings to make sure that it's not, like, once a year we go talk to each one of these and just fire hose them. But this is a great, like, let's all sit for six, seven hours, talk about this stuff, ask tough questions. I don't know. I think those are nice. Same reason we all go to conferences, right? You have focused attention on interesting topics. Also, as I recall, there was guacamole on the lunch line. That's the sign of good catering. It was strong. It was great. And it was chunky. It wasn't that frappe stuff. It wasn't good food. The Aria was a good place. You know, the other thing is I liked having it at SpringOne because – SpringOne platform, sorry – because it got them to the event as well. And I want them to feel the energy, right? You put it in context. Yeah. And talk to our customers and see our customers. Right. And so I think having – and again, there have been analyst days that are done just as individual kind of separate things. But I tagged it on to SpringOne so that they could go to the sessions and just feel the energy. Well, I guess that answers the very insidery question I was going to have is like why you would have a separate analyst thing versus at a conference. Like, I mean, when I was an analyst, I always preferred – is this true? I more or less – I pretty much always preferred having it at a conference, right? Because you could go to the conference then. Exactly. Right? It's not two trips. Yeah. I mean, these people travel a lot. Yeah. Right? There were some exceptions. Like, I remember IBM had their big – everyone would call it the Mills event. But, like, there are – back when Steve Mills ran software and everything, there are some that are nice in the sense that the vendor is so huge.

Right. That it's – And that still happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That still happens. And the big vendors do that. They'll do that one or two days. Well, the other thing I saw you did a lot of, again, it's your matchmaking skills, I guess. But, you know, the analysts were also trying to double dip and not just sit here for an analyst day. But then they would go off and grab the customer who presented a talk and go spend a half hour with them just peppering them with questions because they wanted to get a case study. So I guess, you know, my question for you is, do the analysts typically make themselves available to the conference when they're done? I mean, James Governor spoke and did a great job. Or is it kind of like, hey, I'm almost incognito. I'm not going to be giving free consultations while I'm walking around. Like, what's an analyst think when they go to a conference to participate in something like this? Are they just sucking in information or are they trying to create a two-way conversation? I think probably more so sucking in information. But they also like to talk to the customers and selectively and have a conversation. Oh, my gosh, you're so-and-so. Can we go chat about that? Yeah, exactly. It's a conversation. Yeah. I mean, they don't mind being asked their opinion. I mean, that's what they get paid to do, especially if it's an end user. But mostly they're there to get the information. And in our case, a lot of that information was being parsed by our customers, which was really great. And I think our customers also liked hearing the feedback from the analysts. Again, to talk, to mention Red Monk and James, he wrote his trip report was pretty much about our customers. Yeah, that's true. Period. Like, it was not about, oh, Pivotal made these announcements and blah. It was, here's a common thread I'm learning from their customers. And, again, it helped highlight some of that amazing work, for example, Allstate was doing, you know, and just. Well, I mean, that's why I remember we spent virtually no time on competitors in this chat. Even when people ask, they could give an answer. But we didn't spend analyst day bashing competitors. Instead, it's like, here's some really great customers. Here's some really cool product plans. Here's what's already working today. I like that vibe versus let's try to be defensive about our spot. Yeah, there's a set of questions of, like, that analysts ask that I always think is sort of like, well, I don't want to do your homework for you.

Right? And I more started to pick up on this bucket of questions back when I would listen to other analysts when I was one. And, like, the competitor one is always a funny one. It's like, I mean, you know, like, isn't that your job? Yeah. I think the only reason you ask. That'd be funny if somebody said, who do you think it is? Yeah. And the other side of that is kind of what you're saying is, like, well, I mean, I'm happy to tell you who we compete with. But, like, I'm more interested in, like, not – I mean, obviously, it's interesting to know about who you think the competitors are. But, like, from the perspective of the full title of an industry analyst, I'd be really interested to hear your framing of how you think the industry is, right? And so, like – and also, I mean, I'm also always overly hyper-aware of – I don't know how to categorize this in a word that's, like, rated G, but, like, analysts who are kind of, like, screwing with you. Like, they're intentionally, like – They want to be provocative. Yeah. It's like – Could you make you uncomfortable? It's like the reporter side of being an analyst where they're trying to kind of, like, get you off your whatever and look behind the curtain, which is totally fair game. But I always feel like the competitor one is a little bit of that, right? It's just like – But to that point, I think what you said is important because if I ask a software vendor who your competitor is and they go, you know, we don't really have one. We're defining the market. You know, I'm sell. Sell right now. It's totally, like, wrong answer. So I think there's some truth to why you asked that, but I think the key would be this is why and let's keep moving because we don't – Yeah. So that's what I was trying to get to is there's a series of, you know, Admiral Ackbar to traps that, like, questions analysts have where, like, if you don't – it's almost – it's not always this, but I'm always on guard that it's, like, this encoded way of seeing if you're giving honest answers. And, like, so if you say we have no competitors and it's sort of, like, they can go in to, like, you know, treat the witnesses hostile. They'll do now. Yeah. Or if they accidentally say their biggest competitor is also one of their partners and we're all in the same – You know what? No. You're not at partners. They're actually trying to kill you. Let's just be honest. So then the final question I add is, like, so – oh, let me make sure this – oh, there. See, I'm doing this on my phone, as you can tell, and I forgot to turn off the – what do you call it?

Locking screen. Yeah. So it's always freaking me out. I should do better work. So, finally, if people who – whether they're – we have a variety of audience people. Whether they're people who work at Pivotal or they're prospects or customers, if they wanted to, like – what would be, like, the speaking of – what did you call it? Short listing? You had a good phrase for it that was, like, down-select. Down-select. I like down-drafting. Yeah. That's my band name. Exactly. So what would be the way that you would help people down-select the analysts that they should talk to? Like, if they just – you know, like, what are, like, three or five or however many you feel like you should answer? I'm sure there's just one you would like them all to talk to, but you want to be polite. But, like, who would you point them towards? Or are there specialties? Say, look, if I want to talk about X, I would steer you here. If I want to talk about this topic here. Or do you not even think that way? No, I actually don't think that way. I think it depends on the company and what you're – and from what you want to learn about. You know, there's some – you know, the two biggest firms cater to the same audience, right? They just do. Forrester and Gartner have the same – and oftentimes companies who are clients of Forrester are also clients of Gartner. So if you're a large enterprise, you are likely talking to those folks. Right. Even if you're a large enterprise – so this is something – this is a thought I had, actually, not too long ago, since joining Pivotal, is that if you are an enterprise and you're, you know, a high-level app dev leader and you're sort of in an ivory tower, I would probably suggest you talk to the analysts and the analyst firms who go to the developer conferences and are talking to developers and who know what's going on on the ground, you know. And in that case, you know, it's going to be Red Monk and it's going to be some of the Forrester guys for sure. They go to these events. I know that for a fact. I just – because I follow them on Twitter. Yeah. So follow them on Twitter and then you can get a sense. And so that's one of the things that I kind of think about is, again, if you're in an ivory tower, am I saying, you know, your listeners are, why would you want to talk to somebody else who's sitting in an ivory tower? You should be talking to the folks who are out there talking to your devs.

That's an interesting, helpful point in the sense of you can use analysts to jump down the hierarchy. And I guess it would go the other way, although usually if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, you don't have the funding to do it. But you can basically use it as a wormhole to, like, go up and down the kind of hierarchy. What are my developers doing? What are they thinking about? What are the new technologies that they're hot on? What makes them happy or productive, right? Those are the things that the folks, like I said, that are going to the developer conferences are learning. Yeah. Because they're not just talking to other people like you, right? Yeah. You know, who you're trying to differentiate yourself from. Yeah. Right? So that's one thing that I would consider when you're wondering. And then, for example, like Red Monk's model is they blog. They don't have – you know, you don't have paywalls. So you can always read their stuff for free, which is always wonderful. And they do webcasts, things like that. So – and then I think 451 also often publishes free research. Yeah. Some of their opinion pieces, they'll put them up for free for a little while. I know, like, there's a Nick Patience piece on digital transformation. Oh, yeah. That was free for a while. And that was really a great piece to read. It's like, why? Why do digital transformation? And it was a really good – you know, and anybody could download it for a little while. And same thing with Ovum. I think they also do – you know, Michael Azoff had written a piece about cognitive security. Actually, I think that's how he put it. Right. And it was also published as a column in a magazine. So there's ways to get access to the content they publish, you know, and they'll do that. But, yeah, like I said, I think it's – if you want to know what's going on, talk to the folks that are out there, not just talking to people like you. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, one more thing for you. So when they are talking to people not like them and they don't see someone they expect. So let's say you look at a wave, quadrant, triangle, whatever shape, and you don't see Pivotal. What are they supposed to do about that? Just go, meh, I didn't get – guess they get included? Or do I expect that – hey, you're allowed to call Gardner and say, hey, tell me a little more about why they weren't in there.

What criteria? How does that work? A new idea for you marketing folks. We'll make little stickers that we'll send out and you can just stick it in your printout. How about that? There you go. You can put the Pivotal name on the – stick down there. That reminds me of like a core, like a tiny little Annie pattern. I remember in multiple organizations people saying that they tell this to like field-facing people. It's like you cannot take a screenshot of the Magic Quadrant and put where you think you should be on it. Which happens to surprisingly – I'm sure. So one of the things actually – so with the wave, I don't know how they'll address this. Like the wave will sometimes mention – or Forrester will mention people who weren't in it for whatever reason, but who should be considered anyway. The Quadrant folks, what they're doing actually is there's something called Peer Insights, which is – for lack of a better term, it's like Yelp for IT. So if you are – if you like to write reviews, check out Peer Insights, all right? I think it's like Gartner slash reviews or Gartner.com slash reviews. And there's categories of – unfortunately, they don't have a category that we would fit in yet. Sure. It's coming any quarter now. So – and what they're doing is they're tying that to the Magic Quadrant. So if you're not a Gartner client, right, you don't have a subscription, but you want to know what your peers are saying about some of the technology platforms you check out Peer Reviews. So what they're doing is they're linking the MQs to the Peer Insights stuff. So if you are on the MQ, you click on the dot, and then that will take you to the peer – first it will pop up a little, like, oh, this is how many stars they have out of five. Then you can go and look at – but the cool thing is that will also take you to the Peer Insights page for that category. So if you're not in the MQ and you have enough reviews in that category, you can learn about that. So, for example, you know, they can – if they do end up, like, in the APAZ Peer Insights section, there might be a bunch of Pivotal reviews posted on there, and they can learn about Pivotal that way.

Even though we're not in the APAZ at the moment. Exactly. So, I mean, I'm just using that as an example. They don't have a PaaZ section in Peer Insights yet. Is that that company they bought? Like, there's – I even think maybe they're in Austin, but Gartner bought some company that was, like, a user review thing. I'll have to go look that up. Yeah, check that out. Yeah, so that's exciting. And I think it's actually – it was a good move for Gartner to do that. Yeah. Because they need to – how do they stay relevant, right? Like, back to the ivory tower conversation. Right. Well, you have anything else you want to tell our listeners about the exciting world of analysts? Well, something I've been thinking about specifically since joining Pivotal and just hearing the different kinds of conversations is that the industry analyst, they're – so for years, they would get calls asking about, like, feature-to-feature comparisons on things. And that's their easy black-and-white kind of thing. Okay. Yeah. But with these changing paradigms, right, of how to develop applications or run them, you know, cloud architectures, microservices, they're getting a lot more questions about culture, which, you know, is – I don't want to say that it's outside of their comfort zone, but it's not – they're not used to talking about those things, right? So these are new things. So this is – it's always interesting to see how they – what kind of advice they give in that, right? And they need – and the thing is, I think they just need to hear more from end-user organizations and customers about what – how they – the cultural changes they went through or what they had to do to get – to change the people in the process aspect of the – Yeah, that – I mean, it'd be interesting to compare, like, fuzzy thoughts on this, but, like, there's, like, the analysts who cover agile software development. Like, I think Forrester has a group specifically doing that. And I feel like I don't – if there's not a group, there's several analysts at Gartner who do that. And, like, it's kind of an interesting – because you could erroneously have that only be about tools that you could buy that you would be using during doing agile software development.

And I think some firms maybe fall into that trap. But, like, really, it kind of gets to this point of, like, there being industry analysts about how the industry is doing the work. I mean, and it is, like – Yeah, it's – But that – and maybe there's a few areas off in IT management land where there's, like, the ITEL people and stuff like that. But, yeah, you're right. Like, it's this – I don't commonly think, aside from what I was just saying, of analysts covering the how you use stuff so much. Yeah, and it's – this is why I think it's even more important for them to be talking to end-users. Yeah. As a matter of fact, right? Because it's not just, here, pick this tool because you need to do this. This is – they're hungrier even more now to hear how people have done it. So they can go back and say, here's how – and they don't have to name the company. But, hey, I talked to a large organization who had the same issue, and this is how they did it. Yeah. Right? And this is what they learned. So they're even more – I mean, an analyst we talked to today was, like, I don't care about tools. I want to hear about use cases. Yeah. So that's another thing that's been changing, and it's kind of fun to watch. Well, good. Well, great. Well, I'm sure we'll have you on in what will feel to be like a year. Another year. But maybe it'll just be six months, which will be great. I'm glad. It's always fun. I'm always nervous before these, and then I get on. I'm, like, this is great. That's right. But what's the next big analyst event we have coming up? Pop quiz for you. No. So nothing imminent. Like, I think, you know, end of year. There's kind of a pause until maybe spring or so. Yeah, I know. There's places like CES and, like, the Mobile World Congress that happens. Those are analyst-specific events. I think Red Monk's Monkey Gra is happening in March. So springtime. Oh, that's right. So I think Monkey – oh, no, wait. Monkey Gra is happening end of January in London. Oh, that's right. So that's happening, and we're sponsoring that, I believe. So that's – check out the website, and if you're an end user who likes to talk about what you're doing, check it out. Yeah. Submit a paper. That's another thing is, like, submit a paper. It's cool, like, especially for the Red Monk. Yeah, yeah. They always have great giveaways. Yeah, exactly. And then there's, yeah, and then there's, I think, a Data and Analytics Summit in March,

and then, you know, that's summertime. Keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Well, great. Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. You can find, as quickly as possible, rule one, you should subscribe. And then you'll get it right away. You can find that in iTunes or Overcast or wherever. And also, if you go to SoundCloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations, just all one word. I think you can capitalize it however you like. It's very entertaining. You're shouting. You can call caps. And then what, I always get it wrong. What's the URL we have, the official Pivotal one? Well, Pivotal.io slash blog. Yeah. Or podcast somewhere. We're not good at that. Just search for it. But that's where we post the full show notes that we keep alluding to. Yep. And also, like, if you like this podcast, or even if you don't like it, you should do the following. You should go into iTunes and give us, like, five stars or, like, leave a review. And in your review, you can talk about how you like to work with analysts, you know, your thoughts on them, and also just that we're a great podcast. Or if you're listening in Overcast, as most people are, I have no idea what this actually does, but you should just open it up and click the little recommended button. I don't know what that does, but it looks great. So thanks for listening, and we'll see everyone next time.

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