>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE!
Covering Boomi World 19.
(futuristic music)
Brought to you by Boomi.
>> Welcome to theCUBE,
Lisa Martin at Boomi World 19 in Washington, D.C.
I'm with John Furrier,
and John and I are pleased to welcome
to theCUBE Jason Maynard,
the SVP of global field operations from NetSuite.
Jason, welcome.
>> Thanks for having me here.
It's great to be in D.C. and on theCUBE.
>> It is, we were just talking about baseball
so we'll have to park that for a second
and talk about some other sexy stuff
besides baseball, ERP.
So, NetSuite, I saw you on stage this morning.
You guys have been a partner of,
the first alliance partner with Boomi, for about 12 years.
Thousands of joint customers, candy.com is one of 'em.
They're going to be on later today
so I'm excited to have my afternoon sugar rush.
>> Jason: Make sure he brings a big bag of candy for ya.
>> Oh, you got it.
So, talk to us about, you guys were also, I noticed,
Boomi's 2019 Alliance Partner of the Year.
Lots of innovations going on.
Give our audience a little bit of an overview
of what NetSuite is doing with Boomi.
>> Great, so Boomi has been one of our longest partners,
I think I said.
I think we first inked the partnership in 2007,
so it goes back 12, 13 years.
When we sell ERP, you always end up having to connect
to a legacy on-prem system, right?
Or you may have to connect to new marketplaces to sell,
and so there's always need for integration.
And so from day one,
Boomi wanted to really kind of push the envelope,
work with cloud players.
You know, when we started NetSuite 20 years ago
it was kind of crazy
to put business applications on the internet,
and they've been there from day one with us, really,
on this journey, and so they've been a great partner
to sort of help all those customers migrate
and move their business to the cloud.
>> You guys had success with Boomi on the customer front.
Can you unpack that a little bit
because the customer equation around data is interesting.
You guys have turned this into an opportunity with NetSuite.
Talk about how that works.
>> Yeah, I mean, look.
Every customer needs to get more insight out of their data,
and the ERP system is one of the major hubs
in any organization, right?
You've got a handful of system of records, right,
and core financials is one of the main systems record.
And inevitably every customer will have
probably 15, 20 legacy data sources
that are going to be necessary for an ERP.
And so for us, working with Boomi across
not just the US but across the globe
with a lot of different international customers,
it's a natural fit because we're not obviously going to be
connecting with all the systems that they're touching today,
it brings a lot more value of data into NetSuite
which obviously then helps our customer out.
>> So you guys were, you said, an early partner of Boomi
back in 2007 when they were founded.
We got to speak with Rick Nucci yesterday.
So, one of the interesting things that we talk about,
and John even pointed this out yesterday, is, you know,
they took a big bet, Boomi did, way back then,
with building this architecture
that's pretty unique to this day.
This single instance, multi-tenant cloud application.
Take us back to,
'cause obviously NetSuite's been around longer,
you have a lot of choice,
there are more iPaaS vendors out there.
What is it about the way that Boomi is architected
that is enabling your customers to achieve so much success,
but also really that you guys saw back in '07
to think this is something that's going to be a real big
opportunity for NetSuite.
>> It's been an interesting ride because
if you go back, even to '07,
and even maybe eight or nine years ago,
it was not a foregone conclusion
with a lot of technology vendors
that the world was going to shift to the cloud.
Right, There were a lot of server huggers out there,
there still are. >> Server hugger. (laughs)
>> They still want to hug the space,
they want to hug the machine, right?
And so it's important, I think,
that we work with partners who have the same true north
in terms of where we think the technology is going,
and I think that alignment which is, you know,
we're 100% in the cloud, always have been, always will be,
Boomi shared that vision early on
so it was easier to make a bet then
with a vendor who was going to have that commitment.
And so that's been to their credit,
the vision that they've had for obviously years now,
and I think it's what's helped them grow so quickly.
>> And one the things that you observed, obviously,
is that the customers have choices,
but the world's software is changing, right?
I mean, cloud has changed
the software development lifecycle.
I mean, just in past decade alone the business has changed.
You're still going to the system of records, okay,
but with containers, and now Kubernetes,
and some of these cloud-native opportunities,
there's more flexibility in how people are deploying
legacy and or core apps.
So they're not getting thrown away
as everyone had predicted.
So, I mean, there were some pundits saying,
well, everyone's going to move to the cloud,
and, not really. (laughs)
>> Well, look, it's a good point because there's,
packaged applications are not the entirety
of the application market, as you know.
Custom application development will never go away.
You will always have things that are custom.
People build apps on NetSuite, right,
things that are very close to ERP
you'll build on the NetSuite platform.
But there are things that are not native to our platform
that need to connect to NetSuite.
And there are customers that we share
who have legacy COBOL applications, for example,
and they may need to put a wrapper around that
and get certain forms into NetSuite.
So, it really does run the gamut
and so it'll never be one thing.
We just sort of, In the technology industry,
we never go from 100 to zero
in terms of what's deployed in the legacy.
We sort of layer and compost technology
and I think that's what's happening,
and so we'll replace certain systems.
We go in and we pretty much always replace
an on-prem system,
but there are a lot of on-prem technologies that
will never go away.
>> I was digging around about Boomi and you guys, NetSuite,
looking at some of the use cases,
one of the things that caught my eye was
the classic growth startup, for instance.
Might be born in the cloud, never have an IT department.
They have kind of a hacked together system of record,
HR and ERP kind of things.
But at some point, they got to grow,
and they hit a growth spurt
and they just become rapid growth, eventually goes public.
You guys have had good success with Boomi
in these kinds of startups.
It's pretty normal, you've seen this before.
Can you talk about that dynamic 'cause at some point
people have got to start establishing formal,
the systems, applications,
you're going to need payroll, you're going to need HR.
I mean, this is blocking and tackling.
You guys have been successful there.
>> We like to think about we can be
the first system that you'll ever need,
and hopefully we'll be the last system
that you'll ever need.
And what ends up happening is we've architected NetSuite
to let you start small
and then add more functionality as you grow.
So you may start with just basic financials.
You may add quarter management,
move into full-fledged ERP.
Maybe you're going to use our HR system down the road.
And so we kind of stairway a customer through their journey.
Boomi does the same thing.
Maybe you start with two connectors, right,
you're just connecting two basic applications into NetSuite,
and then you evolve into something more sophisticated where,
as you saw today in some of the technology demos,
where they're tapping in to all sorts of different systems
that are not even ERP or CRM, it's, you know,
IoT and just all sorts of different insights
that they can bring from the different technologies, so.
>> A better together message is legit and this works.
>> Yeah, look, technology is all about
coopetition these days, right?
Every vendor, in some way we overlap.
Boomi's owned by Dell, NetSuite's owned by Oracle.
We're all sort of interlocked in one way or another,
but ultimately we have to work together
because we share so many customers.
And so, customers don't have the patience,
and nor should they,
for any of the sort of the vendor warfare,
and I think that's the cool thing
that's evolved with technology standards.
It's easy for us to work together,
and we have to do it, and we want to do it,
because it's what's the right thing for the customer.
>> Let's talk about NetSuite as a launching pad
for a lot of tech IPOs in the last few years.
Give us your perspectives on
what you guys started to recognize
as a lot of these tech companies have kind of,
that's why it just seems to me like NetSuite
has been this sort of launch pad for that.
Talk to us about what you've achieved there.
>> We're really humbled by the fact that
more tech companies go public on NetSuite
than frankly on any other ERP system.
We helped invent the industry early on, 20 years ago.
Evan Goldberg and Larry had the famous
four minute phone call to, you know,
kind of crazily, idea to put business apps on the web.
And so we've been at the forefront of this.
But it's not just technology, it's, you know,
we were a subscription business from day one.
We didn't sell a license with maintenance,
we sold a subscription.
So, I think a lot of customers look at us and say,
okay, they've been through the journey that we have.
We went public 12 years ago.
We scaled past a billion dollars in sales.
We got acquired.
So the journey that we've been on,
most of our customers are going to be on that journey
in one form or another.
We've made acquisitions, our customers make acquisitions.
So, we tried, and this was sort of the genius of what
Evan and the team built,
is a system that can handle any business model.
So whether you're selling time as a service,
whether you're selling time,
you're selling a subscription, you're selling a widget.
Maybe you're going to sell a widget as a service in the future,
we can kind of handle any of the business models.
And most of the IPOs are innovative companies that
innovate not just with what they sell
but in how they sell it.
>> Talk about some stories from the field
that you've seen out there,
anecdotally share some current situation.
What are customers going through right now,
enterprises, as they go through their, quote, journeys,
they realize cloud's there,
they got some stuff on-premise they're going to keep there.
There's obviously certain reasons,
you're going to run payroll in the cloud,
you're going to have to have multi-tenants.
These are a lot of the use cases
that cloud's not that straightforward
when you start thinking about having an enterprise
in a hybrid mode of operations.
What are some of the customers feeling?
What's the mindset?
What's their architecture look like?
What are some examples can you share?
>> Yeah, you know, I would say three things come to mind.
So first off, it's this business model innovation.
The on-prem systems tend to lock you in to a model.
And then there's nothing,
when they were built they were innovative
15, 20, 30 years ago.
Most companies' business models have outgrown
that legacy system so they need to move off that
to enable some new thing that they want to do.
So that's a big driver.
I think the other thing is globalization is here to stay.
Whether you're in the United States,
or you're in the UK, or you're in Asia,
we're one interconnected global economy.
And so you may source from Asia,
you may design in California,
you may do nearshore assembly in Mexico,
and then you do omnichannel distribution.
So, you have to be global.
And I would say the thing that's changed
in the last 10 years is
companies are being global from day one.
It's not just something you add on
five, seven, eight years down the road.
You see companies design for being global.
And I think those two things,
business model innovation, global,
are big catalysts right now.
>> Okay, so one more thing real quick,
so we had a CUBE alumni, said on theCUBE,
data's the new software.
So if you've got a global business, data's critical,
as the data needs to be acted upon.
You got policy, you got regulations, regulatory issues,
personal privacy stuff, company policy.
As you have this global layer of data,
making it available, addressable,
across multiple systems, is a huge task.
What's your view on that?
>> It's an interesting question
'cause we think if it in kind of three pillars.
We give you visibility, we give you control,
and then we give you the agility.
First off you've got to have visibility into the data,
you need to know what's happening.
Like, how much did we sell in the
Australian subsidiary yesterday?
You need to have controls.
If you're a CFO you need to have global financial controls.
You may have sold a lot in Australia,
better make sure you're not spending too much.
How do you manage that?
And then ultimately, the agility
is how do you make a decision on that.
And so those three things I think all play into it.
>> And how does the consumerization affect, impact,
visibility, control, agility,
'cause as consumers we have this expectation,
whether in our personal lives,
we can get anything we want within a couple of clicks.
So when you're talking to a tech,
whether it's a young tech company,
or even not a tech company, candy.com,
which seems like a mixture.
You and I were talking before
of a number of different industries all in one.
How has NetSuite evolved to enable
that consumer to go from their personal life
to being able to interact with ERP
and extract the value from it
in the ways that they want, anywhere, anytime.
>> Let's be honest for a second,
ERP kind of got a dirty reputation in the '90s.
Nobody loved their ERP implementations.
Books have been written on this, right?
(hosts laughing)
ERP, it was like going,
like a bad trip to the dentist's office in the '90s,
and that was sort of the catalyst for our company.
But that's not enough, just to be in the cloud.
You have to make your user experience consumer-grade.
We always talk about enterprise-grade,
it's all the ilities, reliability, scalability,
all that kind of stuff, that's sort of a given,
like, you have to do that.
But I think you have to adopt the consumer-grade.
So, we spend a lot of time, and we're doing a lot more,
and we're going to be rolling out some new stuff
around user interface and just,
how easy is it to have a dashboard on your phone
so that you can run your business from your smartphone
versus actually having to be tethered to the desktop,
because we're all mobile, we're all traveling.
You're a business owner, you're a CFO, you're a CEO.
You need to be connected, maybe you're too connected,
maybe we have screen time problems with business.
>> We definitely do.
>> If we can give our customers screen time addiction
to watch their business in real time,
I guess that's a good thing, right?
And so we want to be able to make sure that they can
have all that insight at their fingertips,
whether they're in the office or at the beach.
>> And speaking of insight, talk to us about Brainyard.
What that is, why you developed it, and what it's enabling.
>> Yeah, thank you, I was hoping you were going to ask me.
It's my secret, but not so secret anymore, pet project.
So one of the things,
being in the cloud we have 18,000 customers.
We have a single instance of NetSuite,
and so we've had the unique seat at the table
to see all these different companies grow
in all these different industries.
We evolved into selling by industry.
So we have a retail version, a software version,
a manufacturing, nonprofit, 12, 13 different industries.
What we had in that is we had
all these insights, by industry.
What is the right DSO number for a software company?
What is the thing that a nonprofit needs to look at?
And so we had, trapped inside of NetSuite,
all these brains sitting, and all this information,
and PowerPoint, and Word docs, and just everywhere.
And so we decided to crack the hood open
and literally open source that information
and put it on the website.
And so, there's a subtle message here, is that,
we have to do more than just sell bits.
We're ultimately selling customer success,
or a business outcome, whatever you want to call it.
So we need to transfer that knowledge to our customers
so they can run their business better.
So, it's our investment back into the customer saying,
hey, you know what, if you're a software company
and your DSO is at this level,
best in class is actually, you know,
five days lower on a days sales outstanding,
how do you get your business to close that gap?
And that's where we can really add value.
>> I mean, comps, people love comparables,
and best practices.
You're essentially taking that heavy lifting work
and just giving it up there.
>> It's benchmarking, it's analysis.
I was a former Wall Street analyst
so this one's near and dear to my heart,
which is comparison.
How is company doing verse that company?
And so we have lots of data
that we've gleaned over the years, lots of insight,
so we kind of know what those best practices are.
This is just the first phase of what we're doing.
We're working with a lot of partners across the industry
to give us some of their industry data,
so we kind of mash it up and come up with the insights, so--
>> As an analyst, I'd love to get your thoughts real quick,
and take that NetSuite hat off,
put your industry participant hat on.
Lot of Wall Street challenges around.
WeWork pulled their IPO, their gross profit was down,
other SaaS businesses have huge margins,
they're successful, Zoom's public.
There's a new formula developing in this
cloud 2.0 world, software world,
where the dynamic between classic software
and software economics in the cloud are changing.
What's your thoughts on this
for startups out there and growing companies
that are really looking to crack the code,
buy at all costs, and then monetize, get the margins up.
What's your analysis?
>> This is an area that I think a lot of companies
raise too much capital.
We've been in this very unique environment
over the last kind of eight or nine years
where I'd argue a lot of startups have been overfunded.
And when you have overfunding you chase growth
without any limit on terms of the cost,
and what you see is you sort of distort the reality
of what's happening in the business.
And so, I would argue that we've had
basically free money in terms of access to capital,
and we've lost track of some of the basics
that you need to build a profitable, sustainable business.
So, when I was up working on Wall Street,
you couldn't go public if you weren't within, say,
four quarters of cash flow break-even.
Those are some of the things that we used to have.
You've seen, you know.
>> John: Business fundamentals. (laughs)
>> Yeah, I mean, so what's happening right now,
I think it's mean reversion, honestly.
I think you're seeing the public markets,
if you will, veto some of the frothiness
that's been in the private markets.
And so, this is, I think companies--
>> The marketplace is due, that's what they, that's their.
>> It's fantastic, it's a self-correcting mechanism, right?
Just 'cause you marked up your last round
when you were private to a gajillion dollars
(John laughs)
doesn't mean that the by side
on the pension fund is going to want to pay that.
>> WeWork, see, you can't be high and run a business (laughs)
you know, as we were saying.
>> Jason: People are trying, though.
(hosts laughing)
God bless 'em, they're trying.
But it's probably not the best practice.
I would not recommend it. (laughs)
>> Lisa: That's good advice.
>> John: Not a good look for Wall Street.
>> It's really not, it's really not.
>> If you can get on the Joe Rogan show, though,
knock yourself out.
(Lisa laughs)
>> John: If you're Elon, you could do it, but, you know.
>> He's the only one we're going to let, so.
>> I dunno, I think it's a practice that probably shouldn't
be publicly aired too much.
Unless you want something to laugh at, and you know what,
in this economy I think we all need that.
Jason, thank you for sharing with us
what you're doing at NetSuite with Boomi.
The insights that you guys are opening up with Brainyard.
So from Brainyard,
let's go back to the other yard that I promised,
the baseball yard.
You're a Dodger fan, Giants fan.
Hats off, you guys are there, we are not,
so I will say good luck to your team.
We appreciate your time--
>> I'm an LA guy, what can I say?
>> Lisa: All right, I'll give it to ya.
All right, we'll it's been a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you for your time. >> Thank you so much.
Appreciate it, thanks.
>> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin.
You are watching theCUBE from Boomi World 19.
Thanks for watching.
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