>> Narrator: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts.
It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
(light techno music)
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage
of the Red Hat Summit
here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts.
I am your host, Rebecca Knight.
I'm here with my co-host, Dave Vellante.
Joining us is Marco Bill-Peter.
He is the vice president of
customer experience and engagement at Red Hat.
Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> So I want to start out by talking about
your management philosophy,
and your philosophy really of what you do.
Because that is just so core
to the Red Hat experience for customers.
I noticed that you changed the name,
it's no longer Customer Support,
it is Customer Experience and Engagement.
Do you want to talk a little bit about
why you made that switch?
>> Yeah, I think, well yes, it would be awesome, yeah.
I mean the name reflects actually, in my opinion,
also the business model from Red Hat,
which is you take an open-source development model,
you develop the products,
you actually sell them as a subscription.
But there's no license behind it,
which is the amazing business model, right?
That there's no lock-in, right?
The customer can buy it, they can use it,
if we don't provide the value,
then shame on us, they can move on.
And so that's where the customer experience has to be good.
That they really see, hey, I got something from Red Hat,
I'm coming back, I will renew this.
And the engagement is as well, it's the part,
one is like, experience was great
and engagement is, we got to engage them, right?
Because shame on us if we didn't engage a customer
in during their journey during that year
of subscription life that they have,
or three-year, whatever it is.
That is the, I think it's the business model,
but it's also my philosophy, which is,
I used to work for proprietary companies
and running support or customer success functions.
There you make the money on the license
and the maintenance is, basically,
I always call it janitorial services.
This way our model is different, so that's why
I also report through Paul Cormier,
it's integrated in technologies.
It's maybe not the philosophy,
but it's our philosophy really, the customer,
it's not a joke, it's customer is in the center.
And if they are successful, yes, they will come back,
they will buy more, they will renew.
But it's an honest model.
And so that's why we changed the name for various reasons.
I also, we looked at other functions at Red Hat,
and said, "Which one is really about customer experience?"
And security, for example, is in my team, right?
It's not just support, because security is a big element
of our value that we provide.
And so that's why we expanded the team,
changed the name to kind of reflect that.
>> You mention Paul Cormier and we're actually,
he's going to be joining us later today too.
And he was talking about how the design process
is really led by customers
in this new era of cloud computing.
>> Marco: Yeah.
>> Talk a little bit about what it's like
to collaborate with customers in these products.
>> Yeah, it's really good.
I can give you an example from the innovation
award winners this week.
We have, like, for example, British Columbia,
the government of British Columbia,
and they start on this journey and they wanted to create
this, I would say, exchange for partners that they have,
companies to kind of provide some services
and make it easier for them.
And they started on a journey and it didn't go well.
And shame on whoever was involved in that.
But then we got involved.
I was like, okay, that's what you're trying to solve.
We got one of my guys actually flew out there,
spent a few weeks out there.
He was like, oh, this is the problem,
let's build it differently.
Then Ashesh Badani from the open-shift team got involved
and we realized, okay, what they're trying to do is this,
change the product, adjust it.
There's one example from last year's
innovation award winner.
We had Betfair.
It's a horse-race company in England.
Same thing, they wanted to really innovate a data center
in a complete, like, software-defined way.
And having that collaboration with us directly
and the upstream communities, but then also with partners,
like in that case it was
a software-defined network provider,
to get involved and really build the solutions.
It's a whole different way.
And if you go back a few years when we just did Linux,
that maybe didn't really happen
because it was more Linux was driven by the community.
And now I think it's honestly good to see
because it's customers involved,
there's still a lot of partners involved and
there is a strong community and that whole thing
working together is pretty cool to see.
>> There's a saying that I like.
It's customer satisfaction is one thing,
customer loyalty is everything.
And you live in a world where
customer loyalty really is everything.
Describe, you mentioned before your previous company,
what's the innovation experience and total customer
experience like now and how do you innovate versus the way
a traditional company might innovate in customer experience?
>> I think traditional companies, they innovate around,
since it's a maintenance budget,
we've got to save costs, right?
That's their take.
It's like, save costs, deflect cases,
deflect customers basically, right?
And our model is the opposite, right?
If I start deflecting customers
that's kind of the negative of engagement, right?
So pushing back customers that actually
they see value if they have interaction so
that's where we look at it completely different.
We innovate around, you know,
like two years ago when we talked about we presented
Red Hat insights, the tooling that basically
out of our customer support cases we provide back
to our customers a connection that
they know, hey, this might happen.
That's one piece that,
you saw it probably at the keynote today,
it's integrated in our products now, right?
And so that's one piece we innovate around.
Support is not seen as an afterthought.
It's like, how do we build this into our tooling?
So insights was a good example as an innovation.
We did a lot of workflow changes,
which sounds very technical but
really to provide more value back to the customers.
So it's called a knowledge center support approach that
you really basically take what customers provide you,
rephrase that and provide it back as a documentation.
If you run into this situation,
and it can be a support situation,
but it can also an innovation situation,
they want to build something new,
you provide that back in the form of documentation
customer form. >> One of the other
things that's changed in the last two years
is this explosion of artificial intelligence,
some people call it cognitive,
and we saw the kickoff video this morning how,
and we talked about this a little bit
a couple of years ago, how you're going to use data
to improve customer experiences and now we're here.
How are you using data and insights and analytics
to improve the customer service?
>> Analytics, I think, we started in a way in a
traditional way, right?
You have data and then you've got to figure out the data
and then you kind of just create rules out of it.
If this and this happen you do this.
Call it AI, sounds cool, but basically it's rules matching.
This happens, that.
Now I think it's detecting the trends more automatically
that's more done in, I would say, in more real AI.
That's where we are.
I would say the last year we spent more time
figuring out, hey, how do we, instead of trying manually
find the trends to actually automatically find them.
And I think there is,
I just gave an interview a few weeks in Japan where
AI is a really hot topic,
I think we're just scratching the surface.
You saw it in autonomous driving but I think
in support there's so much more to do in this area as well.
>> When I asked you, you know, about juxtaposing
Red Hat versus, say, a traditional software company
it would seem like cutting costs was in conflict with
innovating for customer experience
but when I hear you speak about AI,
is it possible there's a relationship between the two?
That you can actually improve customer service
and cut costs?
>> Absolutely, but you want to do it in a good way.
You want to do it in a way that it provides
value back to the customer.
If you do it an way, hey, we've cut out
this and this things, then the customer just gets
a lousy experience.
That doesn't, I think that doesn't even work for
a traditional company or proprietary company any more.
That whole old, no, there's other companies that
do autodeflection, right?
But I think if you actually optimize the experience
in a way that also the customer sees,
hey, this is actually great value, right?
If you just optimize things and the customer experience
is great, you might actually create a situation
where customer doesn't see value, right?
Like in the old days,
we had a lot of customers saying, hey,
I never had the support case,
why should I pay you guys?
So, you know, obviously you can talk about
that's great you didn't have a support case,
but a customer paying a few millions and
they only had one support case is a tough recovery.
Today, not AI, but a lot of data is
we can tell the customer, yeah, you had one support case,
but look at all the tools you used in the customer portal,
all the interactions you have.
We have a nice dashboard we can present back to a customer.
And, I'll give you, if you have a minute
>> Yeah, please. a story quickly
of a CTO from a bank that, a few years we met,
and then he said, "Oh, Red Hat, you guys are good."
That was in a bar.
"You guys are good but, you know, I don't really need
"your support, Marco.
"My guys, they know how to do things."
And so, I was like, okay.
So in the evening I went back to the hotel,
looked at the dashboard
and then realized his story was maybe not as realistic.
Next day, I see him again and show him the dashboard.
And support was involved.
There was documentation in use.
I showed him back, I was like look at this,
this is the value we provide you.
And out of that came a whole different discussion,
as in we do it annually now,
and we looked at this data and he sees trends.
He sees like, "Oh, my Latin America bank,
"they still use this and this.
"My North America team does that and that."
And it's a whole different discussion.
It's awesome, right, that they realize from
the data we have there is a lot of value that
he can change his operation.
That's a short example.
>> I want to talk to you about security.
You mentioned this earlier in our conversation.
The era of cloud computing is maturing
and we are seeing now customers caring more about
compliance and governance and management.
What are the big concerns
that you're hearing from customers?
>> Obviously the big concern is still
the traditional vulnerabilities, right?
If there is a security hole, how do we fix it?
How quickly fix it?
Do we have the right data that we provide back
as a customer realizes,
is this a security hole I need to worry about or not.
And that's what we do, we kind of focus on,
we have a pretty large security team, I think,
for the size we are because of the open-source model.
So they're involved in a lot of the communities.
So we provide fast response and we also provide response
not just with a security fix
but also with information about,
hey, this is why you should worry or this
is why you shouldn't worry.
'Cause sometimes the press creates this frenziness about,
hey, pick your favorite name of a security hole,
Heartbleed, et cetera.
And for some customers it doesn't really matter because
in their environment this is not a real scenario, right?
And so we provide the patch,
we provide data or documentation,
but then also tooling that they can figure out
are we exposed or not.
That's one of the things.
The other problem is in containers, right?
You have these containers.
You build the containers from everywhere.
To actually realize, hey, is this container also
compliant with security is a big topic.
We just released, released, or we will release this week,
it's not a secret, the container catalog,
with actually a scoring that actually says,
yes, this container is quality A, B.
Kind of a freshness score.
>> Ah, a ratings system. >> Yeah, rating.
And this is a huge effort for every company
and we do it as well, as in how do we keep
these containers updated, right?
Because you, if you build a container from application
to middleware down to the operating system,
you've got to worry about a lot of security.
>> It's a fresh date.
>> Yeah, it's like expiration date.
>> A sell-by date.
>> And that's what we do actually.
We have an expiration date but
depending on security hole, that just changes.
>> So we were talking to John Hodgson who
was at the keynote as well and he was telling us,
and he mentioned this in the keynote,
that he went from 17 developers in 2009 to 1,600 today.
He was talking about that a lot of them
are kids right out of college and we were talking about how
you have to treat millennials differently and
give them flexible time.
And, Rebecca, you were talking about a new way to work
at the beginning of our segments today.
So how is that new way to work
affect the customer experience
and what are you guys doing in that regard?
>> I mean obviously, like you say, right,
there's a whole new generation coming
and I actually think the new generation,
they're actually a pretty sensitive customer experience.
I think they're growing up in a different age of
like digital age so, and social media as well,
so actually I was worried that the new generation maybe,
but I have to say, I think contrary, right?
So that's good.
So I don't think customer experience will suffer.
What will change is, like, you can't have people,
you know, we don't have it, but like call centers,
if you have a little farm for everybody.
That just ain't going to fly anymore, right?
And so that's where we got to adjust.
We don't do call centers, but we got to just adjust, like,
how is the office done, where is it, and things like that.
But it's, I think, I'm not too worried about that.
>> And mobile is huge for you guys obviously, right?
The mobile trend.
And there's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about, you know,
what's next beyond mobile.
How we, this is not how we're going to interface with
our two thumbs in the future.
It's going to be voice and,
you have to be careful not to over-rotate either, right,
because you could ruin the customer experience.
Do you do that type of advanced, you know, research in
total customer experience?
>> Yeah, we do research.
We actually also research how do they interact with us.
You know, mobile is always a topic but
our customers aren't engaging as mobile.
You know, like it's, I mean-- >> You say they're not?
>> They're not, no. >> They're out there.
>> You know, our portal is all mobile enabled so
you could go with it, but mostly it's still laptops,
notebooks, et cetera, that they're using to engage us.
So we haven't really invested a lot in that,
but we invest in the digital experience, right,
so make it easier, provide the tooling,
don't force a customer to jump through, like, hoops
to find something out.
Give them the tool to find out.
They want to self-solve a lot, right?
Which goes back in the old discussion,
is that deflection?
But if a self-solve tool helps you,
I think customers see, hey, this is value from Red Hat.
>> If they can do it themselves, yeah.
>> Marco: If they can and they can learn something, right?
That part is good.
>> Well thank you so much for joining us,
Marco Bill-Peter, who is the vice-president,
customer experience and engagement, at Red Hat.
I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante,
thank you so much for joining us
and we'll be back after this break.
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