Mobile First

VMware delivers digital transformation by starting from the outside, in. Starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways to deliver strategic outcomes.

Our Guest

Robin Matlock joined VMware in July 2009 and serves as senior vice president and chief marketing officer. Bringing more than 25 years of marketing experience in the enterprise software and services sector, Matlock is playing a leadership role in positioning VMware as a market leader in Mobile Cloud. As CMO, Matlock is a key member of VMware’s Executive Leadership team responsible for leading all aspects of the Global Marketing organization, which includes Corporate Marketing, Partner, Segment and Field Marketing.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:As a marketer, Robin believes that it’s all about your personal brand. At an early age, she had already figured out that you have to differentiate yourself. Case at hand was the time when she ran for student council despite the fact that nobody knew her because she was new. She broke out from the rest by doing a skit, which nobody ever did during those days, and she ended up winning. If you want to stand out from the crowd, she learned that you have to be courageous and do something a little different. All these braveness came from her mom as she loved the stage and encouraged her to be bold and creative.In her heart of hearts, Robin is a business person. She loves the dimensions and complexities of growing a business and she finds marketing as a culmination of all the input and how you formulate a strategy basing on these. If you are not grounded in the business, you can be creative and cool but you will not be relevant.Robin started with Sales but segued into business development. From there, she went on to product management and then into the traditional broad-based marketing.VMware is an enterprise software company focused on large companies deliver IT services extremely efficiently. There are three big themes that they are focused on: cloud computing; mobility; and risk, reputation and security. VMware empowers IT organizations to help cause digital transformations by severing complexities of physical hardware, software and application environments and make it almost push-button simple.Digital transformation is not just a marketing ploy. It is very real and is happening right underneath our feet. Take Uber and Airbnb, for example – the concept of building a completely new industry using software is disrupting entire industries by thinking experience through software. This is digital transformation and in order to make this happen, you have to have the thirst and curiosity to transform, in general. Waiting for another person to figure it out is a sure way for you to be obsolete five years from now. You must think about how technologies change your business model as we are all impacted.Bringing about digital transformation in your business, you need to start from the outside in. It starts with your customer then with your strengths. Think about these two, listen and open your mind so you can find opportunities and think about new ways on how to go about this.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Our Guest

Mike Fletcher is the General Manager of InComm Digital Solutions, leading a team of 140 employees who are focused on providing digital and physical gift card fulfillment and services for InComm’s mobile, incentive, reward and e-commerce partners. InComm Digital Solutions powers digital and physical gift cards services for hundreds of leading bands in North America and abroad.

Prior to his role at InComm, Mike was co-Founder and CMO of Giftango. Giftango was a pioneer of digital gift cards and developed the industry leading digital gifting platform for the incentive, loyalty, reward and mobile application industries and served customers in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia. Giftango was acquired by InComm in December 2012. Prior to Giftango, Mike was COO of Point West Credit Union. He spent time analyzing mobile payment initiatives on behalf of the Credit Union industry as part of the Filene i3 program.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Mike loves learning and new challenges and one of the things which excite him is complex problems and the end-to-end process of those complex problems. The notion of seeing an opportunity to fix something and improve lives or processes; and putting together a vision, chasing after it and taking it to fruition is something of interest to him. He also loves growth so it is exciting for him to work with bright people and help them in their professional growth. Customer experience and making lives better through the things that they are working on is definitely also among the list of his passions.

Mike has shown entrepreneurial skills as early as 12 years old when he mowed lawns and discovered the need for marketing. At the age of 16, he started a company pulling out carpets and prepping floors, which led to a slightly more complex process of the business after that. The understanding of the importance of how each facet of the task tie up together and how, if they work together, it will all end right, fascinated him ever since.

He started out his career in the Athletics Department at Portland State University and moved on to Operations because of his interest in customer experience. From here, he stepped into the Credit Union space and was also talked into joining a start-up called Giftango. This was his entry into the Financial / Technology sector where he learned more about technology. Giftango was acquired by InComm back in 2012 and this is where he is today.  

InComm is the technology and the distribution company behind gift cards. When you walk up and take a gift card off of a rack from a store, it doesn’t have any value on it yet. It will only have one once you pay for it and it gets swiped at the point of sale. InComm is both the distribution marketing and the technology company which makes all these stuff work. They have 500k points of distribution and have tremendous global reach with over 35 countries on the physical side. Now, think of this same concept except that it’s in a digital space – whether it’s an app, a website, or some kind of digital consumer experience such as redeeming your points gained from credit cards. This, now, is InComm Digital.

InComm Digital’s primary product is their API (application program interface). Their customers build their own tools or user interface and through their API, they can communicate with InComm and ask them to create a specific action.

They are growing very rapidly and scalability is one of the things that they are focusing on. Because of the different models that they serve, there are always new opportunities on the ways they can help refine the tools to solve business problems. One of the things that they are excited about in line with company growth is the open loop side of the business which means Visa, MasterCard, and American Express-type of gift cards which can be sold digital for a variety of reasons. It’s not a mature process as of yet but they are spending a tremendous time surrounding this project.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Our Guest

It’s no accident Katharine found her way to Ruby. Her career has focused on working for companies that value and support human connections, including roles in product management at Ancestry.com and AAA. Her desire to restore the human connection in our increasingly technological world comes with a top-notch pedigree, including a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Oxford University. She brings the perfect combination of passion and experience to lead the evolution of Ruby’s product and service.   

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Katharine has worked with technology for most of her career and is fascinated with the challenge of taking technology, which is usually a way of taking the human element out of processes and experiences, into something that we can use to smartly expand the reach of meaningful human connection as opposed to completely eliminating them. Her passion for technology is has evolved from an early start in childhood, and has always been interested in computers and future tech. Her father, a computer engineer, always had the latest equipment at home. She followed that passion by taking Computer Science, then becoming a software engineer at Hewlett Packard. Now, he is keenly interested in how we can use technology to shape customer experience and broaden connections between people.Katharine is keenly interested in the decision-making process inside organizations -- which drove her to attain her Masters in Business Administration. During her stay at Oxford with students of different nationalities, she learned how to manage business at an international scale. Fascinated by observing trends in different countries, she sought to understand how technology is used in different countries. So much of this is driven by culture and for her, this was the turning point in discovering her passion for understanding how factors such as people and the culture impact how systems, technologies, products, and services are being developed.Ruby Receptionists is a remote service which provides personalized live, virtual receptionist services to thousands of small businesses throughout North America including Canada and a few in Puerto Rico. As these are real people answer the phones, this allows them to make great impressions and allow these small businesses never to miss a call. Their data show that 60% – 70% of callers hang up if they get a voicemail greeting or not get a live person or having a human being pick up the phone really helps businesses grow and capture these opportunities.The secret to their success boils down to hiring the right people for the job. What their co-founder quickly learned: the culture where your employees work has a direct impact on how they deliver service to their customers. Due to this, they have a line of recognition programs and activities designed to ensure that this motivation is maintained by putting them in an environment where happiness is fostered and where they are encouraged to grow and thrive.Ruby has grown from 200 employees to 400+ in the last two years and some the challenges that they are facing right now are those things which actually worked for them when they were smaller. Some of their processes are no longer scaling and are getting brittle so their focus for their organization this year and the next is upgrading their systems and figuring out how to integrate them.  Ruby launched a mobile app but it did not deliver the desired outcome and went defunct. As an industry leader, Ruby’s primary focus is to improve customer-facing applications and create a seamless experience. They are also completely re-architecting their back end such as moving things to the cloud. Kath believes that with the new customer-facing website plus the new mobile app, they can really go deep on the customer journey and will see how pieces interact with each other to allow them to deliver more value.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Peter is a well-known industry expert in eCommerce and omnichannel technology, having previously held the role of Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research where he spent 5 years leading Forrester’s global research on digital commerce technologies, helping to challenge the thinking and lead change for eCommerce executives undertaking major digital transformation and commerce technology programs. Today, Peter leads corporate strategy and business development for Magento.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:Peter is passionate about digital disruptions so he gets excited if he has opportunities to deliver innovations that completely disrupt the way we do things. It’s all about making life simpler, removing friction, and making experiences seamless and intuitive as there are still a lot of day-to-day things which we really do not need to go through. What gets him up in the morning is thinking of new ways to leverage technology to make lives more efficient. Peter had a Bachelor’s Degree in Manufacturing, Engineering, and Control Systems so he left the university thinking that he wanted to be a mechanical or manufacturing engineer and build things. However when he walked through the Ford plants, it became clear that manufacturing wasn’t for him. E-commerce was emerging and Peter involved himself into a big, high profile project at Ford to attempt to sell cars online. This took him out of the factory, and prompted him to learn to code.Joining Forrester was game-changing for Peter and for his career as it got him into a unique position to do research. For him, it was a privilege and a unique opportunity to have conversations with senior leaders and to be able to try to predict where things are going, drive insights and make recommendations to these leaders.  Magento is a global market leader in the enterprise e-commerce platform with over a quarter of million merchants globally to power their e-commerce sites. The platform transacts over $100B annually and a fun place to be because of their diverse, global clients. As VP Strategy at Magento Commerce, Peter is focused on the key technologies that will change the way consumers shop and interact. Peter believes that mobile has probably been the single most disruptive thing that has happened in the industry and where we are today is a transformational shift. We are now rapidly moving beyond mobile first to mobile only. With the right mobile experience, it will be far easier to shop in a mobile device than a laptop or a desktop so we can rapidly going to a world where the vast majority of e-commerce transactions are done through a mobile device. In his research, Peter shares that innovations that we should expect includes having a better ‘check out’ experience wherein we do not need to key in credit card information to complete a purchase because of digital wallets, Apple Pay, multiple payment options, or use of finger print or digital identity. The navigation of moving to pages will also move to become voice-based or maybe even, making a purchase may just be as simple as a thought – a thought will trigger a delivery at our doors two hours later. These examples are a bit far-fetched -- but we may be closer to it than we know.Accepting the fact that we are moving to a mobile-only world is a must so when you must think about the investments that you are going to make in the coming months, it should all be focused on how do you get to mobile only. You need to look at the ways that you are interfacing with your customers and rank them on how you compared to a mobile experience. Make sure that you are obsessing about the reality that we are rapidly moving towards a mobile-only world so if your desktop site does things which your mobile sites are not, you are in the wrong place as it should be the other way around.

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!

Our Guest

Paolo Bergamo became a visiting professor at UCLA (EE dept) in 2002. He worked in the group of Leonard Kleinrock, the “father of the internet” who built the first three ARPANET nodes. Paolo then left Academia to join a mobile technology startup, called Sendia, based in Santa Monica, CA. Sendia became the first Salesforce acquisition in 2006. Since then Paolo has been the lead of mobile products for Salesforce. In 2008, the Salesforce Mobile app was the first business app ever in the iPhone App Stores. He’s currently SVP for Salesforce1 and Mobile, defining the mobile strategy and leading mobile product management.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:A combination of events and items shaped Paolo’s interest around communications and drove him towards mobile: as a young student he considered himself more of a mathematician until a teacher pointed out he was an engineer. His father working in the telco industry for 35 years in Italy, and Paolo was always obsessed with bundling and hiding all the different wires sticking out from his computers. This led him to explore mobile and wireless at an early age and encouraged an educational and career in electronics. He was very much inspired by his experience learning from Leonard Kleinrock - literally the father of the internet.After two years in UCLA, he learned that he really enjoyed research, teaching and loved to be around young people who are passionate and want to learn. However, academic research was a little too lengthy, and provided almost no opportunity to productize inventions. In order to fulfill his calling as an engineer, he knew he needed to take an idea and actually get it out in front of people - get feedback from actual users and consumers.The opportunity to join Sendia, a start-up building business tools for early-era mobile phones. They wanted to translate the most important business tools into mobile. The first web services started appearing in back end systems, like Salesforce. We built a middle layer between the web services API and the mobile phone. They built the apps for a mobile phone highly optimized for offline data communications. It was a success, they were acquired by Salesforce and he became a product manager. In 2007, when the App Store was launched for 3rd party developers, Salesforce Mobile app caught Steve Jobs’ eye and Sendia received a phone call. It was a success once more and people started trusting him to manage the mobile strategies, product and platform more and more. Paolo shares that with all this he believes that rethinking mobile is the key to innovation. Paolo talks about Salesforce’s legacy as one of the companies which built the cloud. They help customers to do business in a whole new way and enables companies to be smarter and more efficient. He believes that the mission of any large enterprise is to go back to the era where the quality of customer service is no less than excellent and they aim that they will be the platform which will enable businesses to do this.As SVP of Mobile in Salesforce1, he is moving the needle towards their goal by mobilizing data, business processes and collaboration. They also have optimized applications, like Wave, should businesses need to slice and dice data. They are also enabling customers to build their own applications for their own customers through mobile platforms and SDKs. They have a low code, no code mantra wherein every time they build a piece of code or functionally, anyone can build an application in a visual way. All these applications are all connected as they are not stand alone applications and this is where he comes in as a product manager. Discover the critical challenges they are facing include tactically deciding which devices that they will support out of the box and which ones to delegate to partners; the challenge of making it really easy for an intelligent admin to orchestrate events from multiple systems and channels in line with their low code, no code mantra; and having a center to cater all systems. 

Rapid Fire QuestionsWhat is your definition of innovation?Innovation is anything that freezes us from the mundane tasks and gives us back the time to do what we want.

Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?30% idea and 70% execution. When you do things right and you execute well, you are going to be in a good position to give people your strategy in the moment in which your idea is not successful.

What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?Adapting. What took you here will not take you there. You need to keep challenging yourself to scale and be less of a control freak.

What is your favorite business book?Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore

What is your favorite digital resource?Mobile First

Freakonomics

The Rubin Report

What is your favorite app and why?Slack

Fitbit

Head over to www.EmergeMobileFirst.com and select "Get Free Resources" to get the full list of resources from all of our guest emailed to you!