Manufacture Trust at Scale and Pace to Grow Exponentially
The rate of growth SADA has experienced gives them credibility when their CEO, Tony Safoian explains that in order to scale you have to manufacture trust at pace.
SADA does one thing exceptionally well, they transform companies into a cloud solution partnering with Google. Yes, that’s paraphrasing, but as a Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA Systems has gained global accolades as an exceptional service provider with proven expertise in enterprise consulting, cloud platform migration, custom application development, managed services, user adoption, and change management. They do what they do REALLY well. They do it so well that ConnectAndSell turned to them to move from AWS to a better solution on the Google platform.
Corey Frank (00:34):
So welcome everybody to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with your host, Corey Frank, and with me, as always is the Sage of Sales, Chris Beall. And Chris, you know that we don’t do this often, but when we do, it’s usually because we run out of things to talk about. No, it’s usually because we have a interesting, compelling, face melting guests that usually has something to offer to the community, which is growing every day. And today we have the CEO of SADA, Tony Safoian. Tony, did I pronounced that correctly.
Tony Safoian (01:09):
Perfectly, Corey.
Corey Frank (01:11):
Great. Tony, as the CEO of SADA is able to lasso all the mystery and complexity and value of the Cloud, where all the bags of money and blood live in a world without… and we’re all laughing, we’ll talk about the key word that we use there in a minute. But Tony runs one of the top Cloud consultancy service providers in the world. In fact, I think, Tony, wasn’t it a year or two ago that you were Google’s Top Cloud Partner of the Year. I think it was, so as modest as I’m sure you are, Chris and I, like to get the accolades out of the way at the top. So I think Chris, turn it over to you, how did you meet Tony and why, because we talk about a lot of folks we come in contact with in our world, that Tony should be in the hot seat for the Market Dominance Guys today?
Chris Beall (02:06):
Well, I just got lucky. I’m a customer of SADAs, made a big decision to move from AWS to Google Cloud, based on the fact that the Google Cloud folks will actually join in with us and help with the marketing, and ultimately, maybe, even the co-selling of our product, which is something we didn’t see out of the other guys. And it provided another bunch of wonderful things, too, cost savings and superior technologies, superior speed. You know how speed centric we are, we’re really speed centric. So we had a great experience working with SADA, effectively, as the folks who brought us into Google Cloud. So they were our vehicles, so to speak, to get there and get there successfully, and very quickly. We moved 14 production systems over there in a matter of a few weeks. And then the great-great insane, good fortune of getting to go down to Austin and participate in a test drive of ConnectAndSell with Tony’s team.
And I can only report, it was a riot. It was really fun. They killed it. There were dead bodies everywhere. Talk about blood. There was blood on the floor, it was flowing. They actually, unlike test drives, they didn’t just do it, but they made money to do it, I believe.
Corey Frank (02:06):
Really.
Chris Beall (03:22):
I’ll have to leave it to Tony to say if they really made money doing it. And so now we’re each other’s customers. And then he kindly invited me onto his podcast, Cloud N Clear, and we had a lot of fun there. And so I got to tell all my stories there, but Tony didn’t-
Corey Frank (03:35):
Oh, love it [crosstalk 00:03:35]-
Chris Beall (03:35):
… get to tell all his story. So now it’s your turn, Tony, how did we get into this craziness? Tell us [crosstalk 00:03:42]-
Tony Safoian (03:43):
I don’t know. I love the hot seat, that’s all I got to say. Thank you for inviting me.
Chris Beall (03:47):
We’re lucky. We’re lucky to have you.
Corey Frank (03:49):
And I’m curious, Tony, when you saw a weapon like ConnectAndSell in the test drive, I always like to get into the blood and guts and of the dials and the epiphany and the exponential amazement that happens as it creeps across the floor, as people realize you can talk to more than one person an hour or so. So that was kind of where the test drive was, and what are seeing thus far? And in a business perspective, I’m just always curious to see a little bit of Inside Baseball of how you’ve been able to adapt to this new type of a weapon that you have on board?
Tony Safoian (04:23):
So to be able to independently source pipeline in the Google cloud ecosystem is not a trivial task. We’ve been partnering with Google for 14 years, now, for many of those years, us and the rest of the Google ecosystem was completely dependent on the Google sales organization to introduce them to customers. And we knew this was a risk. We knew that it was, maybe us not being the best possible partner in the world, meaning delivering value at that part of the value chain at the pipeline side. So a few years ago, we started doing marketing pretty well and developed some inside sales capacity capability, but 12 months ago or so, we had the desire, 10X that impact. We went out on this journey to build the most prolific, active, successful, most active inside sales dedicated organization, really, for the first time.
And we found this gentlemen, Billy France, who is well known by Chris, to say the least, he has this incredible team has built from scratch 15, 20 folks. And they use a lot of traditional tools and methodologies, and they were very, very good at it. And some of it is a wide net and other part of their approach is very, very targeted. And in a short amount of time, we started breaking all sorts of records. Nobody at Google in the ecosystem had sourced the amount of pipeline, the number of opportunities. And these are very well vetted, they have to be submitted into a platform that Google has to approve and the field has to okay, and validate that, yes, this is a new opportunity. Yes, it’s qualified.
So there’s a lot of rigor behind it. So the pressure I was putting on Billy was immense, and of course he was delivering, and Matthew on his team, just a great add to his leadership structure and all of that. But they were seeking the best tools in the business, period, because these days it’s important to be multichannel. It’s important to build great content and awareness, but nothing is as powerful as the phone call. And there just has never been a very efficient way to do this, especially now when people don’t pick up the phone. I don’t think I have a phone. Do you pick up the phone? I generally don’t pick up the phone.
So when this concept of this platform, which on the surface is like, well, this is not inexpensive, in nominal terms, this is an enterprise class investment. When the premise behind the technology was revealed and Billy was so gung-ho, I mean, he was so gung-ho, he was like, “We have to do this.” Matthew’s like, “We have to do this. It’s game-changing.” I was like, “Really? It’s 2020, what do you mean game-changing? You mean there’s something that hasn’t been done? How’s it possible? Enterprise sales have been around forever.”
And then, of course, I got to know Chris better, and he explained even farther, the genesis of the platform. I know that at that test drive that we did, and by the way, it was in Austin, near the Google offices, we had Google folks come in from the Cloud organization, field sales managers, and sellers kind of joined in, like, what is this spectacle that is about to happen? I mean, it was an unbelievable experience for that team. They felt super human. They felt emboldened. They felt powerful, productive, and they just could not believe the efficiency behind it. And Chris and I talked about this on my podcast, but the adrenaline rush, man, the adrenaline rush, somebody picking up that phone, and you have a few seconds to ensure that they stay right?
Corey Frank (07:54):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tony Safoian (07:55):
It’s almost like the ROS form of sales, execution ability, which so many of us have forgotten, but actually, that’s how I cut my teeth at a dotcom in the late ’90s, early 2000s. I went from being extremely fearful of the phone to loving it in the early days, and a platform like ConnectAndSell, that took a lot of that efficiency out, the ROI is just… it was unbelievable. So of course, we’re a big customer ConnectAndSell, ConnectAndSell is a big customer of ours and Google Cloud. And I look at people like you, Corey and Chris, and I’m grateful that this level of thought leadership exists and is happening, and it’s in the ether and we’re talking about it. Because I think without pipeline, none of us could be in business, that’s where it all starts.
Corey Frank (08:41):
Without pipeline and without trust-based conversations. Chris, I think it’s worth repeating, I know Tony, you’re a believer just like I am, but Chris, the number of bits in a phone call versus everybody talks about cold calling is dead. How many episodes have we dedicated to that? How many LinkedIn posts, Tony, do you see, cold calling is dead? I think there was another rash of them this particular week of this insanity. But when it comes to trust-based conversations, Chris, I always try to poke the bear and get you to riff and wax loquacious here about the value of a phone call versus a simple email, just from a scientific, from a bits per second perspective. So, maybe that would be helpful for the audience, setting the stage, and since you already have two believers in me and Tony, here on the line, too.
Chris Beall (09:24):
They got to access all of their company’s information, which has a bunch of bits, and they have to do it with a bunch of computer programs, which has another bunch of bits, and they got to do it without having a breakdown in all that happening. Well, if all the bits are behind a wall, isn’t it funny that we call those firewalls? Like, what’s trying to get at my bits is a fire that’s going to burn down the house. It kind of is though, if you just let anybody, in bad things happen. But when you keep everybody out, bad things happen. And you get the bits outside in a safe place, where they’re accessible by everybody, including folks working from home, the bits can participate in saving the economy.
And by the way, this is something I truly believe has happened. I think it’s happening right now. I think it’s not recognized widely that it’s happening, and companies that Tony’s team is working with, are kind of getting it. Tony told me the other day, those who didn’t move to the Cloud are kind of wishing that they had, right?
Tony Safoian (09:24):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Chris Beall (10:20):
So it’s always about [crosstalk 00:10:22]-
Tony Safoian (10:22):
Big time.
Chris Beall (10:23):
… here’s the simple info, an email fully read email, carefully, read, somebody’s thinking about it while they’re reading it, has about 5,000 bits of information on it. That is one quarter of one second of a live human conversation on the phone, quarter of a second is 5,000 bits, and it takes a lot of bits, not to get somebody to know what you know, but to believe that you care enough about them, that they’re going to trust you with their secrets. And that’s what sales is all about, is getting somebody to trust you with their secrets, because their secrets are pain, and nobody wants to share their pain with the world.
So it’s the same thing as the Cloud. The Cloud itself, I believe, has saved the economy. I think it should get the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize for Economics. The Cloud should be Man of the Year on Time Magazine, if the had magazines, but [crosstalk 00:11:20]-
Tony Safoian (10:23):
Yeah.
Chris Beall (11:19):
… now. The Cloud should be all those things. And the fact is the human voice is the one thing that carries enough information, I’ll call it, in the other Cloud, because the long distance phone calling was the original Cloud. It was the Cloud that made the latter part of the 20th century work, where we could actually talk to people far away and do business with them, because they could trust us. So the long distance phone call was the second Cloud. The first Cloud was the telegraph, and then came along to the phone, which wasn’t a Cloud, because you were always behind the firewall of being just local phone calls.
And then it got released, and became the Cloud. And then that Cloud contracted inside of voicemail, 2003, ’04, ’04, and has had a hard time getting out, that’s our job. But then Google, and there are other folks that they’re similar to, provided sort of the next generation, except it was the long distance phone call for every application, every system, every archive who worked together with the human beings all over the earth, in an unlimited way. And it’s saved the economy, it literally has. And I think we should like do this.
Tony Safoian (12:30):
Cannot disagree. Cannot disagree. I think it’s quite remarkable.
Chris Beall (12:36):
I mean, to me, Tony, you guys are on a mission that is interesting, because at one level is so nuts and bolts, it’s so… I mean talk about workloads, a workload is a workload is a workload is not a workload. It’s not trivial stuff. Everything in the world of software and everything in the world of hardware as a result, is tangled up together. They don’t call it spaghetti code for nothing.
Tony Safoian (13:01):
That’s right.
Chris Beall (13:02):
It’s all tangled up and you have to help folks get that stuff up from where it is, where it’s all stuck and glued into all these different systems, and nobody even remembers how they’re tangled up, and help that come out and move to a place where it’s all accessible by people like me, working from home. What was the key? Why are you guys so good at it? Because it’s one of the hardest things in the world. Selling it is one thing, but you guys have to actually do it. Why did you embark on such a crazy adventure?
Tony Safoian (14:30):
Part of it is, I think, just being on the right side of history for a long period of time. As you both know, selling and delivering something you don’t believe in is a very hard endeavor. So when the Cloud started to become a thing in the mid-2000s, and we had a very on-premise related view of the world, like everyone else did, when a thought started to come together, it wasn’t a debate for us, whether or not that’s where it’s all going to end up eventually.
So just creating a culture around that journey started with email, it was the first thing we worked on. 2006, ’07, ’08, ’09, then went to maps and geolocation services, then enterprise search, and then voice link to the Cloud. It was like, “Look, this is going to the Cloud.” And then on-premise, custom applications and the data center was next, and there’s four trillion dollars worth of this stuff out there, in the old paradigm, and I think, if you get the general methodology of what the journey to the Cloud looks like, yes, it’s in part technical, but a lot of it is cultural.
So if you get the cultural piece, right, like, yes, this is a difficult decision for customers to make. It is something that engineers that work at our customers are either afraid of or unaccustomed to. And so, that’s part of the work streams. It’s not just convincing the CIO or the CTO or VP of Engineering that this is a good idea, but we need these engineers to come along.
In the early days, when we used to migrate email, the biggest barrier was, the team that ran the email backup exchange administrators were like, “We don’t want to move to the Cloud. Our whole job is defined by this box that’s sitting here.” So just 100X that, and that’s sort of the modern data center migration conversation. Engineers are an interesting bunch to recruit, to nurture, to retain, to motivate. They want to do cool stuff and they want to work with other exceptional engineers. So bringing in, just over a year ago, now, the best CT on the planet we could find, which is the gentleman who ran the global solutions architect team at Google for five years, and he did that also at AWS, four years prior to that, was a huge step forward for us, in terms of engineering culture within SADA.
And of course, now, other top engineers that are interested in this space, just want to work in that orbit, so recruiting engineers actually has never been easier for SADA. But even prior to that, we understood that engineers are generally not like salespeople at all, and they’re not like a lot of other folks within any companies, they’re not coin operated. You can’t say, “I’ll pay you more, if you move faster.” Or, “I’ll pay more, if you stay.” That’s actually almost irrelevant to most engineers, it’s, there’s a hygiene factor of comp and benefits and all that stuff, but they want to work around other engineers they admire for their engineering ability and acumen and experience and contribution to open source and other things that engineers kind of measure each other by, but they also want to do meaningful work at the edge of technology innovation.
So that’s why, when we go into a typical customer who has engineers, and let’s say this customer is not very tech forward, those engineers are bored. They’ve gone in to maintenance mode. Maybe, they’re building some cool things. But our approach is, well, our engineers are on the outside, we see hundreds of environments, tackle the most complex challenges, so we come in with a different perspective of experience. But where the SADA approach in the market is different is that we compete in the enterprise at a space that’s been traditionally dominated by the global systems integrators and the outsourcers. And the way they like to engage with customers is they want to come in and replace those people. They want you to outsource this thing to them.
And we come in with an orientation of, I don’t have a 100 people I can put on staff there for three years, I have four ninjas, who are the or the best in what they do, with project management and program management, and then all these other folks, they’re going to come in, help you get started on this journey, lay the critical foundation of security and architecture and make sure it’s all done right, and then spend a lot of time on the enablement piece, so that your engineers, which they will surprise you, are going to get enabled to take you most of the rest of the way.
And I think customers really resonates to that. Engineers that we’ve ended up having to work with at our customer sites, love the opportunity to go get certified and learn big query or Kubernetes or whatever it is, Anthos. And then our engineers go in and they see the direct impact on those people’s lives, and also the company that we just helped transform, and it just fills them with tons of fulfillment and meaning in the work. And I think that’s where we have to continue to win as an organization. We have to have a tremendous amount of exceptional engineers.
Because the selling side, I love how you always frame it, which is value at every interaction. And if your intent is pure, and it is, you’re there to help. In aggregate, there’s actually unlimited demand for the work that the Cloud providers do, and then the partners do. In fact, globally, the demand greatly exceeds the supply of all the engineers in the world and all the partners like SADA that could do this work. So having that meaningful conversation after you get good at it, that’s not going to be, ultimately, the limiting factor in a customer’s journey. It’s going to be other things like their trust, do they trust you? Can you really save them money? Are you on their side? Are you going to be there for the next five to 10 years to support them in this path? And that trust really starts with that first phone call.
Chris Beall (20:22):
That’s fascinating. This whole question of culture is something that’s discussed a lot. The culture and its role in digital transformation of all kinds as much discussed here at the dinner table. This is what we talk about. Now, my fiance’s talk that she gives publicly is about how, in her journey of trying to figure out what digital transformation is really about, what are the constraints, what she discovered the constraint is always culture. I mean, enabling technology, so to speak, is always culture and cultural change.
It’s fascinating to me that you’ve delved into engineering culture, both as a supplier of engineering culture and a consumer of it in a funny way. That is, you consume your customer’s engineering culture as an input to your process. It’s fascinating. I’ve never heard it described like that before. As an old, I don’t know if I’m an engineer, I’m one of those guys who’s written more than a million lines of code, and I still don’t think I ever became an engineer. I don’t know how that happens, but it does sometimes happen in the world. I don’t think I ever had that mindset completely. But that one piece that you talk about, which is what Deming used to talk about, people work for pride of workmanship, not for cash compensation or anything else. And even sales people do. Believe it or not, sales… I mean, we all have to know this right, really, sales people who say they’re coin-operated, I’m sure, never are. They just never are. They’re just trying to hide behind that shield, so that they don’t have to be accountable for what they would prefer not to be accountable.
Tony Safoian (22:00):
So they don’t have to update the CRM system.
Chris Beall (22:00):
Exactly.
Corey Frank (22:00):
That’s true. Yep, that’s right.
Chris Beall (22:06):
Which would keep them from having to do anyway, so that’s all right. That’s quite something. So where in that process, you described where you got to, and the big draw of the Cloud is out there. I had the same experience, I think, in 1983, when I knew that Unix was going to take over the commercial computing world. And I quit my job, and I did my first startup, which was a Unix-based ERP system written from scratch.
Tony Safoian (22:31):
Wow.
Chris Beall (22:31):
So that was like, it was [crosstalk 00:22:32]-
Tony Safoian (22:33):
That not ambition at all Chris. That’s not ambition.
Chris Beall (22:35):
I had an orange crate to put on, so it was quite comfortable. At little terminals banging away, we built our own relational database management system from scratch, from the ground up, from bits. And went after that, but why? Because you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that that glow in the East that you can’t read by yet is eventually going to bake the landscape. Whatever that thing is, it’s got to be really bright to be glowing that much before it gets up over the horizon. And the Cloud must have felt like that to you, way back in the early 2000s. As long as you don’t go out of business and you agree to operate internally by principles that are sufficiently deep, that you’re not going to end up having no keel and being blown every which way, you sort of can’t lose. Now, you guys have gone way beyond can’t lose, sort of gone into the magic place. Is that how you felt? Or were there moments along the journey when it’s like, yeah, I get that we can’t lose, but we could lose.
Tony Safoian (23:40):
I think it’s healthy to operate in this infinite game mindset, which Simon Sinek talks about, and I’m a huge fan of his. We’re just sort of visitors into this time and place of enterprise software sales or sales or technology, whatever you call this space. And we’re players in the game, and if you think in infinite terms, it’s not a game that has a finite end or some kind of scoreboard that you can point to at the end of a quarter or a half or the season, and say we won or lost, per se. So I think with this mindset, that, look, we’re blessed and we know we’re blessed, and we’re so fortunate to be in an environment that’s growing, in a market is growing 50, 60%, anyway, that has unlimited demand, essentially. We’re on the right side of history and we have a little bit of a headstart, that we really just only have to focus on getting incrementally better every day.
If we get incrementally better every day in the areas that become clear to us by virtue of enough customer conversations or internal debates or feedback and input from Google, et cetera, we shouldn’t really ever have to exit the game. And that’s actually, when you lose an infinite game, the closest definition to losing a game like this is exiting the game. Simon Sinek makes a lot of references to, I don’t love war analogies, but he calls it like the Vietnam War, or let’s say the Cold War. The biggest mistake that the United States made, when the Berlin Wall fell down, is thinking that they won the Cold War. It never stopped. So as Corey said, it’s almost like, so what that we want the Global Seller of the Year award two years in a row, it’s not like game over. It’s actually so early in this transformation journey that I don’t know if we can win because it’s an infinite game, but we certainly can mess up.
And if we do, shame on us, because I feel like most of the destiny is clearly in our hands. And I think a lot of that has to do with a lot of humility and self-awareness, but certainly a focus on just customer obsession, a focus on incremental improvement, reinvestment, which a lot of business founders, especially bootstrap business founders or others, forget. I think the part that we’re well beyond, as you’re defining it, is we’re well beyond the lifestyle business. It’s no longer about, what’s in it for me. This is like, we have this amazing opportunity to make something big in a way that’s never been done before, and, boy, can we impact thousands of lives and hundreds of companies, if we do it right.
Corey Frank (26:19):
Well, I think if you look at where the Cloud is, is that it’s maybe started out where it’s not, like you say, “I don’t believe in gravity.” Well, because gravity believes in you, right?
Tony Safoian (26:31):
Right.
Corey Frank (26:31):
You could say, “Well, I don’t believe in taking my servers and moving them out into the Cloud, because of extra security or why, et cetera.” Well, the Cloud believes in you and it’s going to zap you up. So how much, Tony, would you say now versus early on versus today, you were probably doing a lot of educational advocacy, educational missionary work, and they were maybe crying and screaming to move versus today, you may have more of, “Hey, here’s my specs I need in order to move”? and you’ve probably seen that on an X and Y axis, probably, move a little bit less, but nevertheless, I know a lot of the fun and the culture, especially what you’re seeing in the engineers, is still in the educational advocacy, the thought leadership that a company like SADA plays.
So how do you kind of balance that, where you have kind of the laggards who are coming, but you still have the cool kids who are the early adopters, who are your core clients, and constituency at SADA that want you to say, “Okay, what’s next, Tony? What’s next? What’s next?” And to balance those two on the curve from the late adopters to the visionaries has got to be a challenge.
Tony Safoian (27:35):
It’s a challenge, and the work there is changing, but Corey, we’re very accustomed to working in a environment where we knew and had complete conviction on what the right destination was going to be. But we’ve operated in a period of some level of doubt for at least 15 years. So in the beginning, to your point, mid to late 2000s, it was, you were selling the customer on the premise of Cloud. You were trying to convince them that cloud was not a fad, that it was here to stay. And back then with email, in higher education, if you believed in Cloud, the answer was Google, because they were the only ones doing it. So it wasn’t like… We weren’t so much selling Gmail to universities, we were just convincing them this it’s not a fad. And then, Microsoft got their acts together in the Cloud, then we have these two disparate businesses, and there was still a lot of like, “Well, which one’s better than that?” Or, “When do I make this migration?”
But in the early days of partnering with Google, you can imagine, that that was not, that Cloud was real, because, okay, fine. Amazon proved Cloud was real. Salesforce proved Cloud is real. And now, even we believe in Cloud now, but is Google really cloud? Are they serious about the enterprise, because they’re really an ads business? We’ve dealt with that for many, many, many years, and in the last, certainly two years with Thomas Kurian coming on board, and Rob Enslins, Kirsten Kliphouse, and Janet Kennedy here in North America. I don’t think… Really, since Diane Greene arrived and consolidated things and built this great 13,000 employee organization within Google, that was the Cloud, we haven’t gotten that objection so much anymore. But now the conversation is, okay, we know the Cloud is real and Google is serious, but Google is number three.
And we’re like, yes, that’s true, but it’s so early. And they have the best technology. And as engineers, it seems obvious to us that customers should always just pick the best technology. And probably if you’re Google, which has consumer roots, you’re accustomed to a market dynamic that always shakes out such that the best technology wins. Google Maps won, because it was better than MapQuest, simple. Gmail was better than Hotmail. There’s no selling, there’s no training or there’s no migration, it just happens. Now, Instagram. Consumer technology is always defined by, look, just make the best stuff, you’ll get the most users. And I was talking to Janet Kennedy yesterday, who runs US and Canada, and she’s been through like the IBM enterprise days and the Microsoft enterprise days.
And she was at IBM, early days, when it was like, OS/2 versus a Windows NT, and IBM had this big campaign of like, NT stands for not there. IBM arguably had… OS/2 was way better than windows, technically, and that’s just one story. There’s been story after story, and Chris has been in the industry for a long time. It’s very often the case that the best technology has not won. So what is the conversation with the customer today, and what TK and all these sort of enterprise experts who are coming into the space are realizing and are helping partners execute the same way, which is, it’s really about risk. That’s how the enterprise buys. Yes, they want transformation, but nobody wants to lose their job for picking Google. They don’t care if it’s the best technology. They’ll take the third best technology, if it means that their decision will not be questioned. So how do you have those transformational conversations?
It has to do… Yes, you have to be at least as… pretty much every time. But what about your commercial contracting ability? What about your enterprise support? What about professional services? What about product roadmap? What about my direct access to Google executives or SADA executives? That’s what the enterprise engagement today looks like. And Google’s also gotten smarter and more capable, since TK has arrived, to have a much broader strategic conversation with the largest customers. If you look at Activision going Google, that was not about, oh, you can run Call of Duty in our data centers versus yours, and that’s better. It might be better, yes. This is about, we’re going to transform gaming, with Stadia and everything else, and YouTube, and we are going to have a comprehensive strategy to transform Activision’s business. Saber, Deutsche Bank, these 10 year, multi-billion dollar deals, that’s about completely revolutionizing the banking experience for customers at Deutsche Bank.
And them being able to do with the data, things that they just could not do for the last a 100 years, running on mainframes. Sabre was like, transforming the travel experience from the moment you’re searching for your flight on google.com. Not about, oh, you should move out of this data center and go to that data center. So I think more and more that’s what customers are looking for, at least in the enterprise, or it’s not even about, is this point solution from this vendor better than that vendor? Is the Cloud thing real? It’s like, what is the transformational impact and outcome to my business, if I choose Google versus somebody else? How is Google as an enterprise going to support me versus somebody else?
And I think that’s never been truer or more compressed in the context of digital transformation as we’re facing right now, because every customer is different in their behavior than they were four months ago. So, if you’re an organization that does not know how to meet your customer where they are, which is online or in their home or whatever, then your business model is dead.
Chris Beall (33:14):
We don’t have many guests, but when we do, we have the best.
