Speaker 1: He could have been a contender in baseball, but he
Speaker 1: decided he was going to be a success in the
Speaker 1: world of technology. Tom Lunabus is the chief executive of
Speaker 1: SOSTA and he joins us now in studio. Tom, thanks
Speaker 1: for coming in. Great to be here, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: All right, do the quick setup, because I bet if
Speaker 1: I went to the University of San Francisco, I think
Speaker 1: I'd find something that would be a remnant of your
Speaker 1: infielder status. Way too much insider baseball knowledge there. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a little unique in the Silicon Valley where we're
Speaker 1: a tech community made up of engineers. And I an
Speaker 1: odd career in sports where I played baseball for four
Speaker 1: years under a kind of a legend in USF and
Speaker 1: what started off as being talked into going to play,
Speaker 1: I ended up being in the Hall of Fame at
Speaker 1: us F, bait for Baseball and drafted by the Minnesota Twins.
Speaker 1: And but you know, life always has different crossing points
Speaker 1: than I ended up going into tech and not. There's
Speaker 1: not a lot of us that actually gotten that direction.
Speaker 1: So tell us about SOLS Tess tells how you got
Speaker 1: connected in what the company does. Well, So does a
Speaker 1: really kind of cool company in terms of the customers
Speaker 1: we use. You know, we we we work for UH
Speaker 1: five largest digital brands in the world, and as a company,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little bit of a story of getting
Speaker 1: the band back together again. Ken Gardner and I started
Speaker 1: a company back in the nineties around analytics Advanced Analytics UM,
Speaker 1: and we started seeing as more brands we're going to
Speaker 1: go direct to consumers with marketing campaigns selling a million
Speaker 1: tickets for the Olympic Games, or a new iPhone seven
Speaker 1: gets launched, that they're going to drive a lot of
Speaker 1: traffic to web and mobile applications. And the thing that
Speaker 1: we all understand, if that site is down or if
Speaker 1: it's slow, all of us consumers are three clicks away
Speaker 1: from buying the same thing from somebody else. So we
Speaker 1: built a platform UM that in some ways mimics what
Speaker 1: Amazon does in terms of understanding customer experience and a
Speaker 1: platform that allows our brand ends are five digital brands
Speaker 1: to simulate Cyber Monday and Black Friday and Halloween and
Speaker 1: and in big marketing events or or UM you know,
Speaker 1: for hallmarket's UH their super bowl is Valentine's Day where
Speaker 1: they get so many folks coming through so we're helping
Speaker 1: them understand their customers online and we're improving their perform. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you also have the c p I and index
Speaker 1: that measures how users respond to the digital experience and
Speaker 1: how speed and response is nous of the side influences
Speaker 1: engagement and conversion rates. Digital speed. You know, we've all
Speaker 1: kind of become addicted to it, and I think at
Speaker 1: the same time also we kind of fight against that addiction.
Speaker 1: It's neural. I mean, you know, speed is kind of
Speaker 1: inbred into us in all ways. And what we've been
Speaker 1: able to analyze is that we go on these websites
Speaker 1: and if they're slow, um, we're not very happy. And
Speaker 1: so the engagement with the customer is usually cut short.
Speaker 1: They may not watch the full video if they're fat Austin,
Speaker 1: you're liking what the experiences, You're more engaged, and that's
Speaker 1: the key to the game. So what is the number
Speaker 1: one thing people do wrong? It makes a slow experience.
Speaker 1: And I'm the first one I really want to watch
Speaker 1: a video online. I just want the information I want
Speaker 1: to read. It would be really enticing for me to
Speaker 1: watch the video. Well, sometimes it's the video itself, it's
Speaker 1: the content and how long they play it. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you play some videos at fourteen seconds versus ten seconds,
Speaker 1: you'll see a drop off of lots of different consumers.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just creating a marketing event where everybody goes
Speaker 1: to the website at one time, so it could be load.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it hasn't been optimized to you know, the device
Speaker 1: that you're particular to or the browser you're not particular too.
Speaker 1: So it's a very you know, delivering um brand and
Speaker 1: consumerism to to the marketplace is very complex and sophisticated
Speaker 1: these days, and what these brands are getting is very
Speaker 1: sophisticated on how they understand the consumer experience. But it's
Speaker 1: a lot of things that create something that could break.
Speaker 1: Tell us about the public cloud, how do you do
Speaker 1: subscribe it to people? And describe also the growth that
Speaker 1: you're seeing there and why it's relevant. And we're particularly
Speaker 1: interesting in that area because we built the company around
Speaker 1: cloud computing when there was very little cloud computing. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was in when we introduced Sosta. The gentleman that
Speaker 1: introduced us was the founder of cloud computing. It's Andy
Speaker 1: Jassey who runs Amazon z Aws and Andy h This
Speaker 1: was at the first cloud event back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight. What made it interesting for our use case,
Speaker 1: and our use case became particularly interested in cloud computing
Speaker 1: computing industry was I needed a thousand servers for a
Speaker 1: very short period time. In other words, the way that
Speaker 1: we test these applications is we have to simulate millions
Speaker 1: of consumers going to the sites, and you may need
Speaker 1: a thousand servers to do. No one had a thousand
Speaker 1: servers in their test lab. And so what cloud computing
Speaker 1: does is it gives you, especially public clouds, gives you
Speaker 1: access and availability and affordability to capacities server capacities which
Speaker 1: I needed and I consume in large ways, and I
Speaker 1: can only pay. I only pay for what I use,
Speaker 1: so I will only I may pay forty cents an
Speaker 1: hour for for a server, but if I'm using a
Speaker 1: thousand servers for six hours, it's a very small amount
Speaker 1: comparatively buying him for the the whole quick final question, Uh,
Speaker 1: how do you make money on this? Well, all of
Speaker 1: you know there's over two trillion dollars that are transacted
Speaker 1: online every every year, and so our ability to save
Speaker 1: and um to make sure that those two trillion dollars
Speaker 1: actually get done is the key to the game. So
Speaker 1: where the insurance policy for the industry. I like the
Speaker 1: insurance is a very lucrative business. Tom Lunabus, thank you
Speaker 1: so very much. He's chief executive officer at SOSTA. He's
Speaker 1: based in San Francisco, joining us in New York. This
Speaker 1: is Bloomberg