Slack doubles down on enterprise security and Zoom (Full Transcript)

[00:01:28] Speaker 1: you you Yeah. Product Officer at Slack, Tamar Yuoshua.

[00:01:43] Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome back to day two of Frontiers. Wasn't day one amazing? I see you all enjoyed it as much as I did. Yesterday, we got to hear from customers who are using Slack to make their work lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive, and you also heard some great new features we're launching. But to enable all of this, the IT teams, the admins, and the leaders make it possible. You're the ones who share our vision of aligning teams and making them more productive. You're the people choosing the best technologies the industry has to offer in making them work. So all of you are our heroes, our champions, and most importantly, our partners. So we thank you for coming here today. So today, you'll be hearing about how we're going to empower all of you, how we're deepening our relationships and our partnerships with key enterprise technologies, how we're supporting secure administration at scale. And you'll also hear from the IT leaders at Oracle, who are deploying Slack wall-to-wall. So first, please help me in welcoming our head of corporate and business development, Brad Armstrong. Thank you very much.

[00:03:22] Speaker 3: Good morning, everybody. My first and most important job here at Slack is running our partner ecosystem. We've been at it for about three and a half years, and we've come a long way. When we first launched this, only the earliest of adopters saw the vision that we had. The major players in the industry took notice, but weren't ready yet to invest. But more and more, they heard from their customers how important this new way of working in Slack would be for them. And then there was a massive shift. Suddenly, everybody got it. It felt like overnight. In just 12 months, we partnered with Salesforce, with SAP, with Google, with Oracle, and with ServiceNow, and the rest of the industry followed. It was one of those rare moments when you realize the momentum you're experiencing is larger than yourself, larger than your company. The way people work was fundamentally changing and Slack was at the center of it. And we've been building on that momentum ever since, building this ecosystem to the point where it's at today, which is the broadest and deepest partner ecosystem in collaboration. I'm constantly amazed by what we've been able to accomplish in a relatively short amount of time and we're just getting started. So, it all starts with our open platform. That part is very intentional. We're an open platform because we believe that in order to do your best work, you need the ability to choose the right tools to get that work done. From Workday to Dropbox to Atlassian, our partners produce the best apps in the industry. They don't all come from one provider, but they all work well together on our platform. Our ecosystem delivers on the promise of our open platform by bringing all the industry-leading apps right into Slack. In Slack, those apps come into the flow of work, into channels, and that's powerful because it makes our customers more productive. That's what we're striving for with these partnerships, and that's what we're delivering. And our momentum shows that. 1,500 apps in the directory, 94% of teams using apps. And every week, 450,000 apps are used. Phenomenal statistics. Our partnerships with the industry leaders continue to deliver. Just a few weeks ago, Oracle announced a new series of integrations with their Oracle Customer Experience Cloud. With Salesforce, we're launching an entirely new portfolio of richer apps. And with Workday, our app is launching this fall. We're in private beta now and we're getting some great customer feedback. We also partner with the leading tools that your teams use every day. I'll give you a few examples. With Atlassian, we announced a strategic partnership last summer to transition their customers using HipChat and Stride into Slack. It's a rare partnership and took years of building trust to get to that point. Now we're squarely focused on delivering a joint product roadmap across the entire Atlassian suite. Okta has really emerged as a leading identity provider for our enterprise customers. Many of our customers want to extend their existing security infrastructure in their use of Slack. So we partner with the best providers in the industry like Okta to accomplish just that. Finally, there's a new generation of enterprise software that's being built on and around Slack. Companies like Lattice in the HR space, they do real time feedback and team goal setting right from Slack. We're really gratified to see these early stage companies getting real traction and building big businesses in partnership with us. Behind every product integration is a partnership. And every partnership is at its core a collaboration between two companies. We run all of our partnerships on Slack, and partners tell us all the time, we couldn't accomplish this much so quickly, we couldn't get aligned so readily, we couldn't move so swiftly and with such speed if we weren't doing it on Slack. So it's really become an advantage for us and a key to our success. But our success in this ecosystem is really about our commitment to it and our partner's commitment to it. It's become core to who we are as a company. So we're committed to this ecosystem, We're committed to our partners, and we're committed to growing this ecosystem so that our customers continue to have choice in all the apps they use at Slack. And that brings us to today, this partner keynote. Now, it wouldn't be a partner keynote if we didn't have something new to talk about, something that we're excited about, and we do. So today, I'm very excited to announce that we're entering into a formal partnership with Zoom. So for the first time, we're officially partnering with Zoom to build out deeper product integrations, align our go-to-market organizations. More and more over the years, we've seen customers choosing Slack and Zoom. To give you a couple examples, in the last 12 months alone, the Zoom integration has increased its adoption by over 100%, sorry, 200%, it's even better. That's up to 10,000 teams, and that's big customers like Oracle, who we'll hear from later this morning. So we're doubling down on the integration, and we're going deeper with a true partnership. Here's what it means for you in the very near term. We just launched the ability to launch a Zoom meeting right from your Slack notification. This is available today. We're also investing in the meeting experience itself to give you rich previews of your meetings before they start. And once they do start, you'll get real time updates. So you'll be able to see in Slack, who's joined a meeting, who's dropped, what time it started and when it ends. That's just the beginning. Finally, we're launching a brand new integration with Zoom Phone. And this will allow you to launch a Zoom Phone call directly from the Slack user profile. It's a new integration the market hasn't seen before. We're really excited to bring it to you over the next couple months. Every day in this partnership, We're welcoming more and more joint customers, and every day in this partnership, we'll be thinking about bringing them better product experiences. We're drawn together as partners with Zoom because we have a shared belief that it's all about communication. And if you improve communication, you improve everything else about work. So in short, better communication results in better outcomes. We share that belief, and that's what this partnership is all about. So, our CEO, Stuart Butterfield, and Zoom CEO, Eric Yuen, have both had immense impact in changing the way that people work. It's truly an incredible time to have them here together today. And so without further ado, I'd like to welcome Stuart, Eric, to the stage. In conversation with journalist, Jemima Kish. Thank you very much.

[00:10:51] Speaker 4: Well, thank you, Brad, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Eric and to Stuart. Thank you. There are some interesting parallels between your businesses. You both have an ethos of openness and open platforms, and you've both faced down very aggressive competition from the incumbents. So talk about how openness and transparency has allowed you to thrive.

[00:11:19] Speaker 5: Sure. I think before that, maybe let me start with, I'd like to give Stuart a big hug, to thank him, great leadership for building such a wonderful service. Is that okay? Yeah. All right. Thank you. So, if you look at industry and also talk with the customers, you know, many customers told us they want to deploy the best of British service, you know, driven by the product experience and plus millennials, right, you know, over one-third of millennials are, you know, part of today's workforce. Also if for any company who try to deploy the best breed of service from end user perspective, you want to make sure they do not switch the context very often, right? I can leave within a Slack interface, I launch in a Zoom, and after the meeting is over, I can send a meeting transcription back to Slack, right? Because of that, you need to make sure you have an open API. Those two services can integrate very well, give a customer a frictionless experience. With that customer, they do not realize there's so many other technology behind this, and they can live within the Slack, for example, live within the Slack. That's why every best beta service, they've got to have open platform for all those services to integrate together.

[00:12:39] Speaker 6: Yeah. There's two senses of openness that I think matter. One is open, as in open platform and interoperability, and over time, organizations spend more and more money on software, but also use more and more services. And there's a lot more value for anyone who's using those systems, so customers, if they can interoperate at least to some degree, and the greater the degree of interoperation, the more value you're gonna get. If the, we heard yesterday, average large enterprise has 1,000 plus cloud services in use, and if they're all rigid and really compartmentalized, it's harder to realize the value of that investment. But actually, when you first asked it, I was thinking a different sense of open, which is like openness inside of the company. And I think both of those are important. And they're actually, they're related to a certain extent because the business environment is more dynamic now than it was before. And that might sound like just kind of a cliche or hand-wavy thing, but I think it's really true in the sense that business processes are less engineered than they used to be. Because it used to be like, we'll get business process analysts and we'll look at how you're doing this thing. And then there'll be a three-year statement of work to build a system. And once you do that, and it's like really top-down engineered, there's not a lot of flexibility to make dynamic choices. So if what you want is the organization to be able to respond more quickly to challenges or opportunities as they arise, I think it's important to have a high degree of openness inside the organization about what the vision is, but also strategy, not to withhold information and try to manage from a top-down perspective, but to give people more autonomy so that you can respond more quickly.

[00:14:22] Speaker 4: So this leads to our point about being more human at work, which is something that you've spoken about before, Stuart. But can you tell us what we gain by being more natural and informal in our communication in the workplace?

[00:14:37] Speaker 6: Well, I wanna hear Eric talk about happiness because it makes me happy every time he does it, but so I'll be quick. But here's something weird. When new employees start at Slack, and I do the CEO new hire welcome, one of the very first questions is, I want, you know, we have a big group here, why don't I do it? Put up your hand if you have ever treated someone you love in a way that you later regretted. Okay, good. This is also a psychopath test to just make sure like you have enough self-awareness. But the reason I do that is because you talk about recognizing the humanity of our coworkers and stuff like that. It's easy to recognize someone's strengths and talents. You know, that's cool. It's really when people are impatient or passive aggressive or not responsive or something like that, it's to give a little bit of tolerance for that, to recognize that we're all human and we're all fallible. And there's a huge amount of value in that just because you got to work together. There's a lot of people and to the degree that you can have some tolerance or forgiveness, it makes it a lot easier.

[00:15:39] Speaker 4: So Eric, talk about your culture of happiness at Zoom.

[00:15:43] Speaker 5: Yeah, first of all, I'm using Slack, I'm very happy. And yes, so the happiness culture is so when I was young, I really tried to understand what's the purpose of life. I don't think I got an answer when I was very young. But along the way, I realized the purpose of life is to pursue happiness. So but what kinds of happiness are sustainable? Not like you have money or power, all those happiness just a short term, not sustainable. And I realized if you can make others happy, your happiness is sustainable. You are very happy. More like what a student does, right? Build a great service and make every user happy. I'm pretty sure he's very happy every day because end user happy. So we apply that philosophy to our business. So me as a CEO, my number one responsibility is to make sure our employee happy every day. If all of our employees are happy every day, together we can make our customer happy. If our customer happy, guess what? They are going to use Slack, they are going to use Zoom, they are going to pay for us, we are going to be happy. That's why our company culture is happiness. So also I told our employees, every morning when you wake up if you do not feel happy, stay at home. Absolutely fine, so. It's like you're sick and you don't want to bring germs into your house. But let's still use Slack and Zoom at home. Those don't matter, so.

[00:17:08] Speaker 4: I wonder if you could give us some examples of how these very kind of accommodating management styles have really not only facilitated the really rapid growth of your companies, but also how they have supported and nurtured your staff. Have you got any anecdotes from the coalface?

[00:17:31] Speaker 1: Oh.

[00:17:35] Speaker 6: I'm gonna pass it to Aaron first. This is great.

[00:17:38] Speaker 5: I think of something really. say, first of all, you've got to give employees the best collaboration tools. I gave one example, and we interviewed an engineer, I think it's last summer, and after we asked all the questions, you know, I asked him, hey, what kind of question do you have? The first question he asked was, do you use Slack? For sure, we do. You know, those engineers, the point is, if you do not you this, if your company, Donald, deploys Slack, they don't want to join you any more, and it's sort of become a trend. Very often, they have this kind of question. I think meaning you've got to have the best modern tools, right, to empower engineers, empower employees, give them the best tools to let them focus on productivity. Otherwise, they may not join you any more. I think it's getting I got all kinds of feedback now, so I like that.

[00:18:31] Speaker 6: That was good that I did that because I would have sounded kind of a little blowhardy if I gave that answer. But yes, good. I'm glad the engineers are asking for Slack.

[00:18:42] Speaker 4: What's the most, I'm wondering if there's a kind of a hidden feature of both of your tools that you wish was a bit better known about, or something kind of surprising that you think some of the people here might not have discovered yet.

[00:18:56] Speaker 5: So I can start, Stuart, if you don't mind. First of all, the feature, like we didn't select launch Zoom, right? much better. And after I launched Zoom product, I think the feature I really like, you know, I can touch up my appearance. So, you know, for those users who are shy, you know, we have a feature, right? And that's one feature sort of hidden I really like. Another feature I really like, I'm using every day is the virtual background. So meaning, and I'm sitting somewhere on the beach in Hawaii, you know, my virtual background is office. Nobody knows where I am. Oh, by the way, I forgot that. I think that's two months ago, right? You and I had a Zoom call. Actually, you were at the gym, right? And your background is very nice somewhere. I forgot that. So those features I really like. But there's one feature also like probably we should talk after this. You know, we've seen the Slack. You know, we try to launch a meeting, launch a WebEx meeting. We should pop up something, WebEx sucks. Switch to Zoom.

[00:20:01] Speaker 6: That would be a pretty good feature and I remember that call. There was a couple of CEOs and I had the Golden Gate Bridge behind me.

[00:20:10] Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah.

[00:20:13] Speaker 6: I think one, I answer a lot of or initiate a lot of Zoom calls while I'm walking somewhere, so I'm outside and I don't want the video to be on and it took me a while to discover this, but a a preference to not start the call with video on your phone. There's a lot of, I mean, the hidden features that I like tend to be very low-level. Yeah.

[00:20:34] Speaker 4: I'm wondering, are there any misconceptions about either communicating by chat or communicating by video that you would want to correct?

[00:20:45] Speaker 5: What are the assumptions that people make about, you know, what is the, I don't know, the best the best way to make your so yeah recently you know yeah this is a great question we talked with many investors as well we truly believe the world is a much better place if every company can standardize on slack and zoom because make the life much easier quite often they do not know that they still use the email right they still use the phone call right you know email back and forth you know I think you click a slack channel it's very easy, real time. However, I think some of the companies still do not get that yet. That's why we need to work together to educate them. The best modern tools really can really improve their productivity. Don't use those old fashioned tools like email anymore.

[00:21:35] Speaker 4: So the bottom line is productivity.

[00:21:37] Speaker 5: Absolutely. Quite often I got an email from my team. Seriously, sometimes I'm so upset. You can send me a Slack message or give me a Zoom call. Why you send me email? I do not like email anymore. So I tell you the truth. Last week I traveled to New York. When I came back, I look at my email inbox, 950 emails. Oh, my God, it's crazy. Who send me so many emails? Just a slag is easy. So I think that's the problem we need to fix.

[00:22:06] Speaker 6: Yes. I actually sent Eric an email right after the IPO, but mine, you'll remember, was just exclamation point. This is the subject line. point, space, end of message. That was it. So I'll try to save you some time. But I think here's an interesting thing. So none of you will ever, if you can avoid it, call a cab company on the telephone again and then tell them your address and wait an unknown number of minutes until they show up and then pay with cash. And functionally, if you look at a set of requirements, that is exactly the same as calling Lyft or Uber. You're specifying your location and you're facilitating the payment at the end. But that threshold of convenience really makes an experiential difference. So I think whether it's voice or video, it's much more about what is the threshold or the degree of friction. And it's not so burdensome to call someone on the telephone and to say 308 Mission Street or something like that. But if you don't have to, you can avoid it. If it can be just a little bit less friction, you can get more to the intention of what you wanted or the content of the conversation versus messing about with the tools, that is the most important distinction.

[00:23:16] Speaker 5: Yeah, totally.

[00:23:18] Speaker 4: So it's an amazing time to be in the technology industry as the two of you both know very well. And when we look back on this incredibly intense industrial era in a few years to come, 10, 20 years time, what do you think it will be remembered for? what will define this era in the technology industry?

[00:23:45] Speaker 6: I mean, I think it's probably more like 50 or 100 years looking back, because I think it was 40 years ago this year that VisiCalc was released, the first spreadsheet, the first and most important application in the business world, and probably still the most important kind of killer app. And every year since then, there's been a little bit more software in use, and a little bit more software use. So, it definitely didn't start in 1979 and then completes in 2019. I think we're probably, like, 40, 50, 100 years more to come. But if you zoom out even further, there's this great book called The Victorian Internet, which is about the introduction of the telegraph, which, I don't know if it sounds interesting or boring, it's super, super interesting, but the distinction was, like, suddenly information can travel at the speed of light, and the limit before was if you set up a relay of horses, so like the rider could get a fresh horse at every interval, that was how fast information can spread. But now it's like, press the Zoom button in a Slack channel and the 118 people in that channel can jump on a call regardless of where they are in the world and just like, it's instant. So I think the thing that we'll remember is probably the increasing degrees of facility we have with coordinating human activity. And coordinating humans is expensive and difficult and probably like the biggest obstacle. I mean, you all in your professional lives probably spend more than, and this might sound crazy, but more than half of your time just coordinating, not like interesting, creative, strategic conversations, but just like working on a slide deck that's gonna be presented at this meeting, and the sole purpose of the meeting is to tell people how progress is going on the project. And I'm not saying that that's not important. I think it's very, very important, but it's an enormous burden. So I think that looking back on this time, 50 or 100 years from now, it will be about how much easier we have made it to coordinate the activity, to communicate, and to align groups of people in trying to accomplish something that no one person could do by themselves.

[00:25:41] Speaker 5: Yeah, whatever side, I totally agree. So I truly believe, you know, like those communication solutions like email will be replaced by Slack, or phone call will be replaced by Zoom video. And specifically, just a little bit more on the video conferencing side, we truly believe, and someday in the future, and online video conferencing together with Slack, we will deliver a much better experience than face-to-face meeting. Today, quite often, I have a call with a student, I cannot give him a hug, I cannot shake hands. In the future, I can do that. Seeing what you hand shaking, what you hug.

[00:26:13] Speaker 6: You're formally announcing the hug at the museum.

[00:26:15] Speaker 5: Yeah, so we're working very hard on that based on internet sensor technology or AR technology. I think that will happen in the future, yeah.

[00:26:24] Speaker 4: That's very exciting. sneak peek into some of Zoom's product road map there. Eric Yuan and Stuart Butterfield, thank you so much.

[00:26:33] Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

[00:26:38] Speaker 5: Appreciate it, thank you. Thank you.

[00:26:40] Speaker 1: One more hug. And now, please welcome head of enterprise product, Elan Frank.

[00:27:02] Speaker 7: Hi, everyone. I am so excited to be here with you today to tell you a little bit about how Slack is built for enterprise-grade scale and security. Specifically, I'd like to spend some time focusing on the products and features that are helping our enterprise customers deploy Slack. you heard from Bob about how we have 88,000 paid customers and how 65 of the Fortune 100 are using Slack. Our largest customers, we have tens of thousands of employees using Slack on a daily basis. And today, we have thousands of customers in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, education, and and government. I wish I could tell you more about them, but for security reasons, I can't. Thank you for laughing at that. To help meet the needs of these customers, we developed a whole new product and launched it two and a half years ago, Slack Enterprise Grid. Grid has three unique components. First, it has unlimited workspaces that you can configure for departments, for your subsidiaries, or even for project teams to work together. And these can be connected through direct messages, through shared channels, or even organizational-wide channels that can be used for announcements or ask me anything. Second, there is centralized administration that gives admins a single point of visibility for provisioning and management. And third, there are advanced security controls, like enterprise mobility management, data loss prevention, e-discovery, and domain claiming to make sure that you can meet your corporate security and compliance standards. Today, I'm going to speak about some of the newest components, some of the newest offerings and security features that we have never shown before. First, I want to highlight Enterprise Key Management, or EKM. This is a feature that we launched a month ago. And Slack EKM is a security offering that gives admins complete control and visibility over the information that you have in Slack by allowing you to encrypt all of the data with your own encryption keys. Unlike other offerings, Slack EKM is unique in that it's designed to not disrupt the end users. It gives admins the full control and visibility that they need, but without sacrificing the user productivity, efficiency, and experience. This means that Slack EKM can allow admins to address security threats in a targeted manner. For example, they can revoke access to information in one channel or even one hour within a channel. Think of it as providing a security scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. To demonstrate how this works, I'm gonna play a video with a couple engineers who helped lead the development of Slack EKM.

[00:30:15] Speaker 8: Hi, I'm Audrey, a backend engineer here at Slack.

[00:30:18] Speaker 3: And I'm Richard, the operations architect at Slack.

[00:30:21] Speaker 8: Today we're gonna talk to you about Slack Enterprise Key Management, also known as Slack EKM. Slack EKM enables organizations to be able to control the keys at the organization, channel, workspace, or hour. So for this particular incident, they realized that it's only for a particular channel for a particular hour. So we're back in the AWS console. We set the organization policy back to allow because your security team has assessed that it doesn't impact the entire organization. And then down below, we set a policy that we preset for this demo to scope to a particular channel at a particular hour, and we set that to deny. And then we save the changes. We have to wait about five minutes for this service to clear out the keys that were stored in the cache. After the five minutes, you'll be able to see that you still have access to the messages that are not part of the incident, but the ones that are have been revoked. Therefore, the rest of your organization can continue to be productive. Thanks for watching.

[00:31:26] Speaker 7: Is that awesome? What you saw there is that Audrey was able to revoke information from one particular channel, one hour within one channel, and the rest of the organization was able to continue to be productive. The thing that I'm most proud is that less than a month after launching EKM, we have some of the world's most security conscious customers already benefiting from this feature. Government agencies, defense contractors, consulting companies, consumer product companies, and financial services firms. And you don't have to take my word for it, let's hear directly from one of these customers. Lazard is the world-leading financial advisory and asset management firm. They specialize in advising on mergers, restructuring, capital, and strategy. So maintaining control of their data and their customer data is of utmost importance to them. Let's hear from their CIO, Carmine Lizza, about their experience with Slack EKM thus far.

[00:32:30] Speaker 9: Operation is key to every successful organization, and doing it securely is fundamental to our business. We've wanted to adopt Slack's enterprise platform for some time, but needed to ensure that it could be done securely. Over the last year, we have worked with Slack specifically on security features around enterprise key management and bring your own key. Now that these features are embedded into the enterprise solution, we're able to successfully adopt it and take advantages of the features.

[00:33:00] Speaker 7: Thanks, Carmine. Thanks for working with us over the last year to bring EKM to market, and thanks for bringing Slack to Lazard. EKM can help many organizations like Lazard enable their teams to work more productively, and at the same time, ensuring that admins have the control and visibility that they need. In addition to adding new features like EKM, we are also investing in new compliance certificates to ensure that we meet the needs of our regulated customers. Over the past few years, we've been on a mission to earn as many acronyms and badges as possible. Just last year, we invested considerably in becoming ISO 27,017, ISO 27,018, GDPR, and FedRAMP compliant. And we don't just show these badges because we like acronyms or because they look cool on our website. we're proud that these represent people in companies and regulated industries that can now use Slack. One certification I want to call out specifically is our continued investment in HIPAA. A recent update here is that grid can now be configured to support protected health information, PHI, not only in files but but also in messages. This means that organizations like hospitals, insurance groups, and biotech companies can now use Slack. For these organizations, the impact of using Slack and of being productive and aligned can actually mean saved lives, and that's something I'm truly proud of. On a personal note, it also means that my wife's families, who are all doctors, can finally understand what I do. And finally, let's talk about mobility and security. A couple of years ago, we launched Slack for Enterprise Mobility Management, Slack for EMM. And our Slack for EMM offering integrates with the leading mobile security vendors, such as AirWatch, MobileIron, and BlackBerry. But through customer research and through feedback, we found that customers also need a way to protect devices that are not managed by EMM, such as those for guest devices, or your contract workers, or those executives that refuse to install certs on their personal devices. You know who you are. However, today I am thrilled to announce that we are building more advanced security controls natively into Slack to address this need. Let me start by introducing these features. They are built to help Slack administrators protect the sensitive data that you have access via mobile. The first feature is block, download, and copy. This feature allows admins to prevent files from being downloaded or messages being copied on devices that are not managed by EMM to better control for data exfiltration. The second feature is secondary authentication. This requires face ID, touch ID, or passcode, depending on your device, before users are able to access the Slack mobile app. Again, this is natively built into Slack. This ensures that only the right people are accessing data in your Slack environment on an ongoing basis. And the third feature is session management. This feature gives admins mobility session management, including the ability to remotely wipe a session and the cache in the event that a device is lost or stolen. To demonstrate these features, I want to invite Pooja Mehta to the stage. She's an enterprise product manager and actually the one responsible for bringing these features to market. of the future of the cloud.

[00:37:03] Speaker 10: So, let's take a look at the features that Elan just described. Hi, everyone, and thanks, Elan, for having me.

[00:37:11] Speaker 7: Thanks for joining us, Pooja.

[00:37:13] Speaker 10: Of course. I'm personally really excited about the features that Elan just described. But before showcasing these features, I want to take a moment to set the context for this demo. Let's imagine that I'm an external consultant at a financial services organization. And let's also imagine that Elan is no longer the head of enterprise product at Slack, and is instead a Slack administrator at this company. It's the end of a long day, and I'm taking the train home. While on the train, I decide to catch up on my Slack messages on my personal phone.

[00:37:48] Speaker 7: Not so fast, Pooja. With the new power that you've bestowed upon me, I have enabled secondary authentication, which requires our contract workers to use Face ID before they access their mobile device. This is quick and easy though for the end users.

[00:38:03] Speaker 10: Got it. So I'm using my personal phone, I'm gonna be required to use secondary authentication. But what does that mean? It means that when I click on the Slack app on my phone, I'll be prompted to use Face ID. Only once my face is recognized will I be dropped into the channel that I was last viewing. Let's take a look to see how this works. Wow, that really was quick and easy. Awesome. Well, let's take a look at the unread messages in this channel and see how the rest of the security features pan out. So it looks like the team's made a significant amount of progress on this deal since the last time I was here. And this investment model in particular has come a long way. It has some really good information, so I think I'm gonna save it to my phone so that I can access it whenever I need. Hmm, I can't seem to save it anymore.

[00:38:59] Speaker 7: So to prevent data exfiltration, I've turned on block download and file copy, and this is why Pooja is not able to see the options to download this file.

[00:39:09] Speaker 10: Well, the good thing is, I know I'll be able to access it on Slack whenever I need. Okay, I think we're arriving at my station, so I'm gonna gather my belongings, and let's just hope that I don't forget anything. With that, I'm off. Thanks, everyone.

[00:39:28] Speaker 1: Thank you. Woo. Woo. Woo.

[00:39:30] Speaker 7: Looks like I have a Slack message. Let's see what this is over here. So oh, Pooja just sent me a message. It looks like she forgot the phone on the train. Luckily, she realized and sent me a message. And I'm not worried, because I'm a powerful Slack admin. And I've got a new feature called Session Management. So I'm going to go here into my organizational dashboard and search for Pooja. And I have a new option to wipe out her sessions or her mobile sessions. Now look quickly at the mobile phone, because as soon as I select the Wipe Mobile Remote Sessions, it's going to wipe out her session and clear out the entire cache of the organizational information that's on her phone. And there we go. It's that easy. I can now sleep. Thank you very much. Thanks Pooja for helping me demonstrate these and also for leading these to market. I appreciate that. As you can see, these new native mobile security controls allow administrators to better secure the sensitive information that you have in Slack. Let's quickly review what we covered. First, we recently launched Enterprise Key Management to allow admins the ability to control their information by bringing their own keys and encrypting the information in Slack with their own keys. Second, I announced that HIPAA-compliant organizations can now store both files and messages with protected health information. And finally, we rolled out new features, new native mobile security features to secure the information that you have on mobile devices. These features and certifications are enabling enterprise customers to deploy Slack at scale. Next up, to talk about this in practice, is Kristina Kosmowski, our VP of Customer Success, who's gonna sit down with Oracle, who uses Slack across their entire organization. Thank you very much.

[00:41:46] Speaker 11: Thank you, Alon. Oracle is one of the largest multinational technology companies in the world. And they've been a Slack customer since 2017. And now they are our largest wall-to-wall customer. In just a short time, they've grown to over 139,000 users. And those users are engaged. They are sending over 1.6 million messages daily and uploading 18,000 files. Today, I am fortunate to be joined by two champions from Oracle. Please welcome to the stage the VP of Corporate Application Services, Paul Donnelly, and the VP of EMEA and JPAC Strategy and Operations, Sujith Abraham. Good morning. Thank you guys for joining us today, all the way from Hong Kong and London.

[00:42:51] Speaker 12: Very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting us. That's great.

[00:42:54] Speaker 11: Would you guys just mind taking a moment to share with the audience a little bit about your roles at Oracle?

[00:43:00] Speaker 12: So yeah, I've been at Oracle now for 26 years. I'm responsible for a number of different systems, including traditional services such as email and obviously Calendar, and growing into using things like Atlassian. And my role really is to try and have this sort of internal thing, which is around about making Oracle cool again, mocha. So we're starting to use these sorts of services like Slack and Zoom. So we've been early adopters of both those services. Amazing.

[00:43:32] Speaker 13: And this has been, I think, roughly my 21st year. Spent the last eight years in Hong Kong, all with Oracle, of course. And what my team does, we're part of the sales organization. What we do is we build sales programs with our business development teams to help our sales reps actually drive our cloud solutions more effectively. One of the big things that we focus on these days is storytelling. So for us, driving high-impact communications is really a really big deal. Thank you.

[00:44:05] Speaker 11: And Paul, you've been with us on this journey from the beginning with Oracle and Slack. Maybe you could tell us about what was the original impetus for Oracle choosing Slack.

[00:44:16] Speaker 12: Yeah, so our journey started with our users, really listening to where the pain points were. And this would be a familiar story, I think, to a lot of people. And that is inbox overloading. Also, a lack of persistent chat. We have an XMPP service. We're using open source clients. But the persistent chat piece was a big part and pain point. So they couldn't search for things, find data and team activities was becoming a big problem. And then the other part for us as an IT organization was being able to invest in the platform for the future. So that was really, really quite key. So why did we end up with Slack? For us, it was about finding, it was many reasons, right? Many, many reasons. But I'd start by saying, it was the enterprise grid. So what Ilan and Frank was just saying, with all the various features about centralization, being able to put the guardrails in place with enterprise grid was really important for us and we could scale it across multiple workspaces. And that integration platform, being able to get to that integration platform was really massive for us. And there was already, back two years ago when we started getting involved, a huge number of applications, and it's even better now.

[00:45:42] Speaker 11: Thank you. And Sujith, you're based in Hong Kong. Your teams are remote. They're complex themselves. You've got to communicate back to headquarters. You sent us this slide kind of demonstrating how complex communication was before Slack. Could you tell us why Slack is so important for you as a remote business leader?

[00:46:04] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:46:04] Speaker 13: I mean, you alluded to it. We're being the largest wall-to-wall organization. You can imagine when we get to our size, you inevitably get a certain level of complexity in the organization. I think you can see from the chart, you know, if I broadly look at it, we've got, you know, corporate teams, like legal and finance or deal management teams. And then on the other side, when we look at out in the regions, which in my division is primarily sales, you have all of the groups that are built around driving and supporting the sales ecosystem. The thing is that all of these groups need to work together. And you add time zones onto that and multiple time zones, and you're trying to go back and forth between headquarters, that adds a lot of complexity. And what we had for the last 30 years in terms of our communication platform of record was email. And email, you know, email has its purpose. I think, you know, to me, though, it's a bit like writing letters, right? There's a place there for it, but it's not very collaborative, it's not very dynamic. When you're trying to get some things done, you're dealing with all those time zones, you need something that, you know, as Stuart kind of alluded to earlier, that's a little bit more colloquial, a little bit more socially, you know, informal. So we started looking at these things and trying to figure out how can we make, how can we pull people, more people into the conversation and engage them better. You know, in our part of the world, messaging is quite popular, right? I'm sure you know the platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat. We needed something like that, but something that was really quite enterprise-ready, something that could support the search and rich media. And that's where Slack has made an enormous difference, when you're trying to connect all these, you know, geographically dispersed teams and get more done and including more people in the conversation.

[00:47:54] Speaker 11: Yeah. Okay. One of the things we often tell many of our customers is pick one or two use cases to start with and really bring those processes and workflows into Slack. Could you describe maybe what are one of the two use cases you chose initially?

[00:48:10] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:48:10] Speaker 13: Sure. One of the things I mentioned earlier is how my team focuses on this concept of storytelling. So just to give you an example, we might have a rep, for example, that's in Spain that's done an amazing job with a customer, engaged them in a really effective way. And it's what's more important is that that use or that engagement could be something that other reps could learn from. So we started to think about how can we take this story and broadcast it across the organization. So we started doing all kinds of things in terms of pulling the content together. And today you can, you know, you can source all kinds of creative folks to help build that into what looks like a Marvel movie, right? So we built that all together. We, you know, we did the test cases, got great feedback from the audience. And then when we started launching it, we just started to miss on the engagement. And we started to question what was going on here. And as we started talking to the reps, we get the same feedback. It's going great. We love the content. The problem is it's not that easy to access. And so here we are with the content and the creative. And what was falling apart was really the delivery channel. And really, when we started to look back at it, we realized a lot of our delivery was being handled by things that were designed for the desktop environment. So that was what really prompted us to start looking at Slack because it abstracted away all that complexity, made it a lot easier to get out there and get to the audience and not miss them. So that was one area where we started to see a lot of difference. The other area, when we talk, you know, if we look at, for example, the way our key account teams approach, and these are the folks that engage our largest accounts, they usually have several people that are extended members of the team. It was, again, with email, it was a lot harder to bring them into the conversation, but when we started introducing Slack, you suddenly start seeing these teams, we've got some great examples of these teams pulling together all of the extended community, starting to do deal reviews, even onboarding, right, having that history. So all these things really changed the way we've been engaging, And if I sum it up in a couple ways, I would say it's a persistence. Having that history so when new people come into the organization or you need to check back and find out what has been happening, that's been really helpful. The access across any platform from anywhere. And then that colloquialism that I mentioned earlier, that sort of informal nature that makes it easy for people to jump in and feel like they can contribute without feeling that formality kind of taking place. And I think, Ali, if there's one more, it's that sense of having community. So the great thing about having these channels is there's not just one person to answer a question. There's several people that can jump in and solve that for you.

[00:51:09] Speaker 11: That's great. Paul, you've been the mastermind behind getting this deployed. I'm just blown away by your ability to have executed at this extreme speed and agility, but also taking into account security and putting together some governance processes. And you shared with us kind of this deployment strategy or deployment pillars, rather, you put together. What do you think were the one or two most important components of this strategy?

[00:51:41] Speaker 12: Yeah, so I put this slide together around this, what I saw, the three sort of pillars. And these are the teams of people that we put together. So in the first team, really, the get ready team really pulled in the best of the security, the legal teams, our corporate applications teams, all the people that were influencers in terms of us being able to deploy. It would have been great, by the way, to have actually had Slack to organize all of this, but of course, we were in the start of our journey at this time. So I think some of the pillars there would be very familiar to people, but things to just focus on would be, yeah, the governance pieces. So understand from a deployment perspective, what is it that's gonna get you over the hurdle to deploy to a particular organization? So we come up with a governance program, invited all those people to the table, regular meetings with those guys about every time that we went through a process of deployment. So it was really around defining that and getting that ready to go so there wasn't any, you know, we could work at pace. And then the second thing really was, obviously, integrations was going to be a huge part for us. So again, having a governance piece of that that we would meet every two weeks. It's a slimmed down version of a security review. Anyone that's trying to deploy tools today in IT will know there's a lot of bureaucracy around some of the things we have to get through, explaining things to security. So we worked with them, worked on what was it that they really needed to know. And one of the messages I'd give to people is that it's much more about the data that the security teams need to know. So bring those guys on board and work with them on the governance side. The get set piece, really, that was my team. And I'd focus, really, on just one area there, which is the automation and metrics. So when you're doing things at scale, you're going to need to be able to have some people look at your APIs, be able to do things like IDP group creation, user group creation. That sort of stuff will be mightily useful for you to actually go forward with it. And we also put in place some things like once you've actually deployed to everybody, you've still got to get the messages out to anybody that's new that's arriving. So don't forget about having automation for those sorts of pieces as well. And then finally, on the sort of Go team, that's really IT and business. So this is when we started to work very closely with the likes of Sujith in the business. We get to multiply that across the entire organization. And again, post-enablement, we're going to hear more from Sujith in a minute, but post-enablement, we were looking at making sure we have stakeholders. So from each one of those organizations, want to continue this journey. It's not throw it out there, and then it's finished. You've got to make sure that you keep that relationship, making sure they know about features, making sure they know about anything that was new, like our new integrations that we were bringing forward. And then I think finally, the piece that really helped gel everything together was having the customer success team, your team, on board.

[00:54:41] Speaker 11: Not pay them to say that.

[00:54:44] Speaker 12: No, absolutely. They're really an extension of our team, really helped us with guidance, and just making sure that we were always moving forward and never taking backwards steps. So those are the things I would call out. I could really talk about these items for a lot longer, but those are the highlights.

[00:55:00] Speaker 11: It was great, it's very impressive. And I think, Sujith, from the business side, being able to enable and engage with the users is really important. And since you didn't have a tool like Slack before to help launch it, you really had to rely on email. And so email usage was increasing heavily before the launch. You can see on the chart that we have shown here in light blue, the email usage ramping. And then post-launch, you were able to put all of that communication and engagement in Slack, which is on this chart represented in purple. Can you talk a little bit about some of those enablement and user engagement strategies that you executed?

[00:55:37] Speaker 13: Yeah, I think the big thing for us is that email was entrenched. It wasn't something that we were gonna be able to just shut down tomorrow and expect everyone to transition to. There was just too much that was already on it. So what we did do is we invested in the existing channel to help us move people in a gradual way over to Slack. So we had a very programmatic plan of delivery where we took people through this journey of what is Slack all about, in the channel they were familiar with, how they could get on board to it, what the benefits were, and eventually transitioned them over into Slack. And I think that transition in the way that we did helped move people over comfortably and get them used to what the benefits were because it was a pretty big change for everybody.

[00:56:20] Speaker 11: Yeah. Well, and I heard you guys had a little bit of fun while doing that as well.

[00:56:25] Speaker 13: Yeah, we did. We got a few creative people on the team, so we used all kinds of creative visuals and Slack hacks and had all kinds of ways to essentially educate our audience on the different ways in which Slack would be helpful, I tried to make it fun, too. A big thing that we try to do is inspire people into change instead of beating them into it. Sometimes we beat them into the change, but this time we tried to use the inspiration approach.

[00:56:51] Speaker 11: Wow, well, you guys should be incredibly proud. The story and the journey you've been on has been very impressive. But before we wrap up, could you please share one or two words of wisdom you have for the audience today?

[00:57:06] Speaker 12: Wisdom. Okay. I think automate for scale. Anybody that's got very large deployments, I think you have to invest in some form of automation. The API platform is fabulous. So, anybody that's got some skills in that area, you're definitely going to need to have something in there. And talk to Slack about it if you have any, obviously, any concerns about that. But that's what made it work at scale for us. And then I think the other part would be to say, if I can navigate this for, you know, the best part of 150,000 people in Oracle, then you guys can do the same. And, yeah, those are probably my few words of wisdom.

[00:57:47] Speaker 13: And, yeah, from my perspective, I think the one thing is definitely getting the leadership involved. I think it's really key. That's an ongoing journey. But that's something once you have that leadership plugged in, you start to see the changes happen a lot faster. The second thing, which I mentioned earlier, is that education piece, making it fun and helping people understand in very quick ways how Slack can be beneficial and how they can take advantage of it. You know, that really helps drive the engagement levels up.

[00:58:16] Speaker 11: All right, well, I can't let you go without telling us what is your favorite Slack channel?

[00:58:24] Speaker 13: Mine has to be the Hong Kong Happy Hour channel. And I say that because, surprisingly, we've got a fair number of people in Hong Kong. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to get several people together in a social way. And this is actually the first time we've been able to do this without trying to get them together in some sort of complicated way.

[00:58:48] Speaker 12: I guess mine's a little bit more formal. We have an automated alerts channel. I run a lot of different systems. And the reason why I like it is that my team do such an awesome job in running all our systems that there's so few alerts in there for me. So, that's what makes me happy, looking at alert systems that doesn't include me. I'll add you to my channel. Oh, okay.

[00:59:12] Speaker 11: Well, thank you guys so much for coming here today and being great champions and sharing your stories. So, please give a round of applause for Sujith and Paul. Thanks.

[00:59:20] Speaker 1: Thank you.

[00:59:20] Speaker 11: Wow, what a great morning. We heard about our strategic partnerships, including our most new partner, Zoom. We then learned about our enterprise-grade security features. And finally, we saw it come to life with Oracle sharing their story and journey of going wall-to-wall. So up next, we have breakouts at 10.45 AM. But be sure to stick with us throughout the day, because at 3.45, you won't want to miss Stewart Butterfield and Dr. Mae Jamieson speaking this afternoon. Thank you.