Ecosystem in Practice: Building a Best-In-Class Manufacturing Tech Stack
Full Transcript Below:
Rony Kubat
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the session. My name is Rony Kubat. I’m Co-Founder at Tulip. I serve now as many things but serve as our CIO and CSO. So joined here, Chad Wright from Boston Dynamics, as well as Heatherly Bucher from Arena, and Todd who I just met, Todd Fuller, who I just met today from Rootstock.
And so it’s weird being in a podium, because it’d be better if we were facing each other, and we’d be having coffee and having a chat, and you can all listen in on it. That’s why I hope to make it sort of be in a conversational style despite the questions I have to prompt me for all of this. But my hope is that we’ll be a bit of storytelling from really, I’d say, taking Chad’s perspective on things as in the role of the orchestrator for an ecosystem for a new manufacturing stack and what that means.
So before we start on anything, maybe just a quick intro from yourselves as to what you do, and not only what you do, but also where your companies are doing and how we all came here together today. So I’ll start with you, Chad.
Chad Wright
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Chad Wright. I’m the Chief Information Officer at Boston Dynamics. We are the world’s leading maker of autonomous mobile robots. You’ve probably heard of Spot, our yellow quadruped dog robot. We have another one that is commercially available as well called Stretch, which is a logistics and warehouse robot used for moving boxes, say, up to 50 pounds. And then we have a humanoid named Atlas that has just been electrified and released to the world last April, and that continues to be our research and development platform within the organization.
We’re based here in Waltham, Massachusetts, not too far away. We’ve been a Tulip customer now for just about a year. I’ve been with Boston Dynamics it’ll be five years in December and had the blessing or the curse of building out our stack from scratch, talking zero systems.
In fact, Arena was one of three systems that we inherited five years ago when we started on this journey.
Heatherly Bucher
Great. I’m Heatherly Bucher. I lead Alliances and Partnerships for Arena, a PTC business. Those who live in the Boston area, I understand, I don’t live in the Boston area, but I’ve had numerous people tell me they don’t know what PTC is, but they know the building in Seaport, because it’s very large, and it takes up a lot of Skyway in Seaport.
Arena is a product lifecycle and quality management platform, so we manage finished goods, bills of materials before they get to manufacturing and operations, so engineering change processes and quality processes and supplier choices and things like that.
And I personally have been doing strategic alliances for the last two years when I came back to Arena, but I’ve been in the PLM /QMS space starting way back as a customer back in on-prem kind of old-school PLM systems and then have been on the vendor side for 20 years at previous companies in that arena.
We’re just super excited. Actually, I will say that Boston Dynamics had Arena when Chad joined. We found that a lot of our customers have just kind of started doing the smart manufacturing and digitization of operations, so these partnerships are new. We have a new partnership with Tulip, really because our customers have come to us and said, “We’re doing these exciting things in smart manufacturing, and now we see use cases of connecting engineering and operations.” So I’m super excited to be here and kind of have this conversation.
And Rootstock, we’ve had a partnership with Rootstock and other ERPs for a long time, because if anything about PLM, PLM and ERP is a table stakes integration. So that side has always existed in the PLM space, but now it’s kind of expanding beyond for multiple layers of partnerships.
Todd Fuller
And I’m Todd Fuller with Rootstock. I’m a Solution Architect. I primarily work with customers and prospects on how to fit our ERP solution into their business and different functionalities that we can bring to bear and how it would work with other parts of their technology stack.
I don’t have any quadrupeds or humanoids, so I will not try to compete with Chad and Boston Dynamics, but we are honored to be part of the stack that Boston Dynamics uses to run their business.
Rony Kubat
So, I think, I don’t know how many people know, but Boston Dynamics is not a brand new company. It’s been around for quite a while. And so to start with, I’m just really curious on how is it that even though Boston Dynamics is an older company, you had this chance to kind of flip the table essentially and, “Okay, we’re going to start from scratch, we’re going to rethink things from a blank slate.” How did that happen that you could do that?
Chad Wright
Yeah. No, it’s a great question. So I joined the company five years ago as the company’s first CIO. It was when the company started selling robots commercially for the very first time.
Boston Dynamics has been around since 1992, spun out of what was called the Leg Lab at MIT by a gentleman by the name of Marc Raibert. And his passion was about studying the movement, specifically the leg movement, of humans and animals, which is why our robots are primarily legged. And the company grew up over 30 years through DARPA contracts: “Build us one robot that can solve this problem. Can this robot walk five miles without having to be touched? Can this robot run 30 miles an hour? Can this robot pick something up and move it?”
And so, our challenge. We have a unique history having been owned by Google for five years and owned by SoftBank for a couple of years before Hyundai Motor Group bought 80% of the company back in 2021. And you can see, and if you follow the robotics space, a lot of these auto manufacturers are really focused on robotics, and particularly hot right now is humanoids.
But as an IT professional, when I saw this opportunity, I had been working at Amazon Robotics for the six years prior, again, building robots just for Amazon fulfillment centers, had an opportunity to do this.
And like Rony said, it was greenfield, “How do we want to do this?” And I had been an SAP customer for 12 years and an Oracle customer for six years and a NetSuite customer for four years. I knew what big ERP looked like, and my executive leadership team fortunately viewed the world much like I did. And soon as I walked in the door, even before I walked in the door, said, “We will not use SAP or Oracle.” And they said, “We got to find a different way to do it,” and we built the entire business running on the Salesforce platform. And our partnership with Rootstock, with Tulip, with Arena, all of these technologies that easily plug-and-play into that Salesforce ecosystem where I have one customer, one product, one order with no integrations between any of our primary transaction systems, and that really is that sort of Nirvana that I had chased for 20 years working under other CIOs, like how do you do this? And we had an opportunity to go do it.
Rony Kubat
To follow up on that, you say you’re just chasing this Nirvana, so you have a vision coming into it of where you wanted to end up or what the art of the possible could be when you were initially started thinking about which systems you’re going to pick. And what were the criteria, and what was that vision?
Chad Wright
From a technology perspective, it was exactly what I had just said. It was really about that one customer, one product, one order. Having grown up as a business analyst and a data analyst and built integrations between systems, any of you on the architecture side know the pain that you feel when you’re integrating your CRM system with your ERP system with your customer support system and having to build those integrations while the technology has gotten better, and those problems become a little bit easier to solve, they’re still problems and they still take up space in your backlog, in your technical debt, and the things that you have to support.
The other part of the vision was building a team around the business analyst, people that sit between the deep technology and the business. They understand the business well enough that they can help influence the strategy. They understand the technology well enough or that they use technology where they are doing low-code/ no-code and providing that value with less investment from a deep technical step.
For calibration, our company is about 900 people, and our IT organization is 32 people. And that’s usually a question I have whenever I hear people like me talking, so I’ll put that out there to give you an idea of the type of the group, and about 12 of them are on the business analyst side. So almost half of what we invest in on the IT side is supporting that enterprise application stack, of which Tulip and Rootstock and Arena are part of.
Rony Kubat
Can you speak a little bit, actually, about how each of these pieces are in use today?
Chad Wright
How are they in use today? Well, like Heatherly said, PLM and ERP is table stakes for us. In fact, it’s a big area of focus for our organization as we build out the business processes that support products from ideas through production.
And so we have business analysts that are assigned in different functional areas of the business to help support, whether it’s coming from our CAD system through PLM, then from EBOM to MBOM into the ERP system where we can then move into supply chain and production, or they sit in finance and they’re working with finance team or working with people operations or they’re working with various engineering teams.
It is a highly technical company. I have 899 people telling me how to do my job every day, but that’s just part of it. So we try to keep ourselves as transparent and as visible as possible, and these types of tools that we can move fast and nimble are really what give us that advantage.
Rony Kubat
My kids are really into puzzles now, so both the flat puzzles and also the complicated 3D stuff. And I feel like in a way, me sitting in your shoes as the CIO of Tulip and what are the systems that we’re using, it’s either like I build the frame, so here I find all my edge pieces, I’m going to put them together, and then I fill in the pieces together, or you have those puzzles that all the pieces have to fit in together at the same time from a central vision of it, and then from that vision they come together.
So when you were building out the system, the platform for the company, were you thinking about it in a spine-and-spoke sort of model to it or was it centralized, all these things need to come together from the get-go, better make sure that they’re all coming together?
Chad Wright
Yeah, that’s a great way to look at it. I think it was a little bit of both, because we were building completely from scratch. So this was the very end of ’19, beginning of 2020, and then by the way, something else happened in 2020 that really changed a lot of things.
So we were doing this at the same time, but it really was about taking a leap of faith on the technology that it would all start to come together. The vision was that Salesforce was going to be that backbone. That was the big bet that I was making as a CIO, still a big bet that I make every day, but that we were going to build on top of that. Arena happened to work in the same fashion, we could plug and play, Rootstock is built on the Salesforce platform.
So if Salesforce and the objects and the architecture of Salesforce, Rootstock. You just need to learn and understand the business processes, which is how we staffed our team, is we hired good finance people and good manufacturing people that sit in the IT organization now to support that.
But probably the big three investments I made that first year, it was Salesforce, it was Rootstock, and then it was Snowflake, because I knew at the end of the day we would need something to house data, either from our transactional system or from our other peripheral systems that we could then present back to the business in a meaningful way through data analytics.
Rony Kubat
So the common thing in all of this is that interconnectivity between all these systems and how’s that seamlessly come together.
So I think to switch it over to Arena and Rootstock, thinking from the product perspective, what’s your responsibility in all this? What do you have to do to make that possible in an ecosystem? That, I think, this is a good embodiment of as ecosystem meaning all these pieces that are talking together into it.
So let’s start with that way.
Todd Fuller
So from the Rootstock side, I think our responsibility, and we do, we deal with this on a fairly frequent basis through our customer support, is you have to know what our software’s doing and how it’s doing it.
To Chad’s point, I have hired over a dozen, I was a customer of Rootstock before I joined Rootstock, and I went through 12, 15 Salesforce admin/ developers for various different projects. I had to train them very little on the ecosystem. They trained me on the ecosystem. I would just train them, I had a person from another country, great Salesforce admin/ developer, and I told her the whole thing about what we needed to do with our PO process, and she did it all. But before she started, she goes, “I just have one question. What is a PO?” So I just had to be clear with her, this is what a PO is, this is how we use it, here’s the peripheral functionality, here’s how we process them. And once she knew that she was able to do more than any other developer on any other platform I ever worked in, and I’ve worked in an SAP shop, an Oracle shop, Microsoft, we were Microsoft Dynamics before we switched to Rootstock.
So I think by doing that, you enable those people, who there are many, many, many out there. So you have availability of resource, you have a well-documented, ubiquitous system out in the marketplace. The rest is up to you, as long as, you know, if you get a Rootstock or an Arena or anything else, especially in the Salesforce platform, you have clarification on how they’re doing what they’re doing.
Rony Kubat
What about from the PLM side?
Heatherly Bucher
Yeah, that’s a great question. We have over 1,400 customers worldwide across three major industries, and we’re multi-tenant cloud, and we’ve always been multi-tenant cloud.
Before SaaS was an acronym, Arena was the first to the market in that way. And having that commitment, so we were committed to multi-tenant cloud, and that meant that we needed to not only deliver the product in a certain way, develop the product in a certain way, but in our integration strategies, our development platform, and our partnerships.
That decision and commitment to multi-tenant cloud colored all of that. So I spend a tremendous amount of time with our VP of product and VP of dev just like I do our VP of sales when I look at what are we doing in our partnership space, because our partnerships are really predicated on saying yes to our customers’ request to gain more value out of their investment in the Arena system.
So when a Boston Dynamics or any of our other customers come and say, “We need to see value in use cases and connecting to a Rootstock, to connecting to a Tulip, to connecting to some other system out there.” Our goal is through both our platform and our REST APIs, our low-code integration capabilities, and our partnerships to say yes to as many of those as possible and to make it as easy as possible.
And of course, we’re living now in a, Chad and I were talking before, we’re living now in a time that’s super exciting for me, because I’ve been in the PLM space for a long time where connecting an ERP and a PLM meant a big science project, and you’re doing it one-off every single time.
You don’t get to leverage what 10 other customers just invested in. Their 18 months of sweat equity. You don’t get access to it. Now with low-code/ no-code, REST APIs, iPaaSes, the vendor’s responsibility, in my opinion, my responsibility working with my PM and dev team is making sure that we utilize all that for the good of our customers so that they don’t have to invest as much in the technology. It shouldn’t be hard. They get to spend their time doing their work of their business and doing things like that.
So from my perspective, that’s what vendors should be doing.
Rony Kubat
So this is really a question for everybody, but based off of what something Todd said, obviously it’s not a binary choice, but given I’m going to posit as a binary choice, do you believe it’s more important to get a common understanding of the concepts, right?
So imagine a world, an ecosystem where everybody knows what a PO is, they have the same understanding of what that is. They may connect in totally different ways. Versus everyone understands the technology to make that connection. So we’re going to use REST API, we’re going to this, blah blah, blah, OpenAPI, et cetera. But the semantics of what those are is where the rubber hits the road in terms of the connections between them.
Which is more important? You want to go first?
Heatherly Bucher
I would say the second, because we have customers in high-tech consumer products, medical device, the FA&D space, and even within high-tech, Boston Dynamics and Sonos and Insulet, Insulet Medical Device, all three Boston-based companies, all Arena customers, very, very different products, very different manufacturing processes, commercialization processes. Their commitment to field service is all very different. Insulet obviously is regulatory, and you probably have some level of regulatory as well with your military contracts.
We can’t dictate and can’t expect them to have all the same definition of an engineering change process or even what a connection between ERP and PLM or PLM and MES should exactly be for them. But what we can do is give them that structure underneath to make it easy for them to configure it to meet their needs. I can’t tell Boston Dynamics to change their business between PLM and ERP to match what Insulet wants to do. I can give them both the same underlaying structure and technology and partners that have the same so they can do it quickly and to their definition, right?
Todd Fuller
I would agree. I’d say they’re both important. I just think the second one’s more important because you are far less likely to get a common-ground understanding of how the business processes work.
I had a customer that does a PO completely backwards. They receive goods into their warehouse, and they store them and they don’t know what they’ve paid for them, nor do they have a purchase order from, or they haven’t issued a purchase order. They do a blanket agreement with Amazon, and they buy stuff and they put it away, and they start prepping to sell it, but it’s still not even in their inventory. It’s in their inventory, but financially, it’s not in their inventory. It’s backwards. So you just have to know the technology and then the basic structures, and they’re going to do their business the way they run their business.
That’s their advantage. That’s why they’re in business is because they do something very different.
Chad Wright
And I’m glad to hear my partners talk this way because it aligns, I think, with how we think about it, too. If I think about the people that we’ve hired into our IT organization, which was five people five years ago, and we’re 32 today, it was really about people that had good business knowledge and business understanding and good communication skills, good critical thinking, good problem-solving.
I didn’t worry about the technology, because number one, they were going to learn it, we were going to teach it to them, or they’re going to learn it on their own, or we can rely on our partners. And we need partners that can come in and learn and listen, right?
They don’t always like to do that, but they listen to the types of things that we’re challenged with and help us focus on what’s the problem we’re trying to solve. And having your team that are wired that way to focus on the business problem and understanding the dependencies and the risks, we can teach them the technology—the Salesforce platform’s very easy. We’ve taught people from scratch. Two of our best business analysts, three of our best business analysts, four of our best business analysts, they never used Salesforce before. We’re teaching them, and they’re very, very productive in what they do.
And where we have a gap, we need help, we can rely on our partners, because they understand our business or they’re willing to understand our business to help us connect those dots.
Rony Kubat
That’s interesting, because in a sense, I feel we are coming at it from opposition and complementary perspectives. So your emphasis here is on the business process and understanding that, and you’ll learn the technology to make the things come together.
Whereas, correct me if I’m wrong, earlier you were saying is actually the technology that’s more important as long as your system is flexible enough to be able to adapt to whatever the variety of different processes that the end user has.
Heatherly Bucher
From the vendor side, sure. I lived on the customer side, and of course, we have our own business processes internally at Arena, so it’s not like we don’t have to do processes. We all do, right?
Rony Kubat
Everybody’s own special Snowflake.
Heatherly Bucher
Yeah. I think as a customer, I guess what I say is choose vendors that are using modern platforms and modern technologies and the ability to connect, because you don’t know where you’re going to be in the future either. You don’t want to get locked in. But the days of being rev-locked should be over, frankly. But on the other hand, yeah, you should spend a tremendous amount of time knowing what your business processes are.
That’s actually the hardest part as a company, is knowing what do we need to have happen at each stage in the product development and manufacturing process and what data’s involved and when and who. That’s actually a really hard cross-functional exercise, and your systems will work better for you when you’ve done that exercise, because systems are just the manifestation, the automation, the efficiency, and the accuracy of that process.
But you have to know what your process is. So on the customer, not to downplay at all, with our customers, the challenge we usually see is because they’re struggling with that exercise. They’re trying to get Arena or Rootstock or Tulip to work for them, but they haven’t done that exercise first, and it’s really hard, yes, so the vendor, to help them if they can’t articulate, “What is your engineering change process?” “Well, we’re not really sure.” It’s going to be really hard to get any system, I don’t care which PLM you pick to support it, if you can’t articulate it, and the articulation is hard. But if you’re talking about just connecting systems, that should be a whole lot easier than it used to be 10 years ago.
Rony Kubat
Agree. So I’m actually curious from the audience, if I say like Conway’s Law, do people know what I’m talking about? No. All right, so this is more an idea from the development side of, like, your product will evolve to reflect your organizational structure in the company. So if you’ve got siloed teams working on stuff, you’re going to end up with a siloed application or product in the end of things. And so I’m thinking of it from the Boston Dynamics side—how is the systems that you put together, is it a reflection of the organizational structure or not, and what works in the friction between the organizational structure and the systems that you’re putting into place?
Chad Wright
It’s an interesting question. Our situation I think is unique, because we were starting from ground zero all at the same time. We were trying to build the airplane while it was flying, literally.
And for us, I will say that the teams, so the business units that matured faster have been able to take advantage of the technology stack the most. So that’s just natural. They’re able to articulate their requirements, they’re thinking in an innovative way, and then from an IT perspective, we can deliver against that in a very agile, iterative approach, and our tools and our stack supports that, and so we can move very, very quickly.
I will say in some cases, as an IT organization, we are trying to be strategic and then exerting our influence on those business units using our technology partners for best practices to help mature those processes. But that is a given friction, and it literally is a tug of war back and forth where we are trying to move the organization at a rapid rate.
Rony Kubat
From the flip side and the vendor perspective, having seen your systems implemented in different organizational structures for, I’d say, the modern approach to the new manufacturing stack from an ecosystem perspective, connectivity perspective, where have you found it works best and where does it not work well? What kind of cultures or organizational structures in your customers does it work best?
Todd Fuller
I think for Rootstock on the ERP side, ERP has been around a long time, and I’m old enough to remember the sales pitch that SAP made to me when I was at a paper company, that we have crafted all of the business processes that you need in our software. Your job is to use them, not to change them, not to modify them, not to submit requests for stuff.
So I think the best organization is not the organization that can do that. Boston Dynamics is kind of a pinnacle customer for us because they have a super high-value product, very customizable, flexible, they’re not towards the process industry where they’re just cranking out these robots and they just need to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. The customer engagement, the management of the work in the business and how we interact with customers, how we interact with our manufacturing partners or employees or vendors is all very important.
We need to do it in the most effective way, not the way the software does it so that I have to think about it the least. Those are our best customers.
Everybody’s business is different, and if it’s not different, you’re probably losing competitive advantage. So our best customers are customers that are looking to craft the software to support their customers, vendors, partners, employees, and I still deal with a lot of companies that they want, “What are your best practices?
So we’re looking for you to dump your software in our environment, and we’ll just all use it, and it will work, and nobody can screw anything up.” It’s not a good customer for us. Those are typically, they’re cranking out widgets at a high volume, and they just need to get it done.
Heatherly Bucher
Yeah. I’d echo everything that Chad and Todd said. And I think the other thing I would add, thinking back over the years, and I used to be a solution architect and a sales consultant, and I used to lead those teams, so I used to do a lot of field work with customers.
I think it goes back to leadership, actually. It’s fabulous to see Chad here and engaged with his vendors in a partnership. A lot of times, the people in the trenches, whether they’re engineering directors or change analysts or manufacturing engineers or shop floor managers, may really want to improve the processes and may really be wanting to adapt and improve how they use their platforms.
But there’s always a fire of the day or the week in those jobs. There’s always things they need to do right now. There’s not always time and energy or support. They don’t always have business analysts from IT. They don’t always have the CIO’s support and backing and knowledge of what they’re dealing with with their systems.
All of our customers, like I said, the reason they come to Arena is they tend to be cloud-forward, cloud-only. They tend to be about speed and time to market or owning the market or being first to market. So the business drives there, but not all of them come with really great executive sponsorship of what their teams are trying to do and make sure that even after implementation, initial implementation of the systems, that they still get some dedicated space and support for continual improvement.
We’re constantly improving. I’m sure Rootstock and Tulip are as well. We do four major releases a year, right? We’re multi-tenant. We can give you that greatness four times a year, new stuff, but that means the teams have to figure out what they want to do with the new stuff, and does it impact my process? Do I need to change stuff? Should I reconfigure some stuff? Should I change some integrations? That is work, right? Matter of fact, in our medical device, customers sometimes have been like, “Love it, but not so much change.” And we do release changes in a way they don’t have to take it.
But I think leadership support, our best customers have CIOs and CEOs and VPs aware and supportive of their teams and that makes a difference.
Chad Wright
Yeah, I think it’s important for all of us as customers. You’re here, that shows that you’re engaged in the Tulip ecosystem, and you should push on your customer success managers, you should push on your account managers, and you should push on the leadership team here at Tulip as your other partners, right?
Yeah, I introduced Rootstock and Tulip people a year ago, because Rootstock wanted to know what we were doing. They were very invested in what we were doing and what we were doing for MES. So it’s nice to be in the middle of these things, but we can do all that. You are at the intersection point of all of your vendors, and I encourage you to be active and push, because together we crowdsource the direction of these tools, and they’ll listen to us in mass, and that’s an important part of our job.
Rony Kubat
He said it and is right, and it’s push us to be better. It’s not push us that we’re pushing back. I want to give feedback, tell us what you want.
We’re not going to be able to do that without you. So this is just, I’m fully wearing the Tulip hat here, but for all of you people that are in this audience who are exactly the people that need to be telling us what to do.
You mentioned something else that was kind of interesting on the customers that are asking for the best practices, and it kind of is in this tension I feel like between we understand your paper-making process. All you have to do is do it, right? That is the best practice fully encompassed, versus here’s a blank page. You can do whatever you want.
And so I’m curious from both sides, both from, again, the responsibility side, both from the vendor, but also what is desired from the customer side for the responsibility of putting all these pieces together and sharing the best practices versus adapting to whatever your particular situation, particular set of needs and connections between systems are. Who bears that responsibility? Who could?
Chad Wright
I think it’s me, as a customer, I think bears that responsibility. You are steering the direction of the ship. You are responsible for the decisions that are made within the organization.
I will tell you when I evaluate new technology and get to know a new partner, I’m usually asking them to see their best practices. I want to get a response out of that and see what they mean about that, whether they’re coming with implementation templates, things to accelerate our implementation, which Tulip did, and we were able to take advantage of that, and it was real, it wasn’t vaporware.
I think being able to push on those types of things. Because it will help you in the absence of an answer, which happened a lot in our case where our business units were still maturing. We needed to lean on a best practice, even if it was just something to get us through a temporary period. So I do think it also helps out to see if they are in a partner network. You’re all familiar with Salesforce and their vast ecosystem and seeing customers playing, and that should give you a vote of confidence that the customers or the partners in those areas are going to be working well together.
Rony Kubat
What’s your vision of the future that we are today? We did a bunch of stuff, put it together. What’s next?
Chad Wright
Prompt to app. It’s not low-code/no-code, it’s not text-to-code. It’s prompt to apt, and you might be writing that prompt or you might be speaking that prompt. And I got to figure out how does that make our business better? How do we build robots faster and cheaper and better quality with that in mind?
Rony Kubat
What do you all say?
Heatherly Bucher
About the future?
Rony Kubat
I’ll give you a time horizon of five years.
Heatherly Bucher
Five years. I think in the overall platform technology space, outside of the obvious, I think everyone’s working to figure out what valid non-performative use of AI is and what types of AI.
There’s a whole lot of things to explore for businesses within that space, for sure. But outside of that obvious one, I think, again, from a partnerships perspective, the partnerships I’ve been most excited about recently are in these new areas that our customers are bringing to us. Certainly, MES is one of them, but we’ve also seen kind of a burgeoning adoption, for example, a very modern cloud hardware procurement platforms and sourcing platforms as an example, or hardware team kind of whip collaboration spaces. These are interesting, and they have valid use cases or reasons to want to connect to that engineering source of truth that they have in Arena, our customers.
So I think overall, finally the SaaS cloud, it sounds funny to say, because we’ve been around a while, SaaS and cloud, but I think it’s finally going into some of these niche spaces and maybe chipping away, I don’t want to say MES necessarily is, but I think going into manufacturing and operations where large ERP used to try to own everything, like an Oracle sourcing and procurement platforms, but never did a great job.
So we have some new cloud partners in sourcing and procurement, and it’s because our customers bought them, by the way, and came to us and then said, “Well, we’re using this now instead of Oracle or SAP, and we want to integrate Arena to it.” I’m like, “Great, let’s make that easy to do.”
So I think this idea of finding the best-in-class modern solution for what your teams need, trusting that you’re selecting things that can easily connect, that’s kind of where we see a lot of our customers going. They’re abandoning the monolithic manufacturing ERP system or some of these older technologies, because there are new choices, and they’re finding value in them, and they can move quickly. So I think next five years there’s going to be a whole lot more of that, really.
Todd Fuller
Yeah, I think the same. It’s not brilliant, it’s just more of the same. I think there’s just more and more opportunities for more and more people to build more and more Arenas, Rootstocks, Tulips, that you don’t need a big organization with tons of resources to build something effective.
So the more you do that, the more we do that, the more you do that, the best tools are going to be the newest built by the brightest groups of people. And if you need that leverage in your business, in this instance, we have the Salesforce platform is kind of the common denominator, the piping that you have to put in place to actually get stuff done, it’s there.
So we don’t need so many resources to focus on that. Let’s focus on that last mile that delivers value to the customer, the employee, the vendor, the business.
It’s been 30, 40 years, and it is going to keep heading in that direction. Like I said, I’m old enough to remember I wrote my first AI program was written in Lisp, and it figured out how much change I should give you if you put this amount in the machine, and it was written in Lisp. I can’t even believe that AI stands for the same thing that I did back in the ’90s. So that pace of change, it’s not slowing down, it’s getting faster, so better start dealing with it.
Rony Kubat
I guess one closing perspective from me before I’d like to, if we have five minutes for questions from folks, is more I want to explode out this word ecosystem within the space that we’re in. Because when I think of a resilient ecosystem, it’s one that is very rich in variety and it’s complementary in that this flower that gives my wife pleasure when I give it to her is providing nectar for some bees that are passing pollen from one thing to another and sustenance for the deer or whatever that’s eating the flowers.
And so I think the analogy works well in this space, too, in that it is the resilience you get through the richness of many different folks working together in creating something that’s greater than any one monolithic experience can give you, which is a very gray world.
So with that, I open it to questions from anyone here.
Todd Fuller
Did that good a job, I guess.
Audience member
How long did it
Rony Kubat
How long did it take you to implement the full ecosystem and have it all tightly integrated among the different apps?
Chad Wright
So we signed contracts in January, we hit the ground in February, we changed course in May, and launched a e-commerce store to sell robots on the web because of COVID, and we were live with customer support in August and finance in December.
So it was all of that inside of 10 months. Snowflake went live during that, Workday went live during all that, so it was a busy year.
Heatherly Bucher
Busy year.
Rony Kubat
Marius.
Marius
Yeah. This is Marius. One question. On the one hand, you say when you talk about business processes, it’s very individual. So when you take software, you need to make the software fit to the business process.
On the other hand, we talk about the tech stack where I understand you want to stay flexible, updatable so to say. So how do you see this field of tension when you talk about a tech stack applying standard solutions, but stay flexible in regards to solutions?
I understand you have certain standards like ERP or so, then you use Tulip. So how do you see these levels of, I don’t know, if you want to call it business process hierarchies or so? If you could give me your opinion about that.
Chad Wright
Do you want to hear that from a customer or from a vendor’s perspective?
Marius
Both.
Chad Wright
Probably different. Do you want to go, Todd?
Todd Fuller
Well, I think the ability to do that, comes down to, and not to get into programming languages, but it comes down to object orientation, the move to object orientation over the last 20 or so years of systems like Rootstock and Salesforce and OutSystems and stuff like that.
So you can implement a best practice, if you will, at a smaller level, and then you can have a customer or a partner kind of tailor how those things interact.
So it’s a balance. How to keep that balance in balance for a long period of time, I think, is just work. I think you just have to monitor it and have some governance of those things as they sit today so you don’t get them out of whack with all the other pieces and parts you got moving around in your business.
Rony Kubat
So… Go ahead.
Heatherly Bucher
I was going to say it’s a tension, it’s a creative tension, I think, and understand that software vendors make that decision as well, right?
Like I said, we’re multi-tenant cloud. To do that and do it well, the box is very big of what Boston Dynamics can do with Arena and what they can configure, and we’re constantly making the box bigger, but it is a box, to be clear.
But Boston Dynamics didn’t come to us and say, “We’re Caterpillar or Boeing with a hundred years of history, tech debt, culture debt, process debt, and the ability to move that group and people in ship is too big. So we have to have something that there is no box that we’re willing to pay that price, both not just software purchase, but in time to get it live. Instead, we are okay with pretty good practice and best practice.” And also, I think there’s a lot of best practices. We support a lot of best practices in engineering within Arena, best practices that fit Boston Dynamics, but also that fit Insulet, as an example.
They’re all best practice. But it’s true. If you’re a Boeing, you should never, or a Nissan or a Caterpillar, you should never look at Arena, and we will tell you, “We are not for you.” So as a vendor, you should ask your vendors, “What is your philosophy? What are you delivering to us?” right? To deliver multi-cloud tenant and make sure that 1,500 customers on Monday get not only our upgrade, but all of their integrations work seamlessly on Monday, then no problem. We have to have some box to do it. But that’s what all of our customers want. I think there is a tension. You need to know what your vendors are doing from a philosophy standpoint and how they’re delivering it so to see if it fits your corporate culture, which I think is what Chad can answer as a company. You have to decide what’s important to you, right?
Chad Wright
Yeah. And just real quick to add on to something that Heatherly said earlier, you’ve got to decide to buy which boxes, and then you got to make sure those boxes are both sort of technically sound and provide the technical best practices, but they’re flexible, because I don’t want to be painted in the corner, kind of what you said earlier, so I don’t want to be painted in the corner, so you are trusting that your vendors are going to continue to be flexible on your behalf and really push on your vendors and know and understand their roadmap so that you can react as quickly as you can.
If you work in IT, and you don’t like that tension that I think you so perfectly described, it’s probably not the job for you, because I love that tension. I’ve been sitting on the customer side my whole career, and I love not knowing what the answer is every day and waking up every morning and working with my team and figuring out together how we’re going to do that. But it really is that tension.
Rony Kubat
Okay. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us, and let’s stick around for a bit afterwards if anyone has additional questions, and enjoy the rest of the day.