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Eric Herzog

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Eric Herzog, Infinidat

Eric Herzog

CMO Infinidat

Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer at Infinidat, takes center stage in this insightful discussion with theCUBE. As a seasoned marketing veteran with a rich lineage in technology sectors such as storage and software-defined infrastructure, Herzog talks to John Furrier about the evolving role of AI in the marketing landscape, specifically its impact on B2B strategies. The conversation, facilitated by Furrier and CUBE research analyst Christoph Bertrand, dives into how Herzog's expertise is shaping AI tools to optimize marketing performance and efficiency. Read more

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What is the current usage of the AI RAG solution for storage within the company? add

What approach do we take with press releases and social media in our marketing strategy? add

What metrics should a metric-driven CMO be watching for when implementing AI in their marketing strategy? add

What is the importance of embracing AI as a powerful tool in various aspects of marketing and demand generation strategies, and using the right tools for the right job? add

What is the importance of training artificial intelligence in order to avoid logistical mistakes in manufacturing processes? add

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Eric Herzog, Infinidat

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>> Hello, everyone, back to theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are here for the CMO Leaders Summit series. Of course, theCUBE and the NYSE Wired community doing our part, bringing you an open community of great content, great leaders to share what's happening in the AI world, obviously the focus on CMOs and what they're doing, their opportunities to use AI to make their life better and also help their customers be successful. Eric Herzog is here, CUBE alumni going back many, many years with theCUBE, award-winning CMO and B2B. Great to see you with Infinidat and CMO. Infinidat recently announced an acquisition intention of Lenovo to buy you guys. Congratulations.

Eric Herzog

>> Thank you. Thank you. - Good to see you.

Eric Herzog

>> Great. Well, thank you. We always love being with theCUBE

>> and this is a new thing and so love doing this. Thank you for inviting us.

>> I was really excited to have you on the CMO Leader series. You've been a friend of theCUBE going back when we started. But your pedigree, going back to the EMC days, you're like a walking knowledge base of storage, software- defined infrastructure. And it's the hottest area in AI infrastructure right now if you look at what's going on. So you've seen one many movies, many cycles of innovation, you're a historian. Dave always calls himself a historian. But also on a tactical side, you've been an award-winning CMO. So I want to ask you first question. As AI unfolds, you've seen how things were done and now you're starting to see AI come in. How do you think about that? Because you kind of got to separate the fluff from the reality and what's real, but there's opportunities that you could solve, problems that were unsolvable or would require massive amounts of money for transformation projects, new CRM system. "I want to be faster on getting leads and getting customer sales. " So as a CMO, looking at this new wave, what is your mindset like right now?

Eric Herzog

>> We are already using it. We use it primarily for competitive. I do believe in oversight. Okay. Part of the thing we do from a product perspective, we have an AI RAG solution for storage that helps you avoid hallucinations and improper data sets. Now, that's not focused on the open market, it's focused on our enterprise customers, so it's really their own data to use AI. But it is an issue, so you got to make sure that that doesn't happen. So I believe in using it right now in a technical perspective-

>> Internally or externally?

Eric Herzog

>> No, no. We use it internally to gather competitive information on our competition. We have a competitive session we do every two weeks for the entire field. We invite everybody and we walk through the infamous checkbox, right? So you've got the green, the yellow, and the red of the key feature functions that the end users want. What are their messages? What are they saying? Are they talking about cyber like we do? Are they talking about AI? Are they not talking about, and how do they do it? So we use that heavily on the competitive level, and then we're using some of it right now for things like ad placement. We do everything digitally. We don't do paper. Not that there aren't still people looking at paper, I do. We have to do it that way. So what's the right thing for the UK? What should we be doing in North America? Which ones spread and everyone will read it because most IT people at least read English even in Japan? So should we use that one? This website that's got a Japanese version in a German, okay, we should use it. So we use AI to try to determine what's the lead characteristics, who are their target markets, what are the titles of the people. And they say their own thing to us, of course, trying to sell us, but we use AI to help pick where we should be doing our digital advertising as well.

>> So you're very intentional the way you're thinking about the AI right now.

Eric Herzog

>> Yes. - Is there any areas

>> that you have like the magic wand saying, "I wish it could get better in this area. " Or are you guys just really narrowing in on things that you can control with data that you have?

Eric Herzog

>> Well, we're narrowing in because we're trying to make sure AI is proven in these areas. So AI's proven and competitive. AI is proven in doing market analysis. So in this case, for us, market analysis of where do we want to spend our advertising dollars. Remember, while we're pending an acquisition, right now we're a tiny little company, and so we don't have a lot of big budget to spend. So we got to make sure that if we're going to do a series of webinars, that it pays. You're going to laugh, but the thing I did with Christoph, with you guys on the cyber summit, we did AI and it said, oh no, everyone watches theCUBE. That's an IT decision maker from director or not. So because it came back with that, I said, "Hey, of course... " Now I know you guys, I was going to do it anyway, but it was just extra thing and we've used it. For example, we use block and files in the register, which you know are storage websites.

>> Chris Miller's awesome. We all know.

Eric Herzog

>> And we did that by also doing the AI because we know Chris, Chris and I have lunch or dinner every time I'm in the UK, but we want to make sure, okay, the advertising site, how does that work? So we ran it through AI and it came back, "No, no, people do it. Same job title." Because we're high-end enterprise. So we don't have products for Herzog's bar and grill or for your cigar store. We may in the future, but right now we don't.

>> So you know your target. - Yes. And we know the profile.

Eric Herzog

>> First of all, great plug for Christoph Bertrand, who's

>> a CUBE research analyst, just read at a cyber summit.

>> But that brings up a good point. What we're doing with the cyber summit is very unique, it's very digital.

>> Right. - So we're starting to see the footprint

>> of the narratives hit these targeted personas

Eric Herzog

>> and your AI showing results there. This came up earlier with Shelley who was just on, who's a marketing expert, has a great vision that digital shouldn't be a separate thing. And I think that's a new thing. You're starting to see these moves. It's like, I call it the Cubinar. It's like theCUBE, not webinar, but webinars were like, "Okay, sign in, get leads. " Which is still kind of around, which is fine, but we're not lead oriented, we're impact oriented. So we call the Cubinar. It's like not a webinar, but it's like we do CUBE style. These are new techniques. As a CMO, what are you seeing that's working? What gets your attention besides us to plug for theCUBE and what are some of the things... I mean, forget the Cubinar, but you know what I'm saying. It's a wave, new things are coming that are tools and opportunities that would throw off data that you could potentially use.

Eric Herzog

>> Well, we have always believed in a fully integrated... It's just the way I am, it's fully integrated market. I came from product management. I've been a sales VP, right? So to me, it's all how you integrate it together and get everything working together. I like to say that business is the ultimate team sport. I used to wrestle in college, that's an individual sport. A swimmer, a tennis player, that's an individual sport. Sure, there might be a team, but it's really about you winning your medal, you winning the NCAA championship or whatever, right? But business is a team sport. It's football, it's baseball, it's hockey, it's basketball. That's the way it needs to be. So from a marketing perspective as a sub thing, everything needs to work together. So what we do in product marketing and technical marketing. If you win awards, leveraging what we do, everything we've done with you, we leverage in social media, we leverage it digitally. We post on our own website, try to drive traffic. We also drive traffic to your websites at theCUBE. So we take a fully integrated approach. As you know, theCUBE recently did some awards and we were a two-time finalist. Well, we did a press release on that. What do we do with the press release? We socialed it. Did I do a little short video? Yes. Did we social that? Do we bring it back to our... So we take a completely integrated approach before the more technical sides of marketing and the less technical sides of marketing. So AI can help do that, right? So make sure all the assets are there. Oh wait, we could use that with our channel people. And we do that with a channel. So we take a very integrated approach even before we could leverage AI to do-

>> You're constantly having a drumbeat talking to your customers all the time with that kind of approach.

Eric Herzog

>> Yes. - So it's kind of a holistic, integrated, end-to-

>> end ongoing cadence.

Eric Herzog

>> Yeah, we are all about constant communication. Now you got to be sensitive because there is privacy laws and other laws. So we make sure we take care of that. You don't want to overdo it. So as an example, with most of our existing customers, we make sure that we don't reach out to them... Now remember, because our sales team is doing it, our system engineers talk to them, right? Our customers are heavily global Fortune 2000, they're buying new stuff all the time. So there's constant contact already. But from a marketing perspective, we have limited it to two contacts per month on peer marketing side.

>> Thought leadership is big in your area. Obviously your focus storage is not this very targeted market. Who is your champions internally? As you look at using the AI, who are some of the stakeholders that you're involved that you want to bring in to make it all work as you look at how marketing's changing?

Eric Herzog

>> So it's mainly been me and a couple of my direct reports. And the reason we do that is for us, because we're small company, any AI we leverage is all about how do we optimize this tiny little budget. If I'm doing this, I used to be as you know the CMO of the IBM storage division or senior VP at EMC, part of Dell. So that would've been different, right? Because there, your budgets are huge. And you still want to optimize, I'm a cheap guy. We were under budget at all my big companies, and that's good, but at the same time, you still need to deliver the leads. You need to make sure that your channel partners know what you're doing. You want to provide that air cover with PR, with social, with digital. So you want to make sure you do that. For us, leveraging AI is extra important because we don't have the big budgets of our... Our smallest competitor does over 4 billion a year and we don't do anything close to that.

>> Yeah, you bring up a good point. This came up

>> with a whole deep-sea conversation. It was a whole nother thread. But what it came out of that was the constraints of them not getting the GPUs, the big money made them optimize. So the thread that we're seeing in the AI side is right on that line, cost efficiency and performance. Because that's what you're getting at. You say, "Oh, we're cheap. " But it means you don't have big budgets. Which means you have to make the performance on that resource bigger. So that's where generally marketing's going, cost efficiency and high performance. And sometimes that formula is not well-balanced, right? You could be heavily funded and not performant.

Eric Herzog

>> Yeah, well, it's all about metrics, metrics, metrics. I'm a metrics guy. Okay. Played baseball high school, I wrestled in college. I gave it by what was my batting average and how many medals did I win? Metrics, I'm all about metrics. So we are all about metrics. How many leads do we get from that webinar? Why do we only get that many leads? Okay, how many leads are converting? Which one of the leads can the inside salespeople get a follow-up meeting set up? Which ones are progressing down the funnel if it was an existing customer or existing prospect and they said, "Oh, we saw that webinar by Eric Herzog on Green It or the one with theCUBE on Cyber. "? We see differentiating you and that other storage company. So we measure everything. It's just, and I think AI is the same thing. AI is not a panacea. AI is a tool. I believe in the right tool for the right job.

>> How is metrics changing? Okay, you mentioned webinar. Okay, we call it the Cubinar because that's our internal word. But we don't do Legion, but we're in the organic. And by the way, you got to do the Legion because that's a great metric. How are metrics changing? Which ones do you are watching? Because in the organic world, your buyers are there, they're changing their user experience. Some of the young guns don't even use email, they use Slack and they're moving to instant message now. You're starting to see WhatsApp groups. So you start to see a whole nother communication layer. More channels are opening. This is the classic more channels, social media started this. As a CMO that's metric driven, what are you watching for new metrics?

>> So we watch, first of all, eyeballs

Eric Herzog

>> and engagement, impressions, follow up. Trying to progress either to a sales call, even if it's a virtual sales call instead of going and shaking their hand and how we track all that. We also are tracking, how many top of funnel leads do we get? How many of those are starting to progress by using ai? Do we get more leads than we did before? Because remember, if you're using AI and you're pitching as a way to be efficient, then if you used to get without AI 100 leads to do something, then you need to get 150 or 200. Otherwise, you're wasting money on... Because you spend money on AI to help you do it. And if it doesn't get you anything, if it doesn't take those leads from X function usually got 100 leads. If they doesn't get you one 50 or 200, then why do you spend money on the AI? You're wasting it. So I view it that the AI is a tool to increase all my traditional metrics. And of course, because we do lots of social media because we're small, we're always looking at impressions, spread, how many reposts are we getting, right? That's how we view the world because we don't have the big platform. We got competitors that are 80, 100 billion companies. We can't compete.

>> I get this reaction all the time from some of the folks internally and also externally. They say, "John, you hate Legion. " I go, "I don't hate Legion. Leads are what comes in for people who want to buy. Got to love Legion. " I'm not a big fan of email marketing, which I think in certain areas where that demographic is still using email, but it brings up the conversation that lead gen is the same game, but it's not the same game as changing. So you still got to get leads. If the demographics shift towards younger, they may or may not click on, they might not even be on email. So the channels-

>> But then you need to use a different way to reach them.

Eric Herzog

>> And that's what AI can help us do. Just like we used it for the advertising, or again, we did that Cyber summit with you, which I would've done anyway, but the AI said, "This is a great vehicle to reach directors and up in high-end enterprise storage," which is what we do. And we knew that. And so it worked for us, but we ran it through the engine. So if the vehicle of communication is different, I do everything. I Slack, I WhatsApp, I text, I still do email. And guess what? I actually go see people and shake their hand. Because I'm freaking almost 70 years old. As you know, I'm an old man. But you know what? I know how to adapt to a new world.

>> Yeah, no. Again, this is why I love you having come on, because you've seen how the mechanisms have changed, but the game is still the same. A lead has to come in, you got to capture it. So if they want to give their number or click on something, it's all about the capture.

Eric Herzog

>> Yes. - That's the game. And I think one

>> of the things we're watching closely is, okay, if you create impact in the new AI world, one, you get great telemetry, which you're using, but once you have impact, how do you roll it back up? So there's a whole nother MarTech wave coming, and a lot of the guests on the program next two days are going to talk about this. Again, there's no right answer yet. It's evolving. It's kind like born in the AI cloud.

>> Yes, it is. And it's changing.

Eric Herzog

>> I'm old enough where the web used to be called the internet. I actually even know what DARPA means, the DARPA net. And not a lot of people even know what that is, who might be

>> Remember the Bulletin Boys, DBS'?

>> I do remember that. - So we're really dating ourselves.

>> We are dating ourselves. But you know what?

Eric Herzog

>> The way it works is constant change.

Eric Herzog

>> And the smart person, I don't care what their function is, changes with the world. It doesn't mean you can't still do old things. I still go drink a beer and smoke cigars with my fraternity brothers. That also doesn't mean we don't have a WhatsApp group. We have a text group, right? Because my fraternity brothers are all over the world now, and you can't always go and hang out at the local bar like we did in college. So you take advantage of the tools. It's all about finding the right tool for the right job. And when the tool changes, you change, right?

>> And you got to keep the channels open.

>> If someone wants to walk in and do business with you, whether it's with their feet or with their digital footprints, you still got to capture it.

>> Exactly. - That's all channel...

>> Okay, so final question for you, is that okay,

Eric Herzog

>> advice to folks out there? The younger marketers that are coming up because you have two tracks of kind of companies. You have the, I call Born in the AI, which is kind of like, remember born in the cloud? No name brands like Dropbox, Airbnb with Twitter, they're doing stuff there, angle. We have no IT, then you have the enterprise side where the money is, the enterprise AI side is super hot. Because they have data and they have workflows, they have processes and tools and data. So you have two kinds of companies that are going to be the consumers of things. So people out there, CMO's are trying to figure out what would be your advice, seeing these waves of inflection points happening where there's value change over, how should they think about their job, how they think about their team? Obviously you're pro-metrics. Your view and advice for a marketer out there, I'll say as a lot's changing.

Eric Herzog

>> So first of all, AI doesn't change measuring stuff. AI is a more powerful tool, which means most of your metrics, what you're using should go fricking up. Not just say, "Oh, I'm using AI now-"

>> Or tell you if it's working.

>> "I'm cool." Is it working?

Eric Herzog

>> It's supposed to be a tool, a powerful tool. Tools make your job easier. Okay, that's item one. Two, you need to embrace the tools. Okay? You don't cut down a tree with a handsaw, you use a chainsaw. And you don't take a chainsaw if you want to build furniture, you use a table saw or a handsaw. And god forbid you take any of those saws and try to cut up concrete in your backyard to fix something, right? So it's the right tool for the right job. AI is a powerful tool. You need to use it on the marketing side, on your demand gen side, everything you're doing. Making sure you're checking vendors' claims when they say, "Oh, we're going to get you X amount of leads if you do ABC, go to this trade show. " No, no, you can run metrics and AI can help you do all those metrics to validate. So you want to make sure you take advantage of those, whether you're a new company or whether you're the old geezer company. Because old geezer companies, by the way, are the ones that are 100 billion. And if you want to be 100 billion 50 years from now, or I should say 200 billion 50 years from now, you better make sure you're taking advantage of the new tools. And by the way, can you think of any company that isn't accepting orders on the internet these days? You can even order frigging cars on the internet. I remember when you went to the local dealer. And by the way, smart dealers, guess what they do? They have their own website where you can buy it on the website, it's still runs through the dealership. So there's kind of this melding of the website is a way to purchase, which normally was buying freaking gum or buying toilet paper. You'd never think you would buy a car or something expensive. Well, guess what? People are doing that now. Same thing in the real estate industry, right? Think about it. Every real estate agent would take you around. Now they still will take you around, but they say, "Why don't we take a look? Let me some parameters. They shove it into a piece of software and five pictures show up or 10 pictures. " And then they say, "Which house would you like to go see Mr. Furrier, Mr. Herzog?" And that's taking advantage of that tool, whether you're an old style company or new style. If an old style company wants to be in the new world, you got to adapt to the new world.

>> Yeah, I appreciate that advice. Eric. Final questions to end the segment, give you the final word. Obviously B2B, you're in the infrastructure side of things, in your job you know storage up and down, obviously software defined infrastructure. AI infrastructure is the hottest area now. All the money for these startups, they're going to want to sell on what's in there. And one of the things we've been seeing is customers don't like to change their platforms and their tools. They adjust their process, but it's a lot more harder to change out tools. If I like my chainsaw, I'm not going to try the new one. So what's going on in the B2B AI infrastructure one and then just put a plug in for Infinidat.

Eric Herzog

>> So what's going on in the AI infrastructure is making sure A, that you can take advantage of the existing infrastructure. You may or may not want to buy new, it all depends. There's certain performance parameters for AI, latency, bandwidth for certain workloads. That because of the way the vector database and the LLM are going to pull the data, that's important. So you need to understand if it is. Secondly, data is all over the place in these large enterprises. It's not on one storage array. It might be on 20. And our AI-based RAG solution actually not only will pull data from our storage, but our competitors. As long as there's what's called the NFS protocol, which can be both file or also block and databases support NFS, will pull data. We can even pull data from the cloud if you want. Otherwise you end up with an AI hallucination, as you know. You have the wrong data. And if you don't have enough data, just think about when you're going to college, you had to read X amount of textbooks to pass the class. And if you only read two and you're supposed to read 10, when the grade came in, unless you're a freaking genius, you did not get an A or even a B, you got like a freaking D because you didn't bring in all the data.

>> If that. - AI is exactly the same way,

Eric Herzog

>> AI is a learning tool.

>> Think of it as a digital version of your human brain, which means it needs to learn. So if you've got 47 databases on your logistics and you only bring in 37, the next thing you know when you're building cars, you don't have the right screws, you don't have the right bolts. Simple stuff, but you didn't order them because AI is helping you order. So you need to pull all that data. So that's what our solution that-

>> You got to distill all the data you need to be successful. The tool has to know the job has got to do domain expertise. Yeah, great stuff. Eric, great to have you on again. Your great career, many cycles of innovation, big companies, small companies, startups. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on.

Eric Herzog

>> Great. Thank you very much. Love being on theCUBE.

>> Yeah, love having you. Eric Herzog here, seasoned veteran in the marketing area, award- winning CMO of course. CMO leaders here, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.