theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Marketing Leaders | Jyothi Swaroop, DDN

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Jyothi Swaroop

CMO

DDN

play_circle_outline Importance of storytelling, messaging, and content acceleration with AI

play_circle_outline Utilizing AI tools to empower marketing teams for efficiency

play_circle_outline Use of chatbots to streamline customer interactions and sales cycles

play_circle_outline Leveraging AI for improved customer journey and data quality management

play_circle_outline The Future of AI: NVIDIA's Roadmap and the Importance of Application Layers in genAI

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Jyothi Swaroop, DDN

Jyothi Swaroop

CMO DDN

Jyothi Swaroop, chief marketing officer of DDN, joins theCUBE's CMO Leaders Series Summit to discuss the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence in marketing and data management. Hosted by John Furrier from theCUBE and featuring analysts, this interview delves into how DDN evolves beyond a storage company into a leading data intelligence platform. Swaroop shares insights on DDN's partnerships with industry giants such as NVIDIA and the applications of their data solutions in real-time enterprise settings.

Key takeaways from the conversation emph... Read more

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What is the process of creating successful marketing in B2B with the use of AI technology? add

What is the difference in the process of creating content from the past to the present in terms of speed and tools used? add

What has been the impact of using chatbots in the sales cycle and closing deals quickly in the world of AI? add

What are some best practices for dealing with data availability challenges, and how can companies prepare for them in a world where data needs to be constantly updated and refined? add

What company is setting the roadmap of AI and showing the industry where they need to go to be successful? add

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Jyothi Swaroop, DDN

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCube. We are here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube, as part of our CMO Leaders Series Summit with the NYSE Wired, of course, theCube enabling all that to happen, the Trust Networks building. We've got CUBE alumni here. Jyothi is here, the CMO of DDN, one of the hottest startup companies out there. Storage companies, not startup. They're well beyond unicorn status. A little slip there, Jyothi. Great to see you back on theCube. Thanks for coming on.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah, thank you for having me. John. Actually, we're not a storage company anymore. We're the data intelligence platform. Storage was 20 years ago.

>> Okay. So storage runs on a platform, a data platform that you guys have.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> And let's talk about that because I think this is just, again, not a startup, but you guys are like a startup in the sense that you're agile.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> But storage is where the data is stored, and this is what's great about AI is that you guys are winning major deals. You have big time endorsement from the NVIDIAs of the world, X, xAI, they're all using DDN. Alex was on theCube at Supercomputing, which is essentially like the GDC version of the industry. The NVIDIA Conference, it's coming up. You guys got a big launch coming up on the 20th. I'm sure you can't share anything there, but the storage is part of it, but it's what's around it.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Right.

>> Explain the difference, because this is where the AI is shining.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah. So storage is important, don't get me wrong, but it is increasingly commodity. It's commoditized. It is okay, it's great. You got to store your data efficiently, et cetera, maybe access it once in a while. Enterprise use case is great. In the world of AI, it's about how you're able to accelerate that data to applications in real time and make it multi-modal in real time. Essentially, every query needs to have the entire internet accessible to it, as opposed to a certain column or a row or anything like that, so that's the beauty of AI.

>> I'm torn on this interview because we're here for the CMO Leadership Series and you're the CMO and you've got a lot of great moves you're making, but saying that, I want to talk more about DDN too because you're also doing extremely well. Maybe weave it in, because CMOs right now are dealing with essentially now the ability to actually use data and the workflows that they have and move from the old school mark tech stacks, pre-existing mechanisms that take their eye off the ball. But a CMO at the end of the day has to talk to customers and convert that into sales and ways to keep the customers, and make sure they're happy. And so the game is still the same but the things are changing, so the role of the data is critical. What are you seeing as a CMO and as also your customer base, how you look at this new, I won't want to say reboot, but a kind of a reconfiguration of the alignment of a CMO, whether it's a aligning more with the CFO, CEO, customer. What's your perspective?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah, it's a loaded question. So let me unpack that a little bit.

>> Yeah, make your choice.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> So as a CMO today, whether it's a small or a large company, you've got to almost be analogous to how AI is transforming the business. What does that mean? It means fewer human resources, more AI tools and technologies and customer insight. That doesn't mean, oh, you're getting rid of the people. It just means you're empowering the people that you have to do a whole lot more. So for example, DeepSeek's been in the news. Everyone's tired of hearing about it. Everyone has got a view on it, but to me at DDN specifically, we feel like we're the DeepSeek of marketing. Essentially, we always feel under-resourced. Marketing organizations are like, "Can I have more money, CEO?" Can we spend more so we can do more?" But I think we are taking that DeepSeek type mentality and blueprint into how we operate at DDN within the CMO organization, and AI allows us to do that. By industry standards, we're at least 60% smaller than an industry-standard marketing team at DDN, so they're superstars. Shout out to the DDN marketing team. And the reason they're able to thrive in this environment is because they have that DeepSeek mentality where you use the AI tools at your disposal in order to supercharge everything you do, whether it's funnel or thought leadership or other.

>> So I love that DeepSeek style. In fact, on the CubePod this past week, Dave and I were riffing on this because I think DeepSeek, I call it DeepSeek-like style, same thing, because DeepSeek was a ChatGPT moment for the enterprise. ChatGPT was more of a user, "Hey, the iPhone's here. Hey, the user experience," so everyone gets all excited. RAG comes in, search retrieval. The Seek showed that you could manage constraints, to your point around how do you configure your resource to get better, whether it's storage combined with certain software layers or chips in certain configurations in that case. Marketing is the same thing. What you're saying is that, hey, you can actually configure your resource, use the superpower of AI. That seems what you were saying.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> That's exactly right.

>> Give some examples, because I think this is the huge point of where CMOs have the supervisor. They have the workflows, they got the customers, they got the prospects, they got the data. Now it's what's the configuration?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Right. So let's start with a simple model of how marketing is successful in B2B. It all starts with the storytelling. It all starts with the messaging and the content. AI allows you to generate that content 10x, 100x faster than we used to in the past. Look, I don't want to date myself but I still remember when I was in Oracle, I was in product marketing, and I used to take weeks to write a white paper because I would fine tune every sentence and grammatical errors and try to go and do my research overnight three hours through books to find that golden nugget that I could insert into my white paper. Of course, that doesn't happen here anymore. I churn out podcasts using Notebook LLM from Google, which is a free open source tool like it's nobody's business, and that is just basically, its acceleration of everything you do. Our CEO, Alex Bouzari, the mandate within DDN is unreasonable velocity, because in the world of AI, everything is unreasonable. It moves unreasonably fast. So use the tools to just go from point A to point B. Those don't change. From advising your customers to making them a lead to an opportunity to closing a deal, those stages don't change. It's just time gets compressed 10x.

>> We had a car racing example on yesterday, and the story was, hey, if you look at all the innovation of the cars, the engine gets better, whether it's a martech stack or whatever mechanisms, but you got to get the whole package. You can put a new engine in there, but you got to get the right tires, you got to get the right frame. So this comes back down to the driver at the end of the day makes it happen. So you can be a good car, may be the right car, but then you've got to drive the AI. This becomes what you're saying, which is you're only as good as the driver. If you don't know how to drive that AI car.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Well, the driver is essentially a prompt engineer for AI. In marketing, you just have to be smart in how you prompt. So if you've studied... We were speaking with some folks who are over at NVIDIA, all the way to the top and below and in the leadership, and we were discussing, "Hey, nobody needs to know what the square root of 625 is. You don't need to memorize that anymore. AI will tell you. What you need to know is what does that do for you in the real world scenario? Why would you want to use square root to do something?" So essentially, prompt engineering is the same thing for marketing. Just know how to prompt AI so it gives you the best content. Know how to prompt AI so it becomes surgical, hyper-targeting with our targeting for our customers, and personalize, personalize, personalize. theCUBE here and New York Stock Exchange, you guys are real time. You guys have always been real time from day one, and marketing needs to be real time.

>> And real time is a data problem as well. It's an opportunity. Talk about that, because I think as a marketer, people are looking at things and going, "Hmm." There were certain things that you could never do, and you mentioned an example of the white paper. That was a slog. You had to do that work and to get a great white paper took time. That shrinks down to almost nothing.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> What other areas do you see that marketers could do that wasn't possible even five years ago? And we see companies like Glean's of the world basically crack the code on enterprise search, and I know there's a graveyard of dead companies that have been trying to crack that nut for years. It's just hard to do, but now with abstractions, AI solves that. Martech stacks, very clunky, antiquated, outdated systems, built for email marketing. Maybe people don't use email as much as they used to, or spam filters kick in. As a B2B marketer, leader, what do you see that are areas like, "Okay, that's possible. That's possible"? Maybe down the road, agents come. What are you seeing as that easy to knock down these old needle moving obstacles?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Right. So first thing I already talked about, and we'll park that, it's messaging and content. You accelerate that 10x, 100x. Next is targeting. Who do you send this to? That's always been a big marketing challenge, is every marketer is almost convinced the aperture needs to be opened up. Let me go after 20,000 accounts or 50,000 accounts. I'll grab 10 if I do that. Whereas in the world of AI and the technologies that we have at our... It's hyper-targeting. It's just like shooting fish in a barrel. Just get it down to... Alex and I, our CEO, we have this conversation. What are the 50 accounts we're going after? I don't want to know 50,000 accounts that are in your Rolodex or through some marketing lead list that's sent over. What are the 50 accounts that will give us eight-figure deals in the fastest possible time, and use AI to accelerate that. So we just recently closed a deal that went from a marketing campaign, getting a lead to come in and talk with our chatbot. And by the way, a chatbot is a very, very useful tool. People no longer converse with BDRs regularly. I just want to go to the chatbot for a simple question, get my answer, so make your chatbot become more intelligent. Use your own AI. So we use some of our own technology to power our chatbot.

>> So chatbots, must check that box.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Absolutely, absolutely. So you compress that whole cycle, is you get the marketing campaign hyper-targeted. Someone comes in, asks your chatbot a question. You give them the specific answer, send them off to your rep immediately in terms of what they want to do. In the world of AI, sales cycles have shrunk about four to 5x from a large enterprise deal sales cycle that you and I know. So we close this deal that I was talking about in 45 days flat, eight figures, end to end. Inbound-

>> From interest to chatbot to close?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> To close, 45 days flat, and that's not like a unicorn one-time thing. We're seeing it happen over and over, opportunities are opening up, and that's not because AI is hot. Of course we know AI is hot and everyone's trying to spend a lot of money on AI to make it profitable, but it's also because they're hearing what they want to hear. They're hearing the ROI messages-

>> You're Converting a lead, not converting an email marketing campaign.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> Which is only one dimension. It's just one thing.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> It's one thing, yeah. You could do it on LinkedIn, you could do it on Google.

>> All right, so cycle times are compressed, chatbots are key. Let me ask you about something that we're seeing a lot of where people say, "Hey, I got my persona, my ICP," whatever you want to call it. We lock in a relationship, we know it's a customer or a prospect, they're in cycle, or maybe it's a beginning customer, we have headroom to grow average contract value. There's trends towards holistic ongoing campaigns that might not look like it's valuable, but every touch point has a different goal end to end. What's your view on that? Because we're seeing that being positioned well for beyond the chatbot, becoming more of the agentic workflow. What do you think about that?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Well, I think there's a bit of futures to this. We don't want to get too ahead of ourselves here in marketing, because your agent, your agentic AI is only as smart as your customer's ability to query it. You see what I'm saying? You can make it as smart as you want, but if your customers are not ramping up or are not looking for it or don't know how to prompt it, you're not going to give them the answers or get the results that you want, so it's an incremental process to getting the customers there. So what we're focused on is everybody uses some GPT, ChatGPT, Grok, whatever is your favorite perplexity, et cetera. We are now focused on GEO instead of SEO. You know what GEO is? It's GPT Engine Optimization. So SEO, sorry, Google. That happened for a long time. It was a great gravy train, but now it's about GEO, because most people are going on on a GPT and asking these questions, and we need to enable that GPT to ensure that it gives out the right answer.

>> And that's actually smart actually, because people are using Perplexity, ChatGPT more than Google Search, unless it's embedded on a map or whatever, unless it's pre-existing because its answers are better.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> They're better, and you get to it quickly. Again, it's compressing timelines. It's just compression. Google is 10 links, click on each link and figure out and go through 20 ads to get the information, versus I asked a question and I got an answer.

>> So your strategy and advice is have a long game view.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> Of where it's going, but knock down what you can where the customers are. Don't speak in a language they don't understand or interface in a mechanism they don't know how to interface in.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah. Recently, I had a company reach out to me and say, "We build things for VR headsets where you could market it." I'm like, how many of my customers use VR headsets to interact with my company?

>> Two.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> So why would-

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Two people, not two companies.

>> Yeah. While that sounds cool, why would this be something that interests me today? So it's also about being practical, whilst to your point, knowing where you want to be a year or two years from now. And again, at DDN, we have the advantage of being part of every large AI use case, so we learn from it immediately and we absorb it into our marketing.And your account base, just for the people watching, is your target account, they're pretty big buyers. They're enterprise. It's not like it's a mid-range, and there are probably some mid-range deals out there, but-

Jyothi Swaroop

>> We have deals of all sizes, but it's always the big ones that get all the airtime. We close a lot of eight-figure deals, but it's those that just get airtime, but we do have a lot of enterprises that are testing the waters, so to speak. So for example, improving your customer journey using AI is a use case of AI. Not everything has to be genomics research, autonomous driving, not everything has to be super sexy and out there. AI can be used to improve your supply chain, it could be used to improve your factory floor planning. That is still AI making progress for the human race.

>> So Jyothi, talk about the data availability challenge opportunity, because you're only as good as the data you have too, so your chatbot intelligence levels or whatever your mechanisms have to have data. What's your advice there? What are some of the best practice that you've seen that can be usable today? And then what do people have to do to prepare?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> So there's a trick with data. Again, I go back to the real time aspect of this. So if marketers think that, "Oh, I've worked for a company that's been around for 20 years and I have all this data and access to customers, I'm going to maximize it." I'm sorry, I hate to break it to you, those customers have moved on quicker than you think. They change quickly. Jobs change quickly, responsibilities change quickly, the persona has changed quickly today in the world of AI. So you've got to keep up with them real time, not just hope that all this data that you've gathered over 20 years is going to be useful to you. It's not that it's not useful completely, but it's getting to be real time absorption.

>> Data quality.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Data quality. So all the tools that I talked about, whether it's your GPT engine optimization, your own chatbot, your social media tools, you've got to continue to fine tune the data that's incoming into the company, and not everything has to be contact. Not everything has to be a lead. It could just be a behavioral pattern. I'm noticing that a bunch of customers from theCUBE seem to crawl my website in a certain way. I don't know why that is, but I'm going to figure it out.

>> Because they're leaders. They love-

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Because I already know John works at theCUBE. I don't need that. I can get it from LinkedIn or from any database. What I'm more interested in is why is John crawling my website or my content in a certain way? That is more interesting to me. So for me, data with AI is more metadata than just focusing on, hey, what's this person's name? Where does he or she work? What does he do for a living? That sort of stuff is very obvious.

>> And your goal there is to understand what their interests are so you can give an experience to, personalization, because that's hot for you. What's your take on-

Jyothi Swaroop

>> So hyper-personalization, not just personalization. I want to know whether this person likes cupcakes and what flavor. So if I do my ABM campaign, when I ship them that batch of cupcakes, it is in their best flavor cupcake and they're like, "Wow, these guys really know me." And I'm using a frivolous example by design, but it just goes to tell you, that's how far you need to go to achieve customer delight in today's world, because there's just so much thrown at them.

>> And it allows you to be more creative, as Dave wanted, to slice the salami as thin as you want. But if you get it right, you got it right, then what do you do next? That becomes the next challenge that we're seeing. CMOs I've heard, CMOs say to me, "Yeah, we got success and actually we're scared. We didn't know what to do." Because we're so used to getting reports and sifting through everything, justifying an ROI model, pumping it up again. A little bit different maybe more bigger enterprises but not as lean and forced to do it like what you guys are doing, where you're more practical, like, "Hey, I know what bullseye looks like. I know what success looks like. I know it when I see it and I know what to do when I get it." That seems to be the challenge.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yep. So conversion is everything. Lead volumes don't matter. You could get the names from anywhere. You could get it from 500 different places.

>> Okay, so what's your strategy at DDN going forward? You got ai, you got the big customers. You mentioned a few of them. I said you got X. X is one of your customers, right?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Mm-hmm. One of the largest.

>> One of the largest, and NVIDIA is behind you guys as well. You got all the big, I call big deployments, the big people who are building the AI basically. What's your strategy? Because you're doing more with less. That's what AI is built for. How do you prioritize? What are the things that you look for?

Jyothi Swaroop

>> So luckily for us, NVIDIA is setting the roadmap of AI.

>> It paved the road.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah, exactly. It's just showing everybody in the industry, here's where you got to go to be successful. That's one path and one way to look at it. The other way is you look at our own product suite. As you pointed out early on, our roots are in storage and infrastructure, but everything we've done in the last seven or eight years with NVIDIA has been what Alex calls above the stack, which is the application layer. Because if I'm building a genAI application, I don't really care about the infrastructure.

>> Yeah, make it work.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> I just want to make it work, and data needs to be available. It needs to be accelerated so my applications work well. So for us, we have this huge advantage where we talk to different personas, so there's an application data scientist type of person who's got a budget and who wants to move the needle and make AI a big thing for their company, or there's an infrastructure person like xAI or others who've got 200,000 GPUs From NVIDIA and they have to build out this huge infrastructure, and we're there for them to deploy that.

>> You guys are really at an interesting spot because you've got the whole storage, network, compute fabrics, now integrated as a system. That's like big iron infrastructure, and then the tsunami of apps are coming. And I think DeepSeek also proves to the developer community that open source is going to drive a lot of innovation. That's why I think it's an enterprise AI moment like ChatGPT was for the consumer, because now the enterprise says, "Actually, Hey, we could do this. We can build around our constraints." If that happens, what happens next is apps can run on it.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Correct.

>> The worst thing you could happen is infrastructure that doesn't have software. That's kind of where we are. All these clusters, they've got to run something.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Software definitely eats the world. Infrastructure is commodity. As much as I hate to say it, as you know, we've grown up with infrastructure companies, and as much as I hate to say it, infrastructure will be commoditized eventually. It's all about the software and that's where the value is, and we continue to use it, leverage it to our advantage.

>> Gone are the days shipping racks onto the dock and saying, install.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Yeah.

>> You've got to put software on it, it's got to have integrated systems. Jyothi, great to have you on as an expert, leader and a marketer, obviously in a hot area, infrastructure and apps. Love your insights. Final point, what's your advice to CMOs out there right now watching who are looking to either restructure their teams, maybe bring digital not as a separate department, make that core? Face-to-face events are back. As you look at the hybrid nature of life now post pandemic, what, four or five years in, we're looking at a digital culture that's completely integrated in to physical constructs.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Right. So there's a lot of parallels to AI. There's physical AI and there's virtual AI. It's the same in the work environment today. There's remote workers, there are people in the office, there's hybrid, et cetera. But what I would tell CMOs, especially budding CMOs who are starting their careers off as first time CMOs, et cetera, is embrace all these tools. Do not start with a mindset of, "Oh, I've got to build my team to a hundred people, 200 people. That's how I want to operate." That should never be a starting point. The starting point should always be, "I want to build the most modern marketing team in the world, not the largest marketing team in the world." So if you start with that mindset, you'll automatically have that scarcity mindset of the DeepSeek mindset, which is, okay, I'm going to keep this lean and mean, but I'm going to bring in the tool sets to just supercharge every individual. So what you do by that is every individual will become future CMOs, because you've supercharged their careers. You've given them 10x the ability that they thought they had, because you coached them on how to embrace these tools. So that's essentially what I would say.

>> Remember the old 10x engineer? Now you get the 10x marketer.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> 10x marketer. Yeah.

>> Look at that. Look at it-

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Marketing eats the world. You heard it here first.

>> Jyothi, great to have you on as always. Congratulations on success. Looking forward to the big product launch on the 20th of February this month, and we'll see you at GTC, NVIDIA event in San Jose.

Jyothi Swaroop

>> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me.

>> All right. We are here at the CMO Leaders Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. theCUBE and the NYSE Wired Community Open Network, people collaborating and getting this going again in year two. Thanks for watching.