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