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Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Bringing Developers Together to Drive Cloud Native, Open Source Innovation

Pain Point

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) formed in 2015 amid the growth of cloud native and open source technologies, and the quickening pace of digital acceleration. The non-profit is dedicated to growing the cloud native ecosystem and promoting open source projects, including Kubernetes. With a small in-house team, CNCF struggled to harness the explosive growth around cloud native and its flagship KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events. A moment in time was at risk of being missed.

Why it Mattered

Not often, technologies and timing come together perfectly. This occurred with cloud-native, open source and digital acceleration. As a neutral home for cloud native technologies to mature without being too influenced by any one company or organization, CNCF helps emerging technologies reach their full potential for the benefit of all companies and organizations using the technology to innovate. To make the most of the cloud native technologies under its care, CNCF needed to bolster its profile and make its KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in North America, Europe and APAC thee place to be for open source and cloud native developers.

Answer

CNCF needed a versatile partner to step up global marketing activities, including PR, analyst relations, social, content and in-region event support. Speakeasy started in 2017 as CNCF’s in-house marketing and external agency, steering an integrated marketing effort in the US and Europe.

How To

Marketing open source, cloud native, and technology is not like marketing toothpaste or other easily understood products. CNCF’s projects are cutting edge and the open source community is far flung and global. CNCF’s members demand value for their membership and that value occurs in the growth of the technologies CNCF hosts.

Details

To drive interest in CNCF projects—and thus spur the advancement of the technologies—the team determined to make KubeCon 2019 the biggest and best event for the developer community in the world – the place to be for anyone involved in Kubernetes and cloud native technologies.

Speakeasy devised a news package and full week of activities to entice media and analysts to attend and spread the news about growth in cloud native. Hundreds of briefings occurred with CNCF members and conference attendance was high at roundtables on topics such as security, AI and edge computing.

Results

KubeCon 2019 attracted over 12,000 attendees, was attended by 160+ media and analysts and generated hundreds of original media articles and analyst report mentions.

In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, CNCF, working with Speakeasy, put on its first virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences in both Europe and North America and reached a record-breaking 20,000+ registrants for the North American event.

Today, CNCF is home to more than 70 open source software projects with over 103,000 contributors and is supported by more than 668 members. At the end of 2020, its end user community numbered 145 companies, making it the largest end user community of any open source foundation.

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
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PagerDuty

PagerDuty: Building Awareness Across Europe

Pain Point

PagerDuty helps the likes of Zoom, Slack and Box keep critical systems up and running so IT teams spend less time fighting fires and more time working to delight customers. PagerDuty was growing across Europe, but needed to boost its visibility, especially in the UK market.

Why it Mattered

PagerDuty’s platform helps keep everything up and running, but it’s like electricity: cannot live without it but don’t think about it either. Without better brand awareness, PagerDuty risked missing business opportunities. It faced a double awareness challenge: PagerDuty was relatively unknown in the UK, as was its pioneering status in the arena of digital operations management.

Answer

Educate. Educate. Educate. When you’re building a company and a market at the same time, education is key. Speakeasy stepped in to educate companies about PagerDuty’s platform and the need for it.

How To

One of the best ways to demonstrate the need for PagerDuty was to let its customers do the talking. Together with the in-house team, Speakeasy sourced PagerDuty customers to find compelling stories and matched them with top-tier publications for in-depth coverage such as ComputerworldUK, Diginomica and ComputerWeekly.

Thought leadership and rapid news response was the second pillar of the media strategy. Speakeasy supported the roll out of a powerful PagerDuty research report that documented the disruptive effect of IT fire-fighting – or unplanned work – on customer service, internal resources and employee morale. This was supported by a program of relationship building for PagerDuty with key reporters, ensuring the company became trusted as a go-to source of insightful comment and educational articles.

Details

Founded in 2009, PagerDuty’s motto is that “people empowered with the right information at the right time can change the world.” This principle certainly held true for the PR program. Speakeasy provided information to the UK media team that enabled them to tell stories that mattered to their audience. And it used this to full effect, generating feature-length user stories and thought pieces in top-tier media.

Results

The increased awareness of PagerDuty and its solution has helped to fuel the company’s growth in Europe. Speakeasy’s PR program for PagerDuty has now expanded to France and Germany.

“We always aim to generate the type of coverage that delights clients so much it gets circulated around the whole company. And that’s exactly what happened with our work for PagerDuty.”
—Chad Torbin, Founder and Principal, Speakeasy Strategies

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
speakeasystrategies.com

MuleSoft

Turning Customer References into Stellar UK Press Coverage

Pain Point

MuleSoft, which was purchased by Salesforce in 2018, was a much smaller company in 2015 and needed to boost its brand to build its business.

Why it Mattered

MuleSoft helped companies achieve digital transformation by connecting all business systems, including applications, data and devices. MuleSoft needed to get its brand into mainstream publications to reach more customers.

Answer

When building a brand and a company, the positive impact of satisfied customers and third party endorsements are key to attracting other customers. The PR goal was to promote the fact that Addison Lee, Europe’s largest premium car service, and Rentokil, a major British business services group, had chosen MuleSoft’s platform to support global expansion strategies.

How To

Speakeasy worked closely with Addison Lee and Rentokil from the start, having detailed discussions with the customers to get ‘under the skin’ of the story.

Details

Speakeasy arranged one-to-one interviews for Addison Lee’s CTO with MuleSoft’s tier one business technology press in the UK as well as with key spokespeople for Rentokil. A supporting press release on behalf of Addison Lee expanded the reach of the story with a wider number of media and potential new customers.

Results

Computer Weekly ran four articles highlighting Addison Lee, Rentokil and MuleSoft within a span of just six weeks. The team also secured coverage in main UK business technology outlets, including Computer Business Review, CIO, ComputerworldUK, Diginomica and TechworldUK. As a result of the one-to-one interviews, journalists had a strong grasp of the Addison Lee and Rentokil stories and MuleSoft’s role in them. This ensured MuleSoft was top-of mind when they wrote other pieces. As such, MuleSoft and its customers were referenced in broader stories, including Computer Weekly features on business digitization strategy and the decentralization of IT.

“When companies win key clients, they want to tell the world about it because great customers beget other great customers. Helping MuleSoft spread the news about its wins was critical to its ability to scale, and to companies needing to upgrade digital capabilities.”
—Chad Torbin, Founder and Principal, Speakeasy Strategies

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
speakeasystrategies.com

AI Landing

Landing AI and Andrew Ng: Launching a New Era of AI

Pain Point

Landing AI pioneered the “data-centric” movement for artificial intelligence, with founder Andrew Ng first coining the term in a YouTube video in early 2021. But the concept was hard to understand and communicate, especially amid all the hype and coverage around AI. Landing AI was at risk of missing its moment to lay claim to the concept and to explain to the world what it was, why it mattered, and how Landing AI fit in.

Why it Mattered

AI is hugely important to companies, organizations and societies. But so much has been promised and written that it’s difficult to rise above the noise and hype. Andrew Ng and Landing AI needed the world to pay attention to “data-centric” as being different from what we’d been accustomed to with AI, which was all about consumer internet giants, like Google, using AI on its giant datasets. Data-centric AI is different in that it doesn’t rely on giant datasets, but the right datasets. Also, it’s not about programming algorithms, but about labeling data correctly and training customizable AI models. Data centric swill democratize access to AI, and it was important that the concept be correctly and fully explained in a way that still garnered media attention.

Answer

The way to do this was to use the incredible market credentials of Andrew Ng, an AI pioneer widely quoted on AI as “the new electricity” and trusted educator and innovator, to shed light on Landing AI’s data-centric approach and lift it beyond what Landing AI was doing. Speakeasy articulated that data-centric was, in fact, the “next era of AI,” and that Landing AI was laying the foundation for something very big.

How To

Speakeasy assisted Landing AI in steadily evangelizing the “data-centric” movement with press releases, proactive media relations, podcasts, new corporate messaging, tailored content development and many high-level interviews with leading journalists. The campaign culminated with Ng being invited to give his first-ever TED talk on data-centric AI in Vancouver in April 2022.

Details

Speakeasy helped Landing AI identify the importance of data-centric in terms of the entire lifecycle of AI and then partnered with Landing AI to spread the gospel of data-centric AI. Ng was positioned as a bridging force from where AI has been, (consumer Internet) to where it is going, which is everywhere. At the same time, story lines were ripe for explaining the need to digitally transform manufacturing, a powerhouse industry in need of advanced technology to increase productivity and efficiency, and then to the broader field of computer vision in all industries and industrial automation.

Results

Working with Speakeasy, Landing AI excelled at spreading the data-centric message via securing coverage in publications including The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Forbes, TechCrunch, Protocol, and many more. The team timed a Landing AI funding announcement with a keynote address by Ng at the FORTUNE Brainstorm A.I. event in Boston, which also resulted in positive press coverage with FORTUNE magazine. Other high profile wins included Ng and data-centric AI as the cover story for the March issue of IEEE, a large profile story in Protocol featuring Ng and Landing AI’s customers, several high profile podcast appearances including with The New York Times columnist Craig Smith for the “Eye on A.I.” podcast, and CB Insights named Landing AI to its prestigious annual 2022 AI 100 ranking, showcasing the 100 most promising private artificial intelligence companies in the world. The drumbeat of coverage culminated in a TED Talk by Ng on data-centric AI.

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
speakeasystrategies.com

BetterUp

BetterUp: Bringing Employee Well-Being to the Fore

Pain Point

BetterUp pioneered the arena of workplace coaching for all employees, not just the C-suite. It sought to remake the learning and development market in corporate America but was a new voice in a huge, entrenched industry. To sell its approach, BetterUp needed to educate the market and show results.

Why it Mattered

Companies spend billions of dollars on learning and development, but efforts often don’t work or don’t result in sustainable changes that enable workers to realize their full potential and drive higher performance at work and fuller lives outside of work.

Answer

BetterUp needed to educate the market about its new way of going about employee well-being and development, which entailed mobile, personalized, one-to-one coaching, informed by science and AI data-driven insights.

How To

Speakeasy went deep on understanding BetterUp’s unique value proposition. Knowing that employee well-being and engagement was a hot story suitable for publications of all kinds, not just HR trades, Speakeasy aimed high to get the word out about the shortcomings of traditional learning and development, the democratization of coaching beyond the C-suite, and how BetterUp’s approach on coaching for the whole person led to real changes.

Details

Speakeasy used BetterUp research to secure bylines and interviews around topics critical to all workplaces, including worker loneliness, belonging, engagement and burnout. BetterUp, working with Speakeasy, convinced companies, including Mars, to share stories of how BetterUp coaching led to sustainable changes. Such testimonies helped establish BetterUp’s credibility and the value of one-to-one coaching, which was still a new category. Thought leadership platforms were developed for numerous BetterUp executives, including the CEO but also the head of BetterUp’s research lab, its head of coaching and a former NFL player turned research psychologist. When BetterUp secured $103 million in funding to take it to the next level of growth, the news was widely covered by a stable of reporters already familiar with BetterUp due to Speakeasy’s efforts and others attracted by the size of the round.

Results

BetterUp was a startup which secured big-company coverage in top tier publications read by the people making decisions around employee training and wellness. Coverage included several research-based pieces in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Business Insider, CNBC, Entrepreneur and the trades, including Human Resources Executive and Workforce Management.

“There is nothing more exciting than telling the story of an industry disrupter, especially one that improves the lives of people. Speakeasy was honored to help BetterUp reach its footing as an established leader in the arena of employee wellness and coaching.”
—Chad Torbin, Founder and Principal, Speakeasy Strategies

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
speakeasystrategies.com

Red Hat

Re-Igniting Technical Thought Leadership

Pain Point

Red Hat, an open source pioneer, champion and leader, needed to reassert its technical thought leadership above new market entrants

Why it Mattered

Red Hat was first, and best, at delivering open-source solutions to the enterprise. More than any other company, Red Hat is the North Star for everything open source, from technology to leadership to how workplaces work. Its voice adds weight, wisdom and inspiration, and it was getting lost.

Answer

Red Hat’s PR program needed more than product news to remain top-of-mind for the technology and developer media that speak to the innovators in the industry. Speakeasy activated a smart newsroom approach — using experienced technical writers to develop pitches that spoke to reporters and developer peers. The answer was to make Red Hat an even more credible source of useful and informative content on topics that mattered to Red Hat’s audience, such as containers, Kubernetes, cloud-native, and modern application development trends.

How To

Speakeasy drew on its deep subject-matter expertise to identify the right topic for the right outlet, creating pitches and content that resonated with the media and with their audiences. Each article enhanced Red Hat’s thought leadership and enriched readers’ knowledge, ensuring a high pick-up rate.

Details

The goal was not coverage volume at any cost, but a sustained uptick in media coverage, with proactive articles every month that spoke to the right audiences, re-igniting Red Hat’s strength of voice.

Results

Speakeasy’s targeted, knowledgeable pitches resulted in increased numbers of interviews, contributed articles, slideshows and podcasts across a wide variety of developer and technology media. More importantly, Speakeasy generated the type of articles that tech professionals and developers want to read — vendor-agnostic, tutorial and educational — and inserted Red Hat into the right conversations to regain its rightful position as thought leader and technology leader in all things open source

“Our work for Red Hat typifies the Speakeasy diference: authentic thought leadership content developed by people who really know their stuff and who speak the language of our clients’ end users and customers.”
—Chad Torbin, founder and principal, Speakeasy Strategies

Speakeasy Strategies
77 Geary Street, 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 548-6535 | @speakezstrat | hello@speakeasystrategies.com
speakeasystrategies.com

We have the code.^™

Clients in the Know

The Place to Be for Open Source

Building Awareness Across Europe

Converting References into Press Coverage

Spreading the Message, Magic, and Growth Story

Launching Andrew Ng’s “data-centric” movement

Bringing Well-Being to the Workplace

Re-Igniting Technical Thought Leadership

Modern Agency

Capabilities

Strategy

Execution

What’s the Hype?

About

About

We have the code.™

Clients in the Know

The Place to Be for Open Source

Building Awareness Across Europe

Converting References into Press Coverage

Spreading the Message, Magic, and Growth Story

Launching Andrew Ng’s “data-centric” movement

Bringing Well-Being to the Workplace

Re-Igniting Technical Thought Leadership

Modern Agency

Capabilities

Strategy

Execution

What’s the Hype?

About

About

We have the code.^™