Are legacy systems still relevant to the way we do business today?

Right. I think you're seeing it broadly. What you just said is absolutely perfect for the CEO, but what I need to do is make a hero of the guy who owns a particular outcome. So one of my customers is the person who has to make sure that the delay between outages is less than an hour. Or the time to repair an outage in their network is under an hour. So the way to get there from a startup perspective is to make individual people in the org heroes, and then you'll slowly move the whole thing up. But ultimately selling top-down is really tricky because everybody knows the goal of getting to show the business decisions and so on, the problem is finding the heroes.

Companies can lose $100,000 per second that they are down. That's a lot of money, and that's a tremendous amount of pressure on the operational technology folks. And I think that getting buy-in from the operational technology champions or heroes as you call them, who you want on your side is where you have that overlap. You don't have a lot of synergy between OT and IT, they've always been warring factions, but now the top-down and even the bottom-up are saying to them, "Look, you have to get time to decision down. We can't afford to be down. You have to be able to make a decision very rapidly," and in doing so, your stream of consciousness, as I'm now calling it, has to merge with what's in the legacy systems that we're mining and somehow those two things have to coalesce.

Under other circumstances I would absolutely agree, creating internal heroes/champions is the way many vendors get their feet in the door and build successes one by one to prove their value across an organization. But we both know that's a long process and very costly for the vendor. Today  the need for speed ( whether digital transformation or Industry 4.0) and with it the need to create, capture optimize or deliver value suggests there's far more of a C-level appetite.