Cloud-native technologies are infiltrating stately old enterprises. Leading the ingress is Kubernetes, the open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). The Cloud Native Computing Foundation — Kubernetes’ homebase — has been playing up its enterprise readiness lately. It’s getting help now from one company evangelizing Kubernetes to curious enterprises.

“We want to get out there as educators, as thought leaders in the space,” said Dayna Rothman (pictured), vice president of growth marketing at Mesosphere Inc.

Mesosphere possesses enterprise DNA; it has worked to bring Kubernetes and other open-source technologies to businesses in consumable service offerings. Previously, its buyers were mostly engineers, developers, and others on the technical end of the spectrum. Today, it is attracting more executive-level people — chief information officers, chief technology officers, business users. It wants to demonstrate the practical value of Kubernetes to these newly interested parties.

Interest is brewing in very traditional industries, like finance, automotive and manufacturing, according to Rothman. “They want to adopt technology like Kubernetes, but they don’t know how to fit it into what they’re organization needs and wants from the IT department,” she said.

Mesosphere’s marketing team is on a mission to educate enterprises on Kubernetes. They’re teaching them how to leverage the technology and how to make their IT environments more cloud-like. 

Rothman spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Mesosphere’s mission to educate enterprises about Kubernetes through marketing programs. (* Disclosure below.)

Something old and something new in targeted marketing

Rothman has worked in marketing technology for years and believes its due for a dose of innovation. Reaching enterprise customers effectively requires more than traditional, spray-and-pray campaigns. Individualized messaging is the best means for reaching customers online today, according to Rothman.

Account-based marketing is actually an older way of thinking about marketing. Instead of trying to get tons of potential buyers into a very wide-top funnel, marketers have a set key account list. The company and the marketing reps agree on the viability of these accounts and target them with well-honed campaigns.  

A lot of modern marketers are getting into account marketing with a new technological approach. “They have ad platforms now where you can actually target on an account-by-account basis based on IP address and a lot of other attributes, and you can actually do account-based nurturing through ads, which is very interesting,” Rothman stated.

Rothman recommends measuring marketing performance after pulling the trigger on campaigns. “The advice that I give to a lot of high-end executive teams is to start measuring your marketing department, your VP, your CMO, on later-stage metrics,” she said.

Leads are one thing; what actually generated revenue? Can the marketing team be doing more of that?

Community outreach

It’s a good idea to have offline relations with prospects if possible. “It’s important to have that online and offline presence — and they should map to each other,” Rothman said.

Mesosphere reaches out to Kubernetes users through its involvement at CNCF conferences like KubeCon +CloudNativeCon. Involvement in the cloud-native community has enriched the company’s understanding of its potential buyers.

“It’s really been trying to understand who these people are, what they’re interested in, how we can provide value, how we can provide fun, what are the ways we can partner with the community, and approach it in more of a humanistic way,” Rothman said.

Mesosphere is looking at hosting its own multitrack user conference this year, according to Rothman.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Mesosphere Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Mesosphere nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE