>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Good morning fellow cloud community nerds and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, we're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You can tell by my sequence. My name's Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be here with theCUBE. Joining me this morning is a packed house. We have three fabulous guests from AWS's global startup program. Immediately to my right is Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> We've also got Jimmy and Jeff. Before we get into the questions, how does it feel? This is kind of a show off moment for you all. Is it exciting to be back on the show floor? >> Always, I mean, you live for this event, right? I mean, we've got 50,000. >> You live for this? >> Yeah, I mean, 50,000 customers. Like we really appreciate the fact that time, money and resources they spend to be here. So, yeah, I love it. >> Savanna: Yeah, fantastic. >> Yeah, everyone in the same place at the same time, energy is just pretty special, so, it's fun. >> It is special. And Jimmy, I know you joined the program during the pandemic. This is probably the largest scale event you've been at with AWS. >> First time at re:Invent. >> Welcome >> (mumbles) Customers, massive. And I love seeing some of the startups that I partner with directly behind me here from theCUBE set as well. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. First time on theCUBE, welcome. >> Jimmy: Thank you. >> We hope to have you back. >> Jimmy: Proud to be here. >> Jimmy, I'm going to keep it on you to get us started. So, just in case someone hasn't heard of the global startup program with AWS. Give us the lay of the land. >> Sure, so flagship program at AWS. We partner with venture backed, product market fit B2B startups that are building on AWS. So, we have three core pillars. We help them co-built, co-market, and co-sell. Really trying to help them accelerate their cloud journey and get new customers build with best practices while helping them grow. >> Savanna: Yeah, Jeff, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I would say we try our best to find the best technology out there that our customers are demanding today. And basically, give them a fast track to the top resources we have to offer to help them grow their business. >> Yeah, and not a casual offering there at AWS. I just want to call out some stats so everyone knows just how many amazing startups and businesses that you touch. We've talked a lot about unicorns here on the show, and one of Adam's quotes from the keynote was, "Of the 1200 global unicorns, 83% run on AWS." So, at what stage are most companies trying to come and partner with you? And Eric we'll go to you for that. >> Yeah, so I run the North American startup team and our mission is to get and support startups as early as inception as possible, right? And so we've got kind of three, think about three legs of stool. We've got our business development team who works really closely with everything from seed, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, top tier VCs. And then we've got a sales team, we've got a BD team. And so really, like we're even looking before customers start even building or billing, we want to find those stealth startups, help them understand kind of product, where they fit within AWS, help them understand kind of how we can support them. And then as they start to build, then we've got a commercial team of solution architects and sales professionals that work with them. So, we actually match that life cycle all the way through. >> That's awesome. So, you are looking at seed, stealth. So, if I'm a founder listening right now, it doesn't matter what stage I'm at. >> No, I mean, really we want to get, and so we have credit programs, we have enablement programs, focus everything from very beginning to hyper scale. And that's kind of how we think about it. >> That's pretty awesome. So Jeff, what are the keys to success for a startup in working with you all? >> Yeah, good question. Highly differentiated technology is absolutely critical, right? There's a lot of startups out there but finding those that have differentiated technology that meets the demands of AWS customers, by far the biggest piece right there. And then it's all about figuring out how to lean into the partnership and really embrace what Jimmy said. How do you do the co build, the co-marketing, co-sell to put the full package together to make sure that your software's going to have the greatest visibility with our customers out there. >> Yeah, I love that. Jimmy, how do you charm them? What do the startups see in working with AWS? (indistinct) >> But that aside, Jeff just alluded to it. It's that better together story and it takes a lot of buy-in from the partner to get started. It is what we say, a partner driven flywheel. And the successful partners that I work with understand that and they're committing the resources to the relationship because we manage thousands and thousands of startups and there's thousands listed on Marketplace. And then within our co-sell ISV Accelerate program, there's hundreds of startups. So startups have to, one, differentiate themselves with their technology, but then two, be able to lean in to do the tactical engagement that myself and my PDM peers help them manage. >> Awesome, yeah. So Eric. >> Yes. >> Let's say I talk to a lot of founders because I do, and how would I pitch an AWS partnership through the global startup program to them? >> Yeah, well, so this... >> Give me my sound back. >> Yeah, yeah, look for us, like it's all about scaling your business, right? And so my team, and we have a partnership. I run the North American startup team, they run the global startup program, okay? So what my job is initially is to help them build up their services and their programs and products. And then as they get to product market fit, and we see synergy with selling with Amazon, the whole idea is to lead them into the go-to market programs, right? And so really for us, that pitch is this, simply put, we're going to help you extend your reach, right? We're going to take what you know about your service and having product market fit understanding your sales cycle, understanding your customer and your value, and then we're going to amplify that voice. >> Sounds good to me, I'm sold. I like that, I mean, I doubt there's too many companies with as much reach as you have. Let's dig in there a little bit. So, how much is the concentration of the portfolio in North America versus globally? I know you've got your fingers all over the place. >> Jimmy: Yeah. >> Go for it, Jeff. >> Jimmy: Well, yeah, you start and I'll... >> On the partnership side, it's pretty balanced between North America and AMEA and APJ, et cetera, but the type of partners is very different, right? So North America, we have a high focus on infrastructure led partners, right? Where that might be a little different in other regions internationally. >> Yeah, so I have North America, I have a peer that has AMEA, a peer that has Latin America and a peer that has APJ. And so, we have the startup team which is global, and we break it up regionally, and then the global startup program, which is partnership around APN, Amazon Partner Network, is also global. So like, we work in concert, they have folks married up to our team in each region. >> Savannah, what I'm hearing is you want do a global startup showcase? >> Yeah. (indistinct) >> We're happy to sponsor. >> Are you reading my mind? We are very aligned, Jimmy. >> I love it, awesome. >> I'm going to ask you a question, since you obviously are in sync with me all ready. You guys see what you mentioned, 50,000 startups in the program? 100, 000, how many? >> Well you're talking about for the global startup program, the ISV side? >> Sure, yeah, let's do both the stats actually. >> So, the global startup program's a lot smaller than that, right? So globally, there might be around 1,000 startups that are in the program. >> Savanna: Very elite little spot. >> Now, a lot bigger world on Eric's side. >> Eric: Yeah, globally over 200,000. >> Savanna: Whoa. >> Yeah, I mean, you think about, so just think about the... >> To keep track, those all in your head? >> Yeah, I can't keep track. North America's quite large. Yeah, no, because look, startups are getting created every day, right? And then there's positive exits and negative exits, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it's impressive. And particularly over the last two years, over the last two years are a little bit crazy, bonkers with the money coming. (mumbles) And yet the creation that's going to happen right now in the market disruption is going to mirror what happened in 2008, 2009. And so, the creation is not going to slow down. >> Savanna: No, hopefully not. >> No. >> No, and our momentum, I mean everyone's doing things faster, more data, it's all that we're talking about, do more and make it easier for everybody in the same central location. Jimmy, of those thousand global startups that you're working with, can you tell us some of the trends? >> Yeah, so I think one of the big things, especially, I cover data analytics startups specifically. So, one moving from batch to real time analytics. So, whether that's IOT, gaming, leader boards, querying data where it sits in an AWS data, like companies need to make operational decisions now and not based off of historic data from a week ago or last night or a month ago. So, that's one. And then I'm going to steal one of John's lines, is data is code. That is becoming that base layer that a lot of startups are building off of and operationalizing. So, I think those are the two big things I'm seeing, but would love... >> Curious to both, Jeff, let's go to you next, I'm curious, yeah. >> Yeah, totally. I think from a broader perspective, the days of completely free money and infinite resources are coming to a close, if not already closed. >> We all work with startups, we can go ahead and just talk about all the well is just a little (indistinct)... >> So, I think it's closed, and so because of that, it's how do you deal with a lot? How do you produce the results on the go to market side with fewer resources, right? And so it's incumbent on our team to figure out how to make it an easier, simpler process to partner with AWS, knowing those constraints are very real now. >> Savanna: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and to build on that. I think mid stage, it's all about cash preservation, right? And it's in that runway... >> Especially right now. >> Yeah, and so part of that is getting into the right infrastructure, when you had a lot of people, suddenly you don't have as many people moving into managed services, making sure that you can scale at a cost efficient way versus at any cost. That's kind of the latter stage. Now what's really been fascinating more at the at the early stages, I call it the rise of the AIML native. And so, where you say three years ago, you saw customers bolting on AI, now they're building AI from the start, right? And that's pervasive across every industry, whether it's in FinTech, life sciences, healthcare, climate tech, you're starting to see it all the way across the board. And then of course the other thing is, yeah, the other one is just the rise of just large language models, right? And just, I think there's the hype and there's the promise, but you know, over time, like the amount of customers big and small, whom are used in large language models is pretty fascinating. >> Yeah, you must have fascinating jobs. I mean, genuinely, it's so cool to get to not only see and have your finger on the pulse of what's coming next, essentially that's what startups are, but also be able to support them and to collaborate with them. And it's clear, the commitment to community and to the customers that you're serving. Last question for each of you, and then we're talking about your DJing. >> Oh yeah, I definitely, I want to see that. >> No, we're going to close with that as a little pitch for everyone watching this show. So, we make sure the crowd's just packed for that. This is your show, as you said, you live for this show, love that. >> Yeah. >> Give us your 30 second hot take, most important soundbites, think of this as your thought leadership shining moment. What's the biggest takeaway from the show? Biggest trend, thing that has you most excited? >> Oh, that's a difficult one. There's a lot going on. >> There is a lot going on. I mean, you can say a couple things. I'll allow you more than 30 seconds if you want. >> No, I mean, look, I just think the, well, what's fascinating to me in having this is my third or fourth re:Invent is just the volume of new announcements that come out. It's impressive, right? I mean it's impressive in terms of number of services, but then the depth of those services and the building on, I think it's just really amazing. I think that the trend you're going to continue to see and there's going to be more keynotes tomorrow, so, I can't let anything out. But just the AI, ML, real excited about that, analytic space, serverless, just continue to see the maturation of that space, particularly for startups. I think that to me is what's really exciting. And just seeing folks come together, start exchanging ideas, and I think the last piece I'll do is a pitch for my own team, like we have like 18 different sessions from the North American startup team. And so, I mean, shout out to our solution architects putting those sessions together, geared towards startups for startups, and so, that's probably what I'm most excited about. >> Casual, that was good, and you pitched it in time. I think that was great. >> There you go. >> All right, Jeff, you just had a little practice time while he was going. Let's (indistinct). >> No, so it's just exciting to see all the partners that we support here, so many of them have booths here and are showcasing their technology. And being able to connect them with customers to show how advanced their capabilities are that they're bringing to the table to supplement and compliment all the new capabilities that AWS is launching. So, to be able to see all of that in the same place at the same time and really hear what they need from a partnership perspective, that's what's special for us. >> Savanna: This is special. All right, Jimmy. >> My thoughts on re:Invent or? >> Not DJ yet. >> Not DJ. Not DJ, but I mean, your first re:Invent. Probably your first time getting to interact with a lot of the people that you chat with face to face. How does it feel? What's your hot take? Your look through the crystal ball, if you want to take it farther out in front. >> I think it's finally getting FaceTime with some of the relationships that I've built purely over Chime and virtual calls over the past two years has been incredible. And then secondly, to the technical enablement piece, I can announce this 'cause it was already announced earlier, is AWS Security Lake, one of my partners, Cribl, was actually a launch partner for that service. So, a little too to the Horn for Global Startup program, one of the coolest things at the tactical level as a PDM is working with them throughout the year and my partner solution architect finding these unique alignment opportunities with native AWS services and then seeing it build all the way through fruition at the finish line, announced at re:Invent, their logo up on screen, like that's, I can sleep well tonight. >> Job well done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty cool. >> That is cool. >> So, I've already told you before you even got here that you're a DJ and you happen to be DJing at re:Invent. Where can we all go dance and see you? >> So, shout out to Mission Cloud, who has sponsored Tao, Day Beach Club on Wednesday evening. So yes, I do DJ, I appreciate AWS's flexibility work life balance. So, I'll give that plug right here as well. But no, it's something I picked up during COVID, it's a creative outlet for me. And then again, to be able to do it here is just an incredible opportunity. So, Wednesday night I hope to see all theCUBE and everyone that... >> We will definitely be there, be careful what you wish for. >> What's your stage name? >> Oh, stage name, DJ Hot Hands, so, find me on SoundCloud. >> DJ Hot Hands. >> All right, so check out DJ Hot Hands on SoundCloud. And if folks want to learn more about the Global Startup program, where do they go? >> AWS Global Startup Program. We have a website you can easily connect with. All our startups are listed on AWS Marketplace. >> Most of them are Marketplace, you can go to our website, (mumbles) global startup program and yeah, find us there. >> Fantastic. Well, Jeff, Jimmy, Eric, it was an absolute pleasure starting the day. We got startups for breakfast. I love that. And I can't wait to go dance to you tomorrow night or tonight actually. I'm here for the fist bumps. This is awesome. And you all are great. Hope to have you back on theCUBE again very soon and we'll have to coordinate on that global Startup Showcase. >> Jimmy: All right. >> I think it's happening, 2023, get ready folks. >> Jimmy: Here we go. >> Get ready. All right, well, this was our first session here at AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the leader in high tech reporting. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Cube Live, AWS Reinvent 2022. This is our first day of three and a half days of wall to wall coverage on the cube. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. Dave, it's getting louder and louder behind us. People are back. They're excited. >>You know what somebody told me today? Hm? They said that less than 15% of the audience is developers. I'm like, no way. I don't believe it. But now maybe there's a redefinition of developers because it's all about the data and it's all about the developers in my mind. And that'll never change. >>It is. And one of the things we're gonna be talking about is app modernization. As customers really navigate the journey to do that so that they can be competitive and, and meet the demands of customers. We've got an alumni back with us to talk about that. AJ Patel joins us, the SVP and GM Modern Apps and Management business group at VMware. Aj, welcome back. Thank >>You. It's always great to be here, so thank you David. Good to see >>You. Isn't great. It's great to be back in person. So the VMware Tansu team here back at Reinvent on the Flow Shore Flow show floor. There we go. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing together, innovating with aws. >>Yeah, so it's, it's great to be back after in person after multiple years and the energy level continues to amaze me. The partnership with AWS started on the infrastructure side with VMware cloud on aws. And when with tanza, we're extending it to the application space. And the work here is really about how do you make developers productive To your earlier point, it's all about developers. It's all about getting applications in production securely, safely, continuously. And tanza is all about making that bridge between great applications being built, getting them deployed and running, running and operating at scale. And EKS is a dominant Kubernetes platform. And so the better together story of tanu and EKS is a great one for us, and we're excited to announce some sort of innovations in that area. >>Well, Tanu was so front and center at VMware Explorer. I wasn't at in, in VMware Explorer, Europe. Right. But I'm sure it was a similar kind of focus. When are customers choosing Tanu? Why are they choosing Tanu? What's, what's, what's the update since last August when >>We, you know, the market settled into three main use cases. One is all about developer productivity. You know, consistently we're all dealing with skill set gap issues. How do we make every developer productive, modern developer? And so 10 is all about enabling that develop productivity. And we can talk quite a bit about it. Second one is security's front and center and security's being shifted left right into how you build great software. How do you secure that through the entire supply chain process? And how do you run and operationalize secure at runtime? So we're hearing consistently about making secure software supply chain heart of what our solution is. And third one is, how do I run and operate the modern application at scale across any Kubernetes, across any cloud? These are the three teams that are continuing to get resonance and empowering. All of this is exciting. David is this formation of platform teams. I just finished a study with Bain Consulting doing some research for me. 40% of our organization now have some form of a central team that's responsive for, for we call platform engineering and building platforms to make developers productive. That is a big change since about two years ago even. So this is becoming mainstream and customers are really focusing on delivering in value to making developers productive. >>Now. And, and, and the other nuance that I see, and you kinda see it here in the ecosystem, but when you talk about your customers with platform engineering, they're actually building their, they're pointing their business. They gonna page outta aws, pointing their businesses to their customers, right? Becoming software companies, becoming cloud companies and really generating new forms of revenue. >>You know, the interesting thing is, some of my customers I would never have thought as leading edge are retailers. Yeah. And not your typical Starbucks that you get a great example. I have an auto parts company that's completely modernizing how they deliver point of sale all the way to the supply chain. All built on ES at scale. You're typically think of that a financial services or a telco leading the pack. But I'm seeing innovation in India. I'm seeing the innovation in AMEA coming out of there, across the board. Every industry is becoming a product company. A digital twin as we would call it. Yeah. And means they become software houses. Yeah. They behave more like you and I in this event versus a, a traditional enterprise. >>And they're building their own ecosystems and that ecosystem's generating data that's generating more value. And it's just this cycle. It's, >>It's a amazing, it's a flywheel. So innovation continues to grow. Talk about really unlocking the developer experience and delivering to them what they need to modernize apps to move as fast and quickly as they want to. >>So, you know, I think AWS coin this word undifferentiated heavy lifting. If you think of a typical developer today, how much effort does he have to put in before he can get a single line of code out in production? If you can take away all the complexity, typically security compliance is a big headache for them, right? Developer doesn't wanna worry about that. Infrastructure provisioning, getting all the configurations right, is a headache for them. Being able to understand what size of infrastructure or resource to use cost effectively. How do you run it operationally? Cuz the application team is responsible for the operational cost of the product or service. So these are the un you know, heavy lifting that developers want to get away from. So they wanna write great code, build great experiences. And we've always talked about frameworks a way to abstract with the complexity. And so for us, there's a massive opportunity to say, how do I simplify and take away all the heavy lifting to get an idea into production seamlessly, continuously, securely. >>Is that part of your partnership? Because you think about a aws, they're really not about frameworks, they're about primitives. I mean, Warner Vos even talks about that in his, in his speech, you know, but, but that makes it more challenging for developers. >>No, actually, if you look at some of their initial investments around proton and et cetera work, they're starting to do, they're recognized, you know, PS is a bad, bad word, but the outcomes a platform as a service offers is what everybody wants. Just talking to the AWS leaders, responsible area, he actually has a separate build team. He didn't know what to call the third team. He has a Kubernetes team, he has a serverless team and has a build team. And that build team is everything above Kubernetes to make the developer productive. Right. And the ecosystem to bring together to make that happen. So I think AWS is recognizing that primitives are great for the elite developers, but if they want to get the mass scale and adoption in the business, it, if you will, they're gonna have to provide richer set of building blocks and reduce the complex and partnership like ours. Make that a reality. And what I'm excited about is there's a clear gap here, and t's the best platform to kind of fill that gap. Well, >>And I, I think that, you know, they're gonna double down triple, I just wrote about this double down, triple down on the primitives. Yes. They have to have the best, you know, servers and storage and database. And I think the way they, they, I call it taping the seams is with the ecosystem. Correct. You know, and they, nobody has a, a better ecosystem. I mean, you guys are, you know, the, the postage child for the ecosystem and now this even exceeds that. But partnering up, that's how they >>Continue to, and they're looking for someone who's open, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the first question is, you know, are you proprie or open? Because one of the things they're fighting against is the lock in. So they can find a friendly partner who is open source, led, you know, upstream committing to the code, delivering that innovation, and bring the ecosystem into orchestrated choreography. It's like singing a music, right? They're running a, running an application delivery team is like running a, a musical orchestra. There's so many moving parts here, right? How do you make them sing together? And so if Tan Zoo and our platform can help them sing and drive more of their services, it's only more valuable for them. And >>I think the partners would generally say, you know, AWS always talking about customer obsession. It's like becomes this bromine, you go, yeah, yeah. But I actually think in the field, the the sellers would say, yeah, we're gonna do what the customer, if that means we're gonna partner up. Yeah. And I think AWS's comp structure makes it sort >>Of, I learned today how, how incentives with marketplaces work. Yeah. And it is powerful. It's very powerful. Yeah. Right. So you line up the sales incentive, you line up the customer and the benefits, you line up bringing the ecosystem to drive business results and everybody, and so everybody wins. And which is what you're seeing here, the excitement and the crowd is really the whole, all boats are rising. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right. And it's driven by the fact that customers are getting true value out of it. >>Oh, absolutely. Tremendous value. Speaking of customers, give us an example of a customer story that you think really articulates the value of what Tanzi was delivering, especially making that developer experience far simpler. What are some of those big business outcomes that that delivers? >>You know, at Explorer we had the CIO of cvs and with their acquisition of Aetna and CVS Health, they're transforming the, the health industry. And they talked about the whole covid and then how they had to deliver the number of, you know, vaccines to u i and how quickly they had to deliver on that. It talked about Tanu and how they leverage, leverage a Tanza platform to get those new applications out and start to build that. And Ro was basically talking about his number one prior is how does he get his developers more productive? Number to priority? How does he make sure the apps are secure? Number three, priority, how does he do it cost effectively in the world? Particularly where we're heading towards where, you know, the budgets are gonna get tighter. So how do I move more dollars to innovation while I continue to drive more efficiency in my platform? And so cloud is the future. How does he make the best use of the cloud both for his developers and his operations team? Right? >>What's happening in serverless, I, in 2017, Andy Chassy was in the cube. He said if AWS or if Amazon had to build all over again, they would build in, in was using serverless. And that was a big quote. We've mined that for years. And as you were talking about developer productivity, I started writing down all the things developers have to do. Yep. With it, they gotta, they gotta build a container image. They said they gotta deploy an EC two instance. They gotta allocate memory, they gotta fence off the apps in a virtual machine. They gotta run the, you know, compute against the app goes, they gotta pay for all that. So, okay, what's your story on, what's the market asking for in terms of serverless? Because there's still some people who want control over the run time. Help us sift through that. >>And it really comes back to the application pattern or the type you're running. If it's a stateless application that you need to spin up and spin down. Serverless is awesome. Why would I wanna worry about scaling it up in, I wanna set up some SLAs, SLIs service level objectives or, or, or indicators and then let the systems bring the resources I need as I need them. That's a perfect example for serverless, right? On the other hand, if you have a, a more of a workflow type application, there's a sequence, there's state, try building an application using serverless where you had to maintain state between two, two steps in the process. Not so much fun, right? So I don't think serverless is the answer for everything, but many use cases, the scale to zero is a tremendous benefit. Events happen. You wanna process something, work is done, you quietly go away. I don't wanna shut down the server started up, I want that to happen magically. So I think there's a role of serverless. So I believe Kubernetes and servers are the new runtime platform. It's not one or the other. It's about marrying that around the application patterns. I DevOps shouldn't care about it. That's an infrastructure concern. Let me just run application, let the infrastructure manage the operations of it, whether it's serverless, whether it's Kubernetes clusters, whether it's orchestration, that's details right. I I I shouldn't worry about it. Right. >>So we shouldn't think of those as separate architectures. We should think of it as an architecture, >>The continuum in some ways Yeah. Of different application workload types. And, and that's a toolkit that the operator has at his disposal to configure and saying, where does, should that application run? Should I want control? You can run it on a, a conveyance cluster. Can I just run it on a serverless infrastructure and and leave it to the cloud provider? Do it all for me. Sure. What, what was PAs? PAs was exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. Write the code once you do the rest. Yeah. Okay. Those are just elements of that. >>And then K native is kinda in the middle, >>Right? K native is just a technology that's starting to build that capability out in a standards way to make serverless available consistently across all clouds. So I'm not building to a, a lambda or a particular, you know, technology type. I'm building it in a standard way, in a standard programming model. And infrastructure just >>Works for me on any cloud. >>The whole idea portability. Consistency. >>Right. Powerful. Yep. >>What are some of the things that, that folks can expect to learn from VMware Tan to AWS this week at the >>Show? Yeah, so there's some really great announcements. First of all, we're excited to extend our, our partnership with AWS in the area of eks. What I mean by that is we traditionally, we would manage an EKS cluster, you visibility of what's running in there, but we weren't able to manage the lifecycle With this announcement. We can give you a full management of lifecycle of S workloads. Our customers have 400 plus EKS clusters, multiple teams sharing those in a multi-tenanted way with common policy. And they wanna manage a full life cycle, including all the upstream open source component that make up Kubernetes people. That ES is the one thing, it's a collection of a lot of open, open source packages. We're making it simple to manage it consistently from a single place on the security front. We're now making tons of service mesh available in the marketplace. >>And if you look at what service MeSHs, it's an overlay. It's an abstraction. I can create an idea of a global name space that cuts across multiple VPCs. I'm, I'm hearing at Amazon's gonna make some announcements around VPC and how they stitch VPCs together. It's all moving towards this idea of abstractions. I can set policy at logical level. I don't have to worry about data security and the communication between services. These are the things we're now enabling, which are really an, and to make EKS even more productive, making enterprise grade enterprise ready. And so a lot of excitement from the EKS development teams as well to partner closely with us to make this an end to end solution for our >>Customers. Yeah. So I mean it's under chasy, it was really driving those primitives and helping developers under continuing that path, but also recognizing the need for solutions. And that's where the ecosystem comes in, >>Right? And the question is, what is that box? As you said last time, right? For the super cloud, there is a cloud infrastructure, which is becoming the new palette, but how do you make sense of the 300 plus primitives? How do you bring them together? What are the best practices, patterns? How do I manage that when something goes wrong? These are real problems that we're looking to solve. >>And if you're gonna have deeper business integration with the cloud and technology in general, you have to have that >>Abstraction. You know, one of the simple question I ask is, how do you know you're getting value from your cloud investment? That's a very hard question. What's your trade off between performance and cost? Do you know where your security, when a lock 4G happens, do you know all the open source packages you need to patch? These are very simple questions, but imagine today having to do that when everybody's doing in a bespoke manner using the set of primitives. You need a platform. The industry is shown at scale. You have to start standardizing and building a consistent way of delivering and abstracting stuff. And that's where the next stage of the cloud journey >>And, and with the economic environment, I think people are also saying, okay, how do we get more? Exactly. We're in the cloud now. How do we get more? How do we >>Value out of the cloud? >>Exactly. Totally. >>How do we transform the business? Last question, AJ for you, is, if you had a bumper sticker and you're gonna put it on your fancy car, what would it say about VMware tan zone aws? >>I would say tan accelerates apps. >>Love >>It. Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Appreciate it. Always great to be here. >>Pleasure. Likewise. For our guest, I'm Dave Ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. Day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Detroit guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We've been on the floor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America for about two days now. We've been breaking news, we would have a great conversations, John. We love talking with CUBE alumni whose companies are just taking off. And we get to do that next again. >> Well, this next segment's awesome. We have former CUBE host, Brian Gracely, here who's an executive in this company. And then the entrepreneur who we're going to talk with. She was on theCUBE when it just started now they're extremely successful. It's going to be a great conversation. >> It is, Idit Levine is here, the founder and CEO of solo.io. And as John mentioned, Brian Gracely. You know Brian. He's the VP of Product Marketing and Product Strategy now at solo.io. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Idit: Thank so much for having us. >> Talk about what's going on. This is a rocket ship that you're riding. I was looking at your webpage, you have some amazing customers. T-Mobile, BMW, Amex, for a marketing guy it must be like, this is just- >> Brian: Yeah, you can't beat it. >> Kid in a candy store. >> Brian: Can't beat it. >> You can't beat it. >> For giant companies like that, giant brands, global, to trust a company of our size it's trust, it's great engineering, it's trust, it's fantastic. >> Idit, talk about the fast trajectory of this company and how you've been able to garner trust with such mass organizations in such a short time period. >> Yes, I think that mainly is just being the best. Honestly, that's the best approach I can say. The team that we build, honestly, and this is a great example of one of them, right? And we're basically getting the best people in the industry. So that's helpful a lot. We are very, very active on the open source community. So basically it building it, anyway, and by doing this they see us everywhere. They see our success. You're starting with a few customers, they're extremely successful and then you're just creating this amazing partnership with them. So we have a very, very unique way we're working with them. >> So hard work, good code. >> Yes. >> Smart people, experience. >> That's all you need. >> It's simple, why doesn't everyone do it? >> It's really easy. (all laughing) >> All good, congratulations. It's been fun to watch you guys grow. Brian, great to see you kicking butt in this great company. I got to ask about the landscape because I love the ServiceMeshCon you guys had on a co-located event on day zero here as part of that program, pretty packed house. >> Brian: Yep. >> A lot of great feedback. This whole ServiceMesh and where it fits in. You got Kubernetes. What's the update? Because everything's kind of coming together- >> Brian: Right. >> It's like jello in the refrigerator it kind of comes together at the same time. Where are we? >> I think the easiest way to think about it is, and it kind of mirrors this event perfectly. So the last four or five years, all about Kubernetes, built Kubernetes. So every one of our customers are the ones who have said, look, for the last two or three years, we've been building Kubernetes, we've had a certain amount of success with it, they're building applications faster, they're deploying and then that success leads to new challenges, right? So we sort of call that first Kubernetes part sort of CloudNative 1.0, this and this show is really CloudNative 2.0. What happens after Kubernetes service mesh? Is that what happens after Kubernetes? And for us, Istio now being part of the CNCF, huge, standardized, people are excited about it. And then we think we are the best at doing Istio from a service mesh perspective. So it's kind of perfect, perfect equation. >> Well, I'll turn it on, listen to your great Cloud cast podcast, plug there for you. You always say what is it and what isn't it? >> Brian: Yeah. >> What is your product and what isn't it? >> Yeah, so our product is, from a purely product perspective it's service mesh and API gateway. We integrate them in a way that nobody else does. So we make it easier to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure. I mean, those two things ultimately are, if it's an internal API or it's an external API, we secure it, we route it, we can observe it. So if anybody's, you're building modern applications, you need this stuff in order to be able to go to market, deploy at scale all those sort of things. >> Idit, talk about some of your customer conversations. What are the big barriers that they've had, or the challenges, that solo.io comes in and just wipes off the table? >> Yeah, so I think that a lot of them, as Brian described it, very, rarely they had a success with Kubernetes, maybe a few clusters, but then they basically started to on-ramp more application on those clusters. They need more cluster maybe they want multi-class, multi-cloud. And they mainly wanted to enable the team, right? This is why we all here, right? What we wanted to eventually is to take a piece of the infrastructure and delegate it to our customers which is basically the application team. So I think that that's where they started to see the problem because it's one thing to take some open source project and deploy it very little bit but the scale, it's all about the scale. How do you enable all those millions of developers basically working on your platform? How do you scale multi-cloud? What's going on if one of them is down, how do you fill over? So that's exactly the problem that they have >> Lisa: Which is critical for- >> As bad as COVID was as a global thing, it was an amazing enabler for us because so many companies had to say... If you're a retail company, your front door was closed, but you still wanted to do business. So you had to figure out, how do I do mobile? How do I be agile? If you were a company that was dealing with like used cars your number of hits were through the roof because regular cars weren't available. So we have all these examples of companies who literally overnight, COVID was their digital transformation enabler. >> Lisa: Yes. Yes. >> And the scale that they had to deal with, the agility they had to deal with, and we sort of fit perfectly in that. They re-looked at what's our infrastructure look like? What's our security look like? We just happened to be right place in the right time. >> And they had skillset issues- >> Skillsets. >> Yeah. >> And the remote work- >> Right, right. >> Combined with- >> Exactly. >> Modern upgrade gun-to-the-head, almost, kind of mentality. >> And we're really an interesting company. Most of the interactions we do with customers is through Slack, obviously it was remote. We would probably be a great Slack case study in terms of how to do business because our customers engage with us, with engineers all over the world, they look like one team. But we can get them up and running in a POC, in a demo, get them through their things really, really fast. It's almost like going to the public cloud, but at whatever complexity they want. >> John: Nice workflow. >> So a lot of momentum for you guys silver linings during COVID, which is awesome we do hear a lot of those stories of positive things, the acceleration of digital transformation, and how much, as consumers, we've all benefited from that. Do you have one example, Brian, as the VP of product marketing, of a customer that you really think in the last two years just is solo.io's value proposition on a platter? >> I'll give you one that I think everybody can understand. So most people, at least in the United States, you've heard of Chick-fil-A, retail, everybody likes the chicken. 2,600 stores in the US, they all shut down and their business model, it's good food but great personal customer experience. That customer experience went away literally overnight. So they went from barely anybody using the mobile application, and hence APIs in the backend, half their business now goes through that to the point where, A, they shifted their business, they shifted their customer experience, and they physically rebuilt 2,600 stores. They have two drive-throughs now that instead of one, because now they have an entire one dedicated to that mobile experience. So something like that happening overnight, you could never do the ROI for it, but it's changed who they are. >> Lisa: Absolutely transformative. >> So, things like that, that's an example I think everybody can kind of relate to. Stuff like that happened. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's also what's special is, honestly, you're probably using a product every day. You just don't know that, right? When you're swiping your credit card or when you are ordering food, or when you using your phone, honestly the amount of customer they were having, the space, it's like so, every industry- >> John: How many customers do you have? >> I think close to 200 right now. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> How many employees, can you gimme some stats? Funding, employees? What's the latest statistics? >> We recently found a year ago $135 million for a billion dollar valuation. >> Nice. >> So we are a unicorn. I think when you took it we were around like 50 ish people. Right now we probably around 180, and we are growing, we probably be 200 really, really quick. And I think that what's really, really special as I said the interaction that we're doing with our customers, we're basically extending their team. So for each customer is basically a Slack channel. And then there is a lot of people, we are totally global. So we have people in APAC, in Australia, New Zealand, in Singapore we have in AMEA, in UK and in Spain and Paris, and other places, and of course all over US. >> So your use case on how to run a startup, scale up, during the pandemic, complete clean sheet of paper. >> Idit: We had to. >> And what happens, you got Slack channels as your customer service collaboration slash productivity. What else did you guys do differently that you could point to that's, I would call, a modern technique for an entrepreneurial scale? >> So I think that there's a few things that we are doing different. So first of all, in Solo, honestly, there is a few things that differentiated from, in my opinion, most of the companies here. Number one is look, you see this, this is a lot, a lot of new technology and one of the things that the customer is nervous the most is choosing the wrong one because we saw what happened, right? I don't know the orchestration world, right? >> John: So choosing and also integrating multiple things at the same time. >> Idit: Exactly. >> It's hard. >> And this is, I think, where Solo is expeditious coming to place. So I mean we have one team that is dedicated like open source contribution and working with all the open source community and I think we're really good at picking the right product and basically we're usually right, which is great. So if you're looking at Kubernetes, we went there for the beginning. If you're looking at something like service mesh Istio, we were all envoy proxy and out of process. So I think that by choosing these things, and now Cilium is something that we're also focusing on. I think that by using the right technology, first of all you know that it's very expensive to migrate from one to the other if you get it wrong. So I think that's one thing that is always really good at. But then once we actually getting those portal we basically very good at going and leading those community. So we are basically bringing the customers to the community itself. So we are leading this by being in the TOC members, right? The Technical Oversight Committee. And we are leading by actually contributing a lot. So if the customer needs something immediately, we will patch it for him and walk upstream. So that's kind of like the second thing. And the third one is innovation. And that's really important to us. So we pushing the boundaries. Ambient, that we announced a month ago with Google- >> And STO, the book that's out. >> Yes, the Ambient, it's basically a modern STO which is the future of SDL. We worked on it with Google and their NDA and we were listed last month. This is exactly an example of us basically saying we can do it better. We learn from our customers, which is huge. And now we know that we can do better. So this is the third thing, and the last one is the partnership. I mean honestly we are the extension team of the customer. We are there on Slack if they need something. Honestly, there is a reason why our renewal rate is 98.9 and our net extension is 135%. I mean customers are very, very happy. >> You deploy it, you make it right. >> Idit: Exactly, exactly. >> The other thing we did, and again this was during COVID, we didn't want to be a shell-for company. We didn't want to drop stuff off and you didn't know what to do with it. We trained nearly 10,000 people. We have something called Solo Academy, which is free, online workshops, they run all the time, people can come and get hands on training. So we're building an army of people that are those specialists that have that skill set. So we don't have to walk into shops and go like, well okay, I hope six months from now you guys can figure this stuff out. They're like, they've been doing that. >> And if their friends sees their friend, sees their friend. >> The other thing, and I got to figure out as a marketing person how to do this, we have more than a few handfuls of people that they've got promoted, they got promoted, they got promoted. We keep seeing people who deploy our technologies, who, because of this stuff they're doing- >> John: That's a good sign. They're doing it at at scale, >> John: That promoter score. >> They keep getting promoted. >> Yeah, that's amazing. >> That's a powerful sort of side benefit. >> Absolutely, that's a great thing to have for marketing. Last question before we ran out of time. You and I, Idit, were talking before we went live, your sessions here are overflowing. What's your overall sentiment of KubeCon 2022 and what feedback have you gotten from all the customers bursting at the seam to come talk to you guys? >> I think first of all, there was the pre-event which we had and it was a lot of fun. We talked to a lot of customer, most of them is 500, global successful company. So I think that people definitely... I will say that much. We definitely have the market feed, people interested in this. Brian described very well what we see here which is people try to figure out the CloudNative 2.0. So that's number one. The second thing is that there is a consolidation, which I like, I mean STO becoming right now a CNCF project I think it's a huge, huge thing for all the community. I mean, we're talking about all the big tweak cloud, we partner with them. I mean I think this is a big sign of we agree which I think is extremely important in this community. >> Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> And where can customers go to get their hands on this, solo.io? >> Solo.io? Yeah, absolutely. >> Awesome guys, this has been great. Congratulations on the momentum. >> Thank you. >> The rocket ship that you're riding. We know you got to get to the airport we're going to let you go. But we appreciate your insights and your time so much, thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> A pleasure. >> Thanks. >> For our guests and John Furrier, This is Lisa Martin live in Detroit, had to think about that for a second, at KubeCon 2022 CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back with our final guests of the day and then the show wraps, so stick around. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. You know, one of the key things... Together, day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin, with Dave ante. We're here in Las Vegas with snowflake at the snowflake summit 22. This is the fourth annual there's close to 10,000 people here. Lots going on. Customers, partners, analysts, cross media, everyone talking about all of this news. We've got a couple of guests joining us. We're gonna unpack snow park. Torston grabs the director of product management at snowflake and Joe. No NTY AI and MDM architect at Allegis group. Guys. Welcome to the program. Thank >>You so much for having >>Us. Isn't it great to be back in person? It is. >>Oh, wonderful. Yes, it >>Is. Indeed. Joe, talk to us a little bit about Allegis group. What do you do? And then tell us a little bit about your role specifically. >>Well, Allegis group is a collection of OPCA operating companies that do staffing. We're one of the biggest staffing companies in north America. We have a presence in AMEA and in the APAC region. So we work to find people jobs, and we help get 'em staffed and we help companies find people and we help individuals find >>People incredibly important these days, excuse me, incredibly important. These days. It is >>Very, it very is right >>There. Tell me a little bit about your role. You are the AI and MDM architect. You wear a lot of hats. >>Okay. So I'm a architect and I support both of those verticals within the company. So I work, I have a set of engineers and data scientists that work with me on the AI side, and we build data science models and solutions that help support what the company wants to do, right? So we build it to make business business processes faster and more streamlined. And we really see snow park and Python helping us to accelerate that and accelerate that delivery. So we're very excited about it. >>Explain snow park for, for people. I mean, I look at it as this, this wonderful sandbox. You can bring your own developer tools in, but, but explain in your words what it >>Is. Yeah. So we got interested in, in snow park because increasingly the feedback was that everybody wants to interact with snowflake through SQL. There are other languages that they would prefer to use, including Java Scala and of course, Python. Right? So then this led down to the, our, our work into snow park where we're building an infrastructure that allows us to host other languages natively on the snowflake compute platform. And now here, what we're, what we just announced is snow park for Python in public preview. So now you have the ability to natively run Python code on snowflake and benefit from the thousands of packages and libraries that the open source community around Python has contributed over the years. And that's a huge benefit for data scientists. It is ML practitioners and data engineers, because those are the, the languages and packages that are popular with them. So yeah, we very much look forward to working with the likes of you and other data scientists and, and data engineers around the Python ecosystem. >>Yeah. And, and snow park helps reduce the architectural footprint and it makes the data pipelines a little easier and less complex. We have a, we had a pipeline and it works on DMV data. And we converted that entire pipeline from Python, running on a VM to directly running down on snowflake. Right. We were able to eliminate code because you don't have to worry about multi threading, right? Because we can just set the warehouse size through a task, no more multi threading, throw that code away. Don't need to do it anymore. Right. We get the same results, but the architecture to run that pipeline gets immensely easier because it's a store procedure that's already there. And implementing that calling to that store procedure is very easy. The architecture that we use today uses six different components just to be able to run that Python code on a VM within our ecosystem to make sure that it runs on time and is scheduled and all of that. Right. But with snowflake, with snowflake and snow park and snowflake Python, it's two components. It's the store procedure and our ETL tool calling it. >>Okay. So you've simplified that, that stack. Yes. And, and eliminated all the other stuff that you had to do that now Snowflake's doing, am I correct? That you're actually taking the application development stack and the analytics stack and bringing them together? Are they merging? >>I don't know. I think in a way I'm not real sure how I would answer that question to be quite honest. I think with stream lit, there's a little bit of application that's gonna be down there. So you could maybe start to say that I'd have to see how that carries out and what we do and what we produce to really give you an answer to that. But yeah, maybe in a >>Little bit. Well, the reason I asked you is because you talk, we always talk about injecting data into apps, injecting machine intelligence and ML and AI into apps, but there are two separate stacks today. Aren't they >>Certainly the two are getting closer >>To Python Python. It gets a little better. Explain that, >>Explain, explain how >>That I just like in the keynote, right? The other day was SRE. When she showed her sample application, you can start to see that cuz you can do some data pipelining and data building and then throw that into a training module within Python, right down inside a snowflake and have it sitting there. Then you can use something like stream lit to, to expose it to your users. Right? We were talking about that the other day, about how do you get an ML and AI, after you have it running in front of people, we have a model right now that is a Mo a predictive and prescriptive model of one of our top KPIs. Right. And right now we can show it to everybody in the company, but it's through a Jupyter notebook. How do I deliver it? How do I get it in the front of people? So they can use it well with what we saw was streamlet, right? It's a perfect match. And then we can compile it. It's right down there on snowflake. And it's completely easier time to delivery to production because since it's already part of snowflake, there's no architectural review, right. As long as the code passes code review, and it's not poorly written code and isn't using a library that's dangerous, right. It's a simple deployment to production. So because it's encapsulated inside of that snowflake environment, we have approval to just use it. However we see fit. >>It's very, so that code delivery, that code review has to occur irrespective of, you know, not always whatever you're running it on. Okay. So I get that. And, and, but you, it's a frictionless environment you're saying, right. What would you have had to do prior to snowflake that you don't have to do now? >>Well, one, it's a longer review process to allow me to push the solution into production, right. Because I have to explain to my InfoSec people, right? My other it's not >>Trusted. >>Well, well don't use that word. No. Right? It got, there are checks and balances in everything that we do, >>It has to be verified. And >>That's all, it's, it's part of the, the, what I like to call the good bureaucracy, right? Those processes are in place to help all of us stay protected. >>It's the checklist. Yeah. That you >>Gotta go to. >>That's all it is. It's like fly on a plane. You, >>But that checklist gets smaller. And sometimes it's just one box now with, with Python through snow park, running down on the snowflake platform. And that's, that's the real advantage because we can do things faster. Right? We can do things easier, right? We're doing some mathematical data science right now and we're doing it through SQL, but Python will open that up much easier and allow us to deliver faster and more accurate results and easier not to mention, we're gonna try to bolt on the hybrid tables to that afterwards. >>Oh, we had talk about that. So can you, and I don't, I don't need an exact metric, but when you say faster talking 10% faster, 20% faster, 50% path >>Faster, it really depends on the solution. >>Well, gimme a range of, of the worst case, best case. >>I, I really don't have that. I don't, I wish I did. I wish I had that for you, but I really don't have >>It. I mean, obviously it's meaningful. I mean, if >>It is meaningful, it >>Has a business impact. It'll >>Be FA I think what it will do is it will speed up our work inside of our iterations. So we can then, you know, look at the code sooner. Right. And evaluate it sooner, measure it sooner, measure it faster. >>So is it fair to say that as a result, you can do more. Yeah. That's to, >>We be able do more well, and it will enable more of our people because they're used to working in Python. >>Can you talk a little bit about, from an enablement perspective, let's go up the stack to the folks at Allegis who are on the front lines, helping people get jobs. What are some of the benefits that having snow park for Python under the hood, how does it facilitate them being able to get access to data, to deliver what they need to, to their clients? >>Well, I think what we would use snowflake for a Python for there is when we're building them tools to let them know whether or not a user or a piece of talent is already within our system. Right. Things like that. Right. That's how we would leverage that. But again, it's also new. We're still figuring out what solutions we would move to Python. We are, we have some targeted, like we're, I have developers that are waiting for this and they're, and they're in private preview. Now they're playing around with it. They're ready to start using it. They're ready to start doing some analytical work on it, to get some of our analytical work out of, out of GCP. Right. Because that's where it is right now. Right. But all the data's in snowflake and it just, but we need to move that down now and take the data outta the data wasn't in snowflake before. So there, so the dashboards are up in GCP, but now that we've moved all of that data down in, down in the snowflake, the team that did that, those analytical dashboards, they want to use Python because that's the way it's written right now. So it's an easier transformation, an easier migration off of GCP and get us into snow, doing everything in snowflake, which is what we want. >>So you're saying you're doing the visualization in GCP. Is that righting? >>It's just some dashboarding. That's all, >>Not even visualization. You won't even give for. You won't even give me that. Okay. Okay. But >>Cause it's not visualization. It's just some D boardings of numbers and percentages and things like that. It's no graphic >>And it doesn't make sense to run that in snowflake, in GCP, you could just move it into AWS or, or >>No, we, what we'll be able to do now is all that data before was in GCP and all that Python code was running in GCP. We've moved all that data outta GCP, and now it's in snowflake and now we're gonna work on taking those Python scripts that we thought we were gonna have to rewrite differently. Right. Because Python, wasn't available now that Python's available, we have an easier way of getting those dashboards back out to our people. >>Okay. But you're taking it outta GCP, putting it to snowflake where anywhere, >>Well, the, so we'll build the, we'll build those, those, those dashboards. And they'll actually be, they'll be displayed through Tableau, which is our enterprise >>Tool for that. Yeah. Sure. Okay. And then when you operationalize it it'll go. >>But the idea is it's an easier pathway for us to migrate our code, our existing code it's in Python, down into snowflake, have it run against snowflake. Right. And because all the data's there >>Because it's not a, not a going out and coming back in, it's all integrated. >>We want, we, we want our people working on the data in snowflake. We want, that's our data platform. That's where we want our analytics done. Right. We don't want, we don't want, 'em done in other places. We when get all that data down and we've, we've over our data cloud journey, we've worked really hard to move all of that data. We use out of existing systems on prem, and now we're attacking our, the data that's in GCP and making sure it's down. And it's not a lot of data. And we, we fixed it with one data. Pipeline exposes all that data down on, down in snowflake now. And we're just migrating our code down to work against the snowflake platform, which is what we want. >>Why are you excited about hybrid tables? What's what, what, what's the >>Potential hybrid tables I'm excited about? Because we, so some of the data science that we do inside of snowflake produces a set of results and there recommendations, well, we have to get those recommendations back to our people back into our, our talent management system. And there's just some delays. There's about an hour delay of delivering that data back to that team. Well, with hybrid tables, I can just write it to the hybrid table. And that hybrid table can be directly accessed from our talent management system, be for the recruiters and for the hiring managers, to be able to see those recommendations and near real time. And that that's the value. >>Yep. We learned that access to real time. Data it in recent years is no longer a nice to have. It's like a huge competitive differentiator for every industry, including yours guys. Thank you for joining David me on the program, talking about snow park for Python. What that announcement means, how Allegis is leveraging the technology. We look forward to hearing what comes when it's GA >>Yeah. We're looking forward to, to it. Nice >>Guys. Great. All right guys. Thank you for our guests and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of snowflake summit 22 stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>Hey, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of eaters reinvent 2021. So our third day wall-to-wall coverage. I'm my coach, Dave Alonzo. He we're getting all the action two sets in person. It's also a virtual hybrid events with a lot of great content online, bringing you all the fresh voices, all the knowledge, all the news and all the action and got great guests here today. As your renderer, managing director of AWS is Europe, middle east, and Africa also known as EMIA. Welcome to the cube. Welcome, >>Welcome. Thanks for coming on. Lovely to be here. >>So Europe is really hot. Middle east Africa. Great growth. The VC culture in Europe specifically has been booming this year. A lot of great action. We've done many cube gigs out there talking to folks, uh, entrepreneurship, cloud, native growth, and then for us it's global. It's awesome. So first question got to ask you is, is you're new to AWS? What brought you here? >>Yeah, no, John, thank you so much. I've been here about three and a half months now, actually. Um, so what brought me here? Um, I have been in and around the tech world since I was a baby. Um, my father was an entrepreneur. I sold fax machines and microfilm equipment in my early days. And then my career has spanned technology in some form or the other. I was at EMC when we bought VMware. Uh, I was a Colt when we did a FinTech startup joined Schneider in my background, which is industrial tech. So I guess I'm a bit of a tech nerd, although I'm not an engineer, that's for sure. The other thing is I've spent a huge part of my career advising clients. And so while I was at McKinsey on business transformation and cloud keeps coming up, especially post pandemic, huge, huge, huge enabler, right of transformation. So when I got the call from AWS, I thought here's my opportunity to finally take what companies are wrestling with, bring together a pioneer in cloud with our enterprise and start-up and SMB clients connect those dots between business and technology and make things happen. So it real magic. So that's what brought me here. And I guess the only other thing to say is I'd heard a lot of other culture, customer mash, obsession, and leadership principles. >>That's why I'm here. It's been a great success. I got to ask you too, now that your new ostium McKinsey, even seeing the front lines, all the transformation, the pandemic has really forced everybody globally to move faster. Uh, things like connect were popular in EMEA. How, how is that going out? There's at the same kind of global pressure on the digital transformation with cloud? What are you seeing out there? >>I've been traveling since I joined, uh, around 10 of the countries already. So Ben planes, trains, automobiles, and what you definitely see is massive acceleration. And I think it's around reinvention of the business. So people are adopting cloud because it's obviously there's cost reasons. There's MNA reasons. There's really increasingly more about innovating. How do I innovate my business? How do I reinvent my business? So you see that constantly. Um, and whether you're a enterprise company or you're a startup, they're all adopting cloud in different, different ways. Um, I mean, I want to tell a core to stack because it's really interesting. And Adam mentioned this in his keynote five to 15% only of workloads have moved to the cloud. So there's a tremendous runway ahead of us. Um, and the three big things on people's minds helped me become a tech company. So it doesn't matter who you are, you're retail, whether you're life sciences or healthcare. You've probably heard about the Roche, uh, work that we're doing with Roche around accelerating R and D with data, or if you're a shoes Addie desk, how do you accelerate again, your personalized experiences? So it doesn't matter who you have helped me become a tech company, give me skills, digital skills, and then help me become a more sustainable company. Those are the three big things I'm thinking of. >>So a couple of things to unpack there. So think about it. Transformation. We still have a long way to go to your point, whatever 10, 15%, depending on which numbers you look at. We've been talking a lot in the cube about the next decade around business transformation, deeper business integration, and the four smarts to digital. And the woke us up to that, accelerated that as you say, so as you travel around to customers in AMEA, what are you hearing with regard to that? I mean, many customers maybe didn't have time to plan. Now they can sit back and take what they've learned. What are you hearing? >>Yeah. And it's, it's a little bit different in different places, right? So, I mean, if you start, if you look at, uh, you know, our businesses, for example, in France, if you look at our businesses in Iberia or Italy, a lot of them are now starting they're on the, at least on the enterprise front, they are now starting to adopt cloud. So they stepping back and thinking about their overall strategy, right? And then the way that they're doing it is actually they're using data as the first trigger point. And I think that makes it easier to migrate because if you, if you look at large enterprises and if you think of the big processes that they've got and all the mainframes and everything that they need to do, if you S if you look at it as one big block, it's too difficult. But when you think about data, you can actually start to aggregate all of your data into one area and then start to analyze and unpack that. >>So I think what I'm seeing for sure is in those countries, data is the first trigger. If you go out to Israel, well that you've got all, it's really start up nation as you know, right. And then we've got more of the digital natives and they want to, you know, absorb all of the innovation that we're throwing at them. And you've heard a lot here at reinvent on some of the things, whether it's digital twins or robotics, or frankly, even using 5g private network, we've just announcement. They are adopting innovation and really taking that in. So it really does differ, but I think the one big message I would leave you with is bringing industry solutions to business is critical. So rather than just talking it and technology, we've got to be able to bring some of what we've done. So for example, the Goldman Sachs financial cloud, bring that to the rest of financial services companies and the media, or if you take the work we're doing on industrials and IOT. So it's really about connecting what industry use cases with. >>What's interesting about the Goldman Dave and I were commenting. I think we coined the term, the story we wrote on Thursday last week, and then PIP was Sunday superclouds because you look at the rise of snowflake and Databricks and Goldman Sachs. You're going to start to see people building on AWS and building these super clouds because they are taking unique platform features of AWS and then sacrificing it for their needs, and then offering that as a service. So there's kind of a whole nother tier developing in the natural evolution of clouds. So the partners are on fire right now because the creativity, the market opportunities are there to be captured. So you're seeing this opportunity recognition, opportunity, capture vibe going on. And it's interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that, because certainly the VCs are here in force. I did when I saw all the top Silicon valley VCs here, um, and some European VCs are all here. They're all seeing this. >>So pick up on two things you mentioned that I think absolutely spot on. We're absolutely seeing with our partners, this integration on our platform is so important. So we talk about the power of three, which is you bring a JSI partner, you bring an ISV partner, you bring AWS, you create that power of three and you take it to our customers. And it doesn't matter which industry we are. Our partner ecosystem is so rich. The Adam mentioned, we have a hundred thousand partners around the world, and then you integrate that with marketplace. Um, and the AWS marketplace just opens the world. We have about 325,000 active customers on marketplace. So sassiphy cation integration with our platform, bringing in the GSI and the NSIs. I think that's the real power to, to, to coming back to your point on transformation on the second one, the unicorns, you know, it's interesting. >>So UK France, um, Israel, Mia, I spent a lot of time, uh, recently in Dubai and you can see it happening there. Uh, Africa, Nigeria, South Africa, I mean all across those countries, you're saying huge amount of VC funding going in towards developers, towards startups to at scale-ups more and more of a, um, our startup clients, by the way, uh, are actually going IPO. You know, initially it used to be a lot of M and a and strategic acquisitions, but they have actually bigger aspirations and they're going IPO and we've seen them through from when they were seed or pre-seed all the way to now that they are unicorns. Right? So that there's just a tremendous amount happening in EMEA. Um, and we're fueling that, you know, you know, I mean, born in the cloud is easy, right? In terms of what AWS brings to the table. >>Well, I've been sacred for years. I always talked to Andy Jassy about this. Cause he's a big sports nut. When you bring like these stadiums to certain cities that rejuvenates and Amazon regions are bringing local rejuvenation around the digital economies. And what you see with the startup culture is the ecosystems around it. And Silicon valley thrives because you have all the service providers, you have all the fear of failure goes away. There's support systems. You start to see now with AWS as ecosystem, that same ecosystem support the robustness of it. So, you know, it's classic, rising tide floats all boats kind of vibe. So, I mean, we don't really have our narrative get down on this, but we're seeing this ecosystem kind of play going on. Yeah. >>And actually it's a real virtuous circle, or we call flywheel right within AWS because a startup wants to connect to an enterprise. An enterprise wants to connect to a startup, right? A lot of our ISV partners, by the way, were startups. Now they've graduated and they're like very large. So what we are, I see our role. And by the way, this is one of the other reasons I came here is I see our role to be able to be real facilitators of these ecosystems. Right. And, you know, we've got something that we kicked off in EMEA, which I'm really proud of called our EMEA startup loft accelerator. And we launched that a web summit. And the idea is to bring startups into our space virtually and physically and help them build and help them make those connections. So I think really, I really do think, and I enterprise clients are asking us all the time, right? Who do I need to involve if I'm thinking IOT, who do I need to involve if I want to do something with data. And that's what we do. Super connectors, >>John, you mentioned the, the Goldman deal. And I think it was Adam in his keynote was talking about our customers are asking us to teach them how to essentially build a Supercloud. I mean, our words. But so with your McKinsey background, I would imagine there's real opportunities there, especially as you, I hear you talk about IMIA going around to see customers. There must be a lot of, sort of non-digital businesses that are now transforming to digital. A lot of capital needs there, but maybe you could talk about sort of how you see that playing out over the next several years in your role and AWS's role in affecting that transfer. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you're right actually. And I, you know, maybe I will, from my past experience pick up on something, you know, I was in the world of industry, uh, with Schneider as an example. And, you know, we did business through the channel. Um, and a lot of our channel was not digitized. You know, you had point of sale, electrical distributors, wholesalers, et cetera. I think all of those businesses during the pandemic realized that they had to go digital and online. Right. And so they started from having one fax machine in a store. Real literally I'm not kidding nothing else to actually having to go online and be able to do click and collect and various other things. And we were able with AWS, you can spin up in minutes, right. That sort of service, right. I love the fact that you have a credit card you can get onto our cloud. >>Right. That's the whole thing. And it's about instances. John Adam talked about instances, which I think is great. How do businesses transform? And again, I think it's about unpacking the problem, right? So what we do a lot is we sit down with our customers and we actually map a migration journey with them, right? We look across their core infrastructure. We look at their SAP systems. For example, we look at what's happening in the various businesses, their e-commerce systems, that customer life cycle value management systems. I think you've got to go business by business by business use case by use case, by use case, and then help our technology enable that use case to actually digitize. And whether it's front office or back office. I think the advantages are pretty clear. It's more, I think the difficulty is not technology anymore. The difficulty is mindset, leadership, commitment, the operating model, the organizational model and skills. And so what we have to do is AWS is bringing not only our technology, but our culture of innovation and our digital innovation teams to help our clients on that journey >>Technology. Well, we really appreciate you taking the time coming on the cube. We have a couple more minutes. I do want to get into what's your agenda. Now that you're got you're in charge, got the landscape and the 20 mile stare in front of you. Cloud's booming. You got some personal passion projects. Tell us what your plans are. >>So, um, three or four things, right? Three or four, really big takeaways for me is one. I, I came here to help make sure our customers could leverage the power of the cloud. So I will not feel like my job's been done if I haven't been able to do that. So, you know, that five to 15% we talked about, we've got to go 50, 60, 70%. That that's, that's the goal, right? And why not a hundred percent at some point, right? So I think over the next few years, that's the acceleration we need to help bring in AMEA Americas already started to get there as you know, much more, and we need to drive that into me. And then eventually our APJ colleagues are going to do the same. So that's one thing. The other is we talked about partners. I really want to accelerate and expand our partner ecosystem. >>Um, we have actually a huge growth by the way, in the number of partners signing up the number of certifications they're taking, I really, really want to double down on our partners and actually do what they ask us for, which is join. Co-sell joined marketing globalization. So that's two, I think the third big thing is when you mentioned industry industry industry, we've got to bring real use cases and solutions to our customers and not only talk technology got to connect those two dots. And we have lots of examples to bring by the way. Um, and then for hire and develop the best, you know, we've got a new LP as you know, to strive to be at its best employer. I want to do that in a Mia. I want to make sure we can actually do that. We attract, we retain and we grow and we develop that. >>And the diversity has been a huge theme of this event. It's front and center in virtually every company. >>I am. I'm usually passionate about diversity. I'm proud actually that when I was back at Schneider, I launched something called the power women network. We're a network of a hundred senior women and we meet every month. I've also got a podcast out there. So if anyone's listening, it's called power. Women's speak. It is, I've done 16 over the pandemic with CEOs of women podcast, our women speak >>Or women speak oh, >>And Spotify and >>Everything else. >>And, um, you know, what I love about what we're doing is AWS on diversity and you heard Adam onstage, uh, talk to this. We've got our restock program where we really help under employed and unemployed to get a 12 week intensive course and get trained up on thought skills. And the other thing is, get it helping young girls, 12 to 15, get into stem. So lots of different things on the whole, but we need to do a lot more of course, on diversity. And I look forward to helping our clients through that as well. >>Well, we had, we had the training VP on yesterday. It's all free trainings free. >>We've got such a digital skills issue that I love that we've said 29 million people around the world, free cloud training. >>Literally the th the, the gap there between earnings with cloud certification, you can be making six figures like with cloud training. So, I mean, it's really easy. It's free. It's like, it's such a great thing. >>Have you seen the YouTube video on Charlotte Wilkins? Donald's fast food. She changed her mind. She wanted to take Korea. She now has a tech career as a result of being part of restock. Awesome. >>Oh, really appreciate. You got a lot of energy and love, love the podcast. I'm subscribing. I'm going to listen. We love doing the podcast as well. So thanks for coming on the >>Queue. Thank you so much for having me >>Good luck on anemia and your plans. Thank you. Okay. Cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in global tech coverage. We go to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John furrier with Dave, a lot to here at re-invent physical event in person hybrid event as well. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Ongoing virtual coverage of IBM. Think 2021. This is our second virtual think. And we're going to talk about what's on the minds of CTOs with a particular point of view from the EMEA region. I'm pleased to welcome rushy Parmer, who is an IBM fellow and vice-president of technology for AMEA that region. Hello Russia. Good to see you. >>Great to see you. So >>Let me start by, by asking, talk a little bit about the role of the CTO and why is it necessarily important to focus on the CTO role versus say some of the other technology practitioner roles? >>Yeah. You know, as you look at all the range of roles of the gut in the it department, the CTO is uniquely placed in looking forward at how technology and how digitization is going to make a difference in the business. But also at the same time, is there as the kind of thought leader for how they're going to really, um, reimagine the use of technology re-imagine automation, reimagining, how digitization helps them go to market different ways. So the CTO is a unique, a unique position from idea to impact. And in the past, we've kind of lost the CTO a little bit, but they're now reemerging as being the thought leader. That's only in driving digitization, going forward in our big clients. >>I, I would agree. I mean, it really has a deep understanding of that vision and can apply that vision to business success. So you obviously have a technical observation space and you also have some data, so maybe you could share with our audience how you inform yourself and your colleagues and IBM on, on what CTOs are thinking about and what they're worried about. >>Yeah. And so, so what we've done over the last four years now is gone out and interviewed CTOs. And can we do a very unstructured interviews? It's not, it's not a survey in the form of, uh, filling these, uh, these 10 questions and tell us yes or no. It reads a structured interview. We ask things like what's top of mind for you. What are the decisions you're making? Um, what's holding you back? What decisions do you think you shouldn't have made, or you wouldn't have liked to make? And, and it's that range of, um, of real input from the interview. So last year we interviewed a hundred CTOs. Um, this year we're actually doing a lot more, we're working with the IBM Institute of business value and we're gonna interview a lot more teachers, but for the material we're going to talk about today is really from those hundred CTO interviews. >>Yeah. And I think that, I mean, having done a lot of these myself, when you do those, we call them, you know, in depth interviews or ideas, you kind of have a structure and you do sort of follow that, but you learn so much and that maybe does inform those more structured interviews, uh, that, that, that you do down the road, you learn so much, but, but maybe you could summarize some of the concerns in the region what's on the minds of, of CTOs. Yeah. Yeah. The, >>The, the real decisions are being based around seven points, right? So the first one is we all know we're on a journey to the cloud. Um, but it's a hybrid multicloud. How do I think about the range of capabilities? I need to be able to unlock the latent potential of existing investments and the cloud-based capabilities we've got. So, so the, the hybrid cloud platform is, is, is one of the first and foundational pieces. The second challenge is that CTOs want to modernize their applications. And that modernization is a journey of, of moving towards microservices. That microservices journey has two parts. One is the business facing view, and that's what containers is all about choosing the right container platform. At the same time, they also want to use containers as a way of automation and management and reducing the effort and the infrastructure. So, so that's kind of two parts of that, that whole container journey. >>So Microsoft, this has really become the, the, the, the business developer view and containers become the operational view. At the same time, they wanna infuse new data to want to climb the AI ladder. They want to get the new, new insights from that data that plugs into those new workflows to get to those workflows. There's a decision around how do I isolate myself from some of the services of using that? And we've created a layer in the decisions around what called cloud services integration. So part service integration is, is kind of the, the modern day ESB as we might think about it. Um, but it's a way in which you choose which technology, which API I'm going to use from where, and then ultimately the CTOs are trying to build what are the new, um, uh, the new workflows, intelligent workflows. And they're really worried about how do I get the right level of automation that managing that issue between what becomes creepy and valuable, right. >>You know, there's some workflows that happen. You think, why the hell did that happen? Or I don't, that doesn't make sense. And, and, and it really sort of nerves the consumer, the user, whereas some which are wow, that's really cool. I really enjoyed that to try to get the intelligent workflows, right. Is a big concern. And then, um, on the two big, uh, parallel to that is how do we manage the systems operational automation, right from having the right data, the observability of all the infrastructure, recognizing they've got a spectrum of things from 30, 40, 50 year old systems to modern day cloud native systems, how to manage it, how to operationally automate that, keep that efficient, effective. And then of course, protecting from the perpetrator's rent business. A lot of people out there wanting to dig into the systems and, and, and, and draw all kinds of, um, you know, uh, data from their systems. So security, privacy, and making sure that align with the ethics and privacy of the business. So those are, those are the kind of range of issues, right? From the journey to cloud, through, to operational automation, through, through intelligent workflows, right. Into managing, protecting the services. >>That's interesting. Thank you for that. I mean, I remember, and you will, as well, some of the post wide thrust and sort of part of the modernization back then was during that they had budget to do that, but a lot of times organizations would make the mistake that they would, they're going to migrate off of a system that was working just fine. That was their sort of mental model of, of, of modernization. And it turned out to be disastrous in many cases. And so what, when I talk to CEOs, they talk about maybe, you know, I'd look at it as this, this abstraction layer. We want to protect what we have that works. Yes. Some stuff's going to go into the public cloud, but this hybrid connection that you talk about, and then we want control. And the way we're going to get control is we're going to use microservices to modernize and use modern API APIs. And so very, very sort of different thinking. And of course they want to avoid migration at all costs because it's so expensive and risky. I wonder if you could talk about, are there any patterns in terms of where people get started and the kinds of outcomes that they're working towards that they can measure? >>Yeah. And we kind of lump the, the learning from the work into three broad patterns, right. Um, one pattern is, is primarily around survival. They recognize that this journey, um, is, is very complex, that the pandemic has created tremendous challenges. Um, the market dynamics means that I've got to try and really be thoughtful in, in taking cost out and making sure they survive some of these issues and sort of the pattern is really around cost reduction. It may start with the hybrid cloud. It may start with in terms of workloads, but it's really about taking cost out of the systems. The second pattern is what we refer to as a simplification pattern. And this is about saying that we've got, we've got so much complexity because of technical debt, because of, you know, systems that we've half migrated in half done things with. Um, so how do I, how do I simplify my it landscape from applications through infrastructure to the data and make it more consistent and manageable and effective. >>And then the third one is that there are CTO saying, look, we've got a really pick that the time when we super scale something, we've got some things which we are unique and effective on. And I want to take that and really super scale that very quickly and make that consistent and really maximize the value of it. So that sort of pattern is really falling to those three categories of driving, driving cost reduction and survival simplification and modernization transformation. And then those that have got something which is unique and special and really super scaling up. >>Yeah. Right, right. Doubling down on those things that gave you unique, competitive advantage. Now, in this, in, in the studies that you've done over the years, you use this term ADP architectural decision points, and some of them are quite compelling. Maybe you could talk about some of those where there's some anxieties from the CTOs that, that you uncovered. >>Yeah. Yeah. The, the ADP's that we'll talk about the seven ATPs and it starts from the high rebuilt crowd through to, to intelligent workflows and so on. Um, and the ADP's themselves are really distilling the client's words in the client's, um, way of thinking about how they're going to drive those, those technologies. Um, and also how they're going to use those techniques to make a difference. But I think went through those interviews, um, what became the power is CTOs do have some anxieties as you refer to it. Um, and, and those anxiety, they couldn't necessarily put words on them and there were anxieties and like, are we thinking enough about the carbon footprint? Are we, are we being thoughtful in how we make sure we're reducing carbon footprint or reducing the environmental impact of the infrastructure you've got, we've got sprawling infrastructure, um, ripping out rare metals from the earth. >>Are we being thoughtful in how we reduce the, um, the amount of rare metals we have water consumption, uh, right through to is the code that we're producing efficient, secure and fit for, for the future? Um, are we being ethical in capturing the data for its right use, um, is the AI systems that we're building? Are they explainable? Are they ethical? Are they free from bias or are we kind of amplifying things that we shouldn't be able to find? So there was a whole bunch of those call anxieties and what we did along with the architectural decision report, um, a point after she decision report was, was identify what we call a set of responsibilities. And, and we've built a framework about around responsible computing, which is, uh, which is a basis for how you think through what your responsibilities are as a, as a CTO or as an it leader. Um, and we're right in the process of building out that, that kind of, um, responsible computing framework. >>Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of people may, may think about it. They think about the responsible computing and the sustainability, and they might think that's a, a one 80 from Milton Friedman economics, which said the job of business is to make profits. But in fact, responsible computing, there's a strong business case, uh, around it. It actually can help you reduce costs that can, can help you attract better employees because young people are passionate about this. I wonder if you could talk about how, how people can get involved with responsible computing in, in lean in. >>Yeah. So what we're about to publish is that he's actually a manifesto for responsible computing. So I think everybody, once we get that published, I'm hoping to do that in the next two to three months, we're working with a few clients, um, to there's actually three clients that have chosen, just click through your client's CTOs from the ones that we interviewed were very keen to collaborate with us in, in laying out that, um, that manifesto and the opportunity really is for anybody listening. If you, if you find this as a great value, please do come and reach out to me more than happy to collaborate with looking for more insights on this. Um, we've also had some, um, competitions. So in, in, in Mia, we've had a competition with, uh, with business partners looking for of how we can, um, really showcase examples or exemplars of being responsible computing provider, whether it's at the level of responsible data center, whether it's about responsible code data, use responsible systems, right through to responsible impact. And, you know, obviously a lot of our work around things like, um, your tech for good is, is tied directly to responsible impact. And of course, if you want to see what we IBM have been doing our responsible responsibility report, which we've been voluntarily publishing for the last 30 years, provides a tremendous set of insights on how we've done that over the years. And, and that's a, that's a great way for you to see how we've been doing things and see if that there are critical in your business. >>Yeah, so there's, so there's the, the re the ADP report is available. You can check it out on, on LinkedIn, um, go to go to Russia, LinkedIn profile, you'll find it. There's a blog post that talks about the next wave of digitization. Um, the learnings that you just talked about. So there's a lot of resources for, for people to get involved. I'll give you the last word rushy. >>Yeah. And th th this is, this is what I call job began. It's not job done. The whole ADP responsible computing is a digitization journey where we want to balance delivering business value and making a difference to the organization. But at the same time, being responsible, making sure that we're thoughtful of what's needed for the future. And we create impact that really matters. And, or we can feel proud that we've put a foundation for digitization, which will, which will serve the businesses for many years to come >>Love it, impact investing in your business and in the future. Russia, thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Okay. Keep it right there for more coverage from IBM. Think 2021. This is Dave Volante for the cube.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin, welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Travis Vigil, the SVP of Product Management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >> Hey, how's it going Lisa? >> Not bad, nice to connect with you virtually, of course this year, everything is so different. You've already done virtual CUBEs. So welcome back to our very-- >> Yeah, this is my third one. >> Socially distance program. Third one? Third time lucky. >> Yeah. >> All right, so back in May, you were on theCUBE talking about the launch of PowerStore. Really what Dell Technologies was doing to kind of converge formerly overlapping technologies by Acquisitions, Compellent, XtremeIO, give us an update last few months of what's going on with PowerStore, customer adoption, momentum, stuff like that. >> Yeah, it's been almost six months that we've launched the product, and it's been an unbelievable experience. Let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, we had to launch PowerStore into a very different world than we had anticipated. The global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everything around the world. Our first priority at Dell is the health and safety of our customers, of our team members, of our partners. And it was a very interesting experience in that, this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad backdrop against which we had to launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic momentum. Since launch, we've shipped world wide over 40, we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. And we have the biggest pipeline that we've ever generated for our product in the history of Dell and EMC at this point in its life. But, I think to really talk about momentum and what's going on, it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Start maybe with a healthcare example, a healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt PowerStore as a multimillion dollar deal. And what they were trying to do was modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. There was a lot of technical debt and they wanted to modernize things, make things more autonomous. And at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into most... Still they had data centers across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites. And with PowerStore because of the efficiency, because of the deduplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual Opex they have related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year by going to PowerMax, I'm sorry, by going to PowerStore. So that was a big one. Another good example was an AMEA high-tech customer. They adopted PowerStore because of PowerStore's ability to scale performance and capacity independently. And in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications, and the other is kind of a variable and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this nearly million dollar deal with them. And then other one that's one of my favorites, an entertainment company in the APJ region, obviously with all of us staying home, I can speak for my kids that are remote learning right over my shoulder. There's a lot more video games going on. And so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing PowerStore. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decreased costs of storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development, and decreased costs. So those are just a couple of the examples that we have for PowerStore. We're seeing great adoption, great traction, and really, customers and partners are really excited about what we've brought to market. >> You talked about some of the things that are essential, that even back in May when PowerStore was launched, no one would have thought here in October, 2020, we'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce, businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company, and APJ being essential, as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption, for example, the healthcare organization that you talked about in North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization to upgrade or migrate to PowerStore so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about, but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site, if it was on-prem, 'cause of course it was all the challenges there, right? >> Yeah, it's a really good question. This was a brand new product for us. And in order to enable proof of concept, in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product, it's taken an enormous amount of coordination and enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so, it's actually taken a little bit more time than had we been able to fly people around the world to do it, but we've gotten very proficient at organizing with the customer, being able to host the demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely, be able to do our customer briefings remotely. So it is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >> So PowerStore was big from the beginning. There was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history. >> The largest beta that we'd ever done, yes. >> Launching it during a pandemic that was unpredictable and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key differentiators that really make PowerStore unique? >> Yeah, I like to start at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about PowerStore, because with storage products, the architecture is the thing that all features and capabilities are built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of PowerStore, was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today and the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that be NVMe or SCM, it was microservices based so that it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. When we first launched this array, and this fact is true today, we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today, that was seven times more performant and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So, that core performance is kind of point number one. Point number two, data reduction. Data reduction is the new normal. And with PowerStore, we have a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of mid range storage devices. And in their particular environment, they saw 4.6:1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4:1. So being very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, and I talked about it in the high tech company that I mentioned, the European high tech company. The ability to scale performance and capacity independently in our scale out design is another differentiator. For folks that have been around storage arrays, a long time, traditional storage array, you would add capacity sometimes when you needed performance or you'd add performance sometimes when you needed capacity. By being able to separate those two things, customers can really get optimized in their environment for what their needs are. They need more performance, they can add more performance. They need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners. And then above and beyond that, we brought some industry only capability to market in that we are the only purpose built storage appliance with a built in VMware, ESXi hypervisor. So what this allows customers to do is, run VMware based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage that's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables a whole new host of use cases where customers can change the way that they're optimized in the core. And also there's a lot of good edge deployments that this new capability can help enable. So it's being architectually advanced in performance, efficiency, and scale up and scale out, and bringing industry only capabilities in our integration, especially with VMware to market that have really resonated with our customers. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that the VMware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate with massively scattered workforce that some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding, device proliferation. What are some of the new use cases that what PowerStore can deliver uniquely as you said, is going to be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >> Yeah, I think that there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core, but I think the new, either remote site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less. And so if you can have hardware that is able to provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability, those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device, which leads to easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having to deploy multiple devices. >> So you, great with the stats, you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with PowerStore, all the testing what you're seeing actually in customer environments, which is fantastic. When you're talking with analysts, looking at what Dell Technologies has done and to develop PowerStore. And like I said, merging technologies from Compellent and XtremeIO, et cetera. Are analysts looking at this as maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing? >> Yeah, there was some press that was written when we announced that the release of PowerStore established a new benchmark of what was expected from a mid range storage array which was something that was really fulfilling, especially after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about, that ended the innovation that we had put into it over the course of a multi-year journey. And so, what we're seeing, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio. That we're able to direct our R&D investments into a single platform to bring more and more capability to that platform over time. And that message is resonating very strongly. >> So wrapping things up here, PowerStore is in its first five or six months. And during that time, crazy things have happened in the world. We're in a state of still disarray, if you will, no pun intended. What is next for the second half of PowerStore's first year? How is Dell Technologies going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now, into thriving so that they can be the winners of tomorrow? >> Yeah, I think the first half of this year was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners trained up on it, getting those key early wins, establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of more customers, getting it into that... Enabling our partners to amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're going to see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of more adoption, more momentum and more success on PowerStore. And for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture, comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come, when new media comes, when new interfaces or interconnect technologies come, when we invest in even tighter integration with VMware, like at VMworld just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VMware on a new interconnect technology and NVMe-over-TCP. That core architecture is so flexible that it can adopt with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market evolves. >> And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about, the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well. Travis, thank you so much for sharing with us the moments for the first half of PowerStore's first year and what we can look to see in its, not just second half, but going forward, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> My pleasure, for Travis Vigil, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 Digital Experience. (upbeat music)