(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner, showcase women in tech. I'm Lisa Martin from the cube. And today we're gonna be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle GShock, the ISP PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata NetApp. JFI a 10th revolution group, company and honeycomb.io. We're gonna look at some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also gonna be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into stem earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase women in tech. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hillary Ashton joins us the chief product officer at Terry data. And Danielle Greshaw is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic, Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background, and a little bit about Teradata. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team. Um, at Teradata I've been with Terra data for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades. If I can say that in the data and analytics space, um, I spent time, uh, really focused on the value of, of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's, um, uh, lots of different dimensions and angles of that. Um, at Teradata, we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that, um, throughout this discussion as well. >>Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look, Atter data's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a, the, it's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Terra data has there. >>Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through, uh, a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. Um, and we use, uh, data to back that up. Um, in fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. Um, and all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around D E and I that's available on LinkedIn as well. So, um, in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50 50, um, men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a, on a diverse and equitable, uh, team. And I think it really, uh, improves the behaviors that we can bring, um, to our office. >>There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science, or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >>I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. Um, I started off thinking, um, that I started off as a political science major or a government major. Um, and I was probably destined to go into, um, the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how, um, data and analytics can truly provide value and, and outcomes to our customers. Um, and I have been living that life ever since. Um, I graduated from college, so, um, I was very excited and privileged in my early career to, uh, work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing, um, uh, kids, people who had graduated from Harvard business school and from MIT Sloan school. Um, and that was super crazy, cuz I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and, and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help, um, organizations really extract value, um, from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >>I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective. That really is such a value. Add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and under and underrepresented groups as well, to get into stem and stay. >>Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. Um, but for me, it's really been about, uh, looking at that, uh, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and, and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in, to be able to help really, um, provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology, which requires all sorts of perspectives. >>Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on de and I at Tarana, but what are, what do you think can be done to encourage, to sorry, to recruit more young women and under groups into tech, any, any carrot there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the, um, bringing in diverse understandings, um, of, of customer outcomes, I mean, I, the we've really moved from technology for technology's sake and I know AWS and entirety to have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric and technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well, but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, um, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand, um, voice of customer who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the, the, the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, um, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and, and how to program, but also the value in outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >>Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills, but this, their soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for, for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >>That's right. >>What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day, day behaviors when it comes to to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of, of, um, diverse and underrepresented folks in, in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning how, what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that, um, as you, as you learn more about, um, different types of bias, that actually you do need to kind of, um, account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental, um, uh, grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. >>Um, if we're leaders know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon. But I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias, um, is really, is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable, um, when things aren't going in, in a, in a Coptic way and being able to talk openly about that, that felt, um, like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we, um, how do we make good on that? How do we change our, our behavior? Fundamentally of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the, the technology aspect of bias, um, looking at at ethical AI, I think is a, a really important, uh, additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I, I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias, um, and the over the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >>Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It, it starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable ourselves, our teammates, that's critical to being able to, to dial that back down, Daniel, I wanna get your perspective on, on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >>I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And, you know, when I think about, um, our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, you know, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies. Um, you know, the what, how, what they differentiate on how they figure out insights into their business. And it's, it's all about the product itself and the data and the same is true at AWS. And, you know, we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as in the product, shaping the products. Uh, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, um, in order to, you know, move bias out of our, um, out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have, uh, better, you know, outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >>I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do, and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. Um, we've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years, Hillary, what's your, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro is silver lining the opposite? What are you seeing? >>Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been, um, very difficult for women during COVID 19. Um, women have, uh, dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of, of reasons. Um, and, and that I think is going to set us back all of us, the, the Royal us or the Royal we back, um, years and years. Um, and, and it's very unfortunate because I think we we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID, um, setting us back in, in such a powerful way. I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce. Um, how do we do that? Understanding work life balance, better understanding virtual and remote, working better. I think in the technology sector, um, we've really embraced, um, hybrid virtual work and are, are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. >>And I think if anything, these, these zoom calls have, um, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more. So for the men on my team, I'm seeing, I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about, um, other responsibilities that maybe they had, uh, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down. And, um, you had, you know, maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of, um, people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was, was really wonderful. Um, uh, even our CEO saw some of that. And I think, um, that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when, um, people can do it after daycare drop off. >>Um, and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for, for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working, um, environment and that this, um, uh, whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for, um, people who are in a, at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in, um, you know, coming out of the, the old COVID. I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people, um, to transform how we do work, um, leveraging data and analytics, but also, um, overcoming some of the, the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits, our work or more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from, from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to, to work when we can, we've learned that you don't have to be, you know, in an office 24, 7 commuting, crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in a ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. Wanna get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we, we would both agree on like, ask more questions. Don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech >>Oh, inspired and being in tech? You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways, I feel like we do a disservice to, um, inclusion when we talk about stem, cuz I think stem can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people for younger people. When I, when I go and talk to folks at schools, I think stem is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like maybe they're all men. And so, um, it's, it's a little, uh, intimidating. Um, and stem is actually, you know, especially for, um, people joining the workforce today. It's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know, stem inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology right. >>Fundamentally. And so demystifying stem as something that is around how we, um, actually make our, our lives useful and, and, and how we can change outcomes. Um, through technology I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for, for hard sciences, there's absolutely a, a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that and men and women can do that. So I, I don't want to be, um, uh, setting the wrong expectations, but I, I think stem is, is very holistic in, um, in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in, in some of that world change can participate in stem. It just may be through a different, through a different lens than how we classically talk about stem. >>So I think there's great opportunity to demystify stem. I think also, um, what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be, be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, you know, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important. Um, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career, a lot of your day with a lot, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about, um, because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be, um, a standout or that person can hold you back. >>And that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can, um, be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self. I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that, um, my first boss really set me, um, up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. Um, and some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for, for, um, the, the path that I've been on ever since. So it, that would be my advice. >>I love that advice. I it's brilliant. I didn't think it choose your bosses wisely. Isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they wanna go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stem. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in de and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you Lisa, to see you. >>My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle brushoff. One of our cube alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called rubra, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, um, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to growth, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job, and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there, >>A lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions, uh, right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave seems like those things are happening. >>So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also, um, more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how <laugh>, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, uh, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's not that metaphor I do too, but we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the woman here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females and leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Leah, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Um, thank you for that. Uh, my name's Stephanie cur, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for, uh, AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS, um, going back 25 years now, uh, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. Um, I come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, um, but had been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. Um, I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. Um, and, uh, it, it turned out to be a 25 year career, um, that I'm really, really excited about and, and, um, really thankful for that person, for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance, um, for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply, um, on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers, um, in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performant teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my, um, career know, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. Um, we find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really reflective, not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really, uh, meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that, um, a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that, that, so I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way, um, to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we're showing them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team, >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can't see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of them was an interview on the Cub I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, um, about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective and AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent. And, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Um, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, uh, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. Um, and then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women on solution architecture organizations. We have, uh, you know, I just personally connect people as well and to like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home, um, during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a, a long tenured Amazonian. Um, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who, uh, ha has been a sponsor of my career has, uh, Matt YK, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph, who's a cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. Um, and you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, um, you know, and, and get things done, um, inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And S I've, I've agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your, uh, original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Um, some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. Uh, he actually is in the distribution, was in distribution, uh, with advent tech data no longer there. Um, Corey Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. Um, so a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend, um, um, different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take, uh, an extra, uh, approach an extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One. I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. Um, and they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups, so early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know, uh, the massive influence they've had Daniel back over. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ, that AWS employees to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, um, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. Um, but I think just making sure that, um, you know, both everything from, uh, recruit to onboard to ever boarding that, uh, they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as that they have someone, uh, working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. Um, for me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. Um, and then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor, uh, to, to people on my team. Um, that is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized, um, communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it and much like Danielle, uh, and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship. Um, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp, um, on my team personally, I think, um, leading by example's really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the, um, life stuffs still lands on the women, whether we like it or not. Uh, I have a very, uh, active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. Um, and I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. Um, I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week now, obviously to make sure your job's covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, um, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. Um, so it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. Um, I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. Um, you both talked about, um, kind of being what you, uh, can see, and, and I know both companies are upset customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Um, some of that maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned, uh, in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp. Um, with that, uh, key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the, um, partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. Uh, so, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to, uh, about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has, uh, started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just, um, uh, the trajectory, um, between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. Um, we feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people in my team often say we feel like Amazonians. Um, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the, uh, first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. Um, I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, um, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the, in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is, um, a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, um, female, male, um, race and so forth, and just to really, uh, have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. Um, so we definitely feel like a part of the family. Uh, we are absolutely loving, uh, working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back five years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the thet route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your youngest Stephanie self. >>Uh, I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >><laugh> absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be an, a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Um, it's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs, this thing. Um, you know, I genuinely now, uh, took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, um, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Um, don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vero Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our cube alumni, Danielle Ock ISV PSA director at AWS. Join us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. >>Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Um, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. Um, I was an engineer for most of that time. Uh, and just recently as a March, switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, um, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different, um, companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile to platforms. Um, it would be apt to call me a generalist. Um, and in the more recent years I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me that, uh, came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI and now honeycomb. Um, I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. >>Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right, uh, for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her, uh, found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, uh, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from, uh, an amazing woman <laugh>, which I haven't seen before. Uh, so I came across charity majors again, Christine Y our other founder, and then Liz Jones, who's our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically, um, we have tried not to over index on that because there was this, uh, maybe fear awareness of, um, it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. Um, but I'm seeing that, uh, rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility, uh, with great power comes great responsibility, and we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. Um, so I would say that for me, it was, um, a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Um, even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both, um, ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so, um, I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, so honeycomb is an observability tool, uh, that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And, um, we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh, just to name a couple, if you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because, uh, APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. >>What I mean by rich data is, um, something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which, um, I don't know, region, they were in, um, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ality and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query the data. We can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. >>And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into comb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out, um, under your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. Uh, and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important, uh, segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, um, because a lot of all of our customers, uh, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. Um, they've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, uh, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Um, definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations, uh, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Um, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, uh, things in that area as well. And so, uh, very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>Back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And, um, I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a longstanding conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. Um, that also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out, um, in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool, um, based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb. And it man was win, win. >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in, let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. Um, but again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently, um, that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Um, some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among, um, a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal, um, practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it, um, with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect, uh, the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with, uh, a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space, um, by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. Um, and you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles, uh, is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. Uh, and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, um, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them, um, to do what they need to do in their unique, um, environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand, um, and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities, and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network, um, and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tag, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate, uh, being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer, uh, back actually in the late nineties, uh, during the, the first.com bubble and, uh, have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, um, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS, uh, as a customer facing solutions architect. Um, I do think spending a lot of time, hands on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome, um, issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. Um, so it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change, uh, as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career, uh, direction, um, and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder, uh, to join, have community, uh, in that. But then as a leader, um, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love that there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask, uh, questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or, uh, in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed, there's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is, um, one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Shaw, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >>Yes. And I will tell you, all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do. And I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the, um, stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So >>I agree. And we're gonna get to set, cuz advice is one of the, the main things that our audience is gonna hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from TETA there, Reynolds joins us from honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Paris from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like D Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with de and I initiatives. And that intention was a, a, a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where de I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? >>Absolutely. I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last, you know, five to 10 years, there's been a, you know, a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, um, first and foremost, by being intentional, that you can change the, uh, the way your organization looks. Um, but also just that, you know, without being intentional, um, there was just a lot of, you know, outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for, um, you know, a healthy, um, and productive environment, uh, working environment. And so, you know, a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how, you know, these align with our values. So >>Yeah, that, that value alignment mm-hmm <affirmative> that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners, there's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a D E and I alignment that they have. And I, I think everybody also kind of agreed Stephanie Curry talked about, you know, it's really important, um, for diversity on it, on, on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in >>This. Absolutely. And I absolutely, and I definitely even feel that, uh, with their studies out there that tell you that you make better products, if you have all of the right input and you're getting all many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also, you know, the teams that I work alongside. Um, arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well to in technical roles. Um, but you can just see the difference in the outcomes. Uh, at least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >>That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented, um, groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that, um, you know, some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >>Yeah. I think especially, uh, speaking with Hillary and hearing how, uh, Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first, uh, concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to, you know, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus, or am I going to be able to, you know, be at my kids' conf you know, conference or even just, you know, have enough work life balance that I can, um, you know, do the things that I wanna do outside of work, uh, beyond children and family. So these are all very important, um, and questions that especially women come and ask, but also, um, you know, it kind of is a, is a bellwether for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need need. So I think that was something that is, uh, changing a lot. And many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >>Absolutely. The pandemic not only changed how we think about work, you know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model. We're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about there's, it's a win-win. >>Absolutely. And, you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. Um, but I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, um, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >>Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors the differences between them recommendations from, uh, the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that, that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic, advice were mentors and sponsors are concerned is, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks. I shouldn't say that that are attracted to a company it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. >>Yeah. And I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me, um, with my career. But, you know, if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to, you know, find a mentor for a period of time or, um, you know, just, just enable for you to be able to get from say a point a to point B just for a temporary period. Um, just so you can grow into your next role, have a, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind find that person who's been there and done that and can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager mentor, who can help you get to the next step. >>Exactly. That, that I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think, regardless of gender of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is, this is how it happened to me. This is I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >>Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it. Um, but also just hearing all the different techniques on, on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does, um, you know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've, I've met in, uh, industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but, um, it is very common and hopefully we, we talk about some good techniques to, to deal with that. >>I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking the, our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in stem and in tech and everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Um, show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know, oh, how can people have the same question sitting in the room? >>Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint and you're always going to, um, have new things to learn and you can spend, you know, back to, we talked about the zing and zagging through careers, um, where, you know, we'll have different experiences. Um, all of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I wanna learn is a key thing, uh, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well, >>Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too, that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now or may, maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is gonna learn is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word. If you turn it into opportunity, no isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I, I thought that was a really positive message that our guests, um, had to share with the, the audience. >>Yeah, totally. I can, I can say I had a, a mentor of mine, um, a very, uh, strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And you know that when you say that, not right now, um, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. <laugh> >>Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping >>Us with it's been a blast. I really appreciate it >>All audience. We wanna enjoy this. Enjoy the episode.

(bright music) >> Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one episode three and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and a sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. >> I agree, and we're going to get to (indistinct) 'cause advice is one of the the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata. Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb. Stephanie Curry from NetApp. And Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank and the topics that we dig into are, first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion, that is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw, from a thematic perspective, over and over, was that, like Vera Reynolds was talking about, the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives and that intention was a common theme that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where, in the last five to 10 years, there's been a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive environment, working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in and so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another theme that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment. There's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a DE&I alignment that they have and I think everybody also kind of agreed, Stephanie Curry talked about, it's really important for diversity on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities, tech is a little bit behind but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can, just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome, we talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think, especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody, I think that is definitely, when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or, am I going to be able to be at my kid's conference? Or even just have enough work life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work, beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work and then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. You know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work, and that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which, at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely, and definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation, to be able to put up boundaries, but I think, at least I personally, have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up, to effectively have a harmonious work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah absolutely, and a lot of that, from a work life balance perspective, bleeds into one of the next topics that we covered in detail and that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice, where mentors and sponsors are concerned, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way, but I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that but as I reflect through my own career I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from, say a point A to point B, just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role. Have a particular outcome that you want to drive. Have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and it's something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know that's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real, this is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well, about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely and I think the key there is just acknowledging it but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common and hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. You know, one of the things that, when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech, and everybody sort of agreed on the, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader. I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives and that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well and also, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn and you can spend, back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences, all of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, "I don't know all the answers but I want to learn," is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word no doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean, not right now, or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door and I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah totally, I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural and that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. >> Exactly, Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue, and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this Partner Showcase. Season one episode three. Danielle, thank you so much for helping us. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast. I really appreciate it. >> All right, audience, we want to thank you. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Everyone, it's nice to see you. Welcome to the "AWS Partner Showcase". I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA Director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you, and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do, and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So-- >> I agree, and we're going to get to that. 'Cause advice is one of the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata, Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity, equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like Vera Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives. And that intention was a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working in the inside of organizations where in the last five to 10 years there's been a strong push in this direction. Mostly because we've really seen first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional, there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS, there's a DE&I alignment that they have. And I think everybody also kind of agreed. Stephanie Curry talked about it's really important for diversity on impacting performance. Highly performing teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, but I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely... When I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or am I going to be able to be at my kids' conference, or even just have enough work-life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. Initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period. But we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance which at the end of the day it's so much better for product development for the customers as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely. And definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. But I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious work life. Where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work-life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail. And that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice where mentors and sponsors are concerned is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, its brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from say a point A to point B just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role, have a particular outcome that you want to drive, have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through if you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several other women about imposter syndrome. That's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around it or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it, but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it, because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it. And I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common. And hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. One of the things that when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech. And everybody sort of agreed on the don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well, and also for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn. And you can spend... Back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences. All of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers but I want to learn is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end, it can often mean, not right now or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F-word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah, totally. I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, "Your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows, and that's natural." And that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes when you can. >> Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one episode three. Danielle, thanks so much for helping us with this. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast, I really appreciate it. >> All right. Audience, we want to thank you, enjoy the episode. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Thank you for that. My name's Stephanie curs. Lisa mentioned I'm the worldwide head of sales for AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS going back 25 years now, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. I'd come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, but had been in a different career. And I had an opportunity to try something new. I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. And it, it turned out to be a 25 year career that I'm really, really excited about and, and really thankful for that person for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie, I'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities, and put that forth to our customers in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performing teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my career note, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. We find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that. So I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we show them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team. >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of 'em was an, an interview on the cube I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of, of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective in AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent and, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. And then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women at solution architecture organizations. We have, you know, I just personally connect people as well and feel like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a long tenure Amazonian, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who ha has been a sponsor of my career has Matt ion, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph who's cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. And, you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, you know, and, and get things done inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And know S I've had, I've been agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really key difference. I thinks also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. He actually is in the distribution, was in distribution with advent tech data no longer there, Cory Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. So a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies. And when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference, I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take an extra approach and extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One, I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. And they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups. So early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know the massive influence they've had Danielle back. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ that AWS employs to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. But I think just making sure that, you know, both E everything from recruit to onboard to ever boarding that they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as though they have someone working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. For me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner, or with a colleague. And then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor to, to people on my team. That is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that and, and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment, a great place for those women are marginalized communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it. And it much like Danielle and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp on my team personally, I think leading by example is really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the life stuff still lands on the women, whether we like it or not, I have a very active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. And I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week. Now obviously make sure your job' covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. So it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. You both talked about kind of being what you can see. And, and I know both companies are obsess customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Some of the maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp, with that key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. So, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just the trajectory between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. We feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people on my team often say we feel like Amazonians, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company, into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the dis in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, female, male race, and so forth, and just to really have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. So we definitely feel like we're part of the family. We are absolutely loving working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back 25 years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the, the turns and, and serendipitous route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your younger Stephanie self? >>I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you, but, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they are, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >>Absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. It's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs. This thing, you know, I genuinely now took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products, and I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine Young, who's our other founder. And then Liz Frank Jones, who's our, our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You two leaders, you mentioned that you liked the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females and the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You could do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using honeycomb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that realtime visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>You back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I know that this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There is kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele, telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it land was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I, I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is we'll lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI headstart program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teens at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice or your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love it there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million other people in the room that probably has the, have the same question. And because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. >>My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director a at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine yen, who our other founder, and then Liz Frank Jones, who our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have. >>Vera a back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I Don know that this Predates me to some extent, but I Don know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does also in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year, we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and demand was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D E and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach Vera? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that end, we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be Africa, tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teen at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions, and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead. Love that various same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a bit, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because an imposter syndrome don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand and ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us talking to >>My pleasure. Likewise, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle GShock. One of our alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called Ruba, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, uh, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to grow, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I've benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you be benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers and technology, which there's a lot of value there. >>Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions. Uh, there's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave. >>It seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS and attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also a more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that when those younger girls, >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, you're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and glean the insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing E ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's that metaphor I do too. But we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time.

>>Hello and welcome to the AWS partners showcase season one, episode two. I'm your host of the cube John ferry. We're here with two great guests who John Kumar, CEO of and Sabina Joseph, the general manager of AWS. Welcome to the show. Welcome to welcome to the cube, >>John. Good to see you >>Again. Great to see both of you both cube. Alumna's great to see how the businesses is going, going very well. Cloud scale, continuing to dominate Columbia is doing extremely well. Tell us more about what's going on in Columbia. What's your mission? What kinds of use cases are you seeing? Napa John, that's helping you guys keep your growth trajectory and solve your customer problems. >>Yeah. Firstly, thank you, John. Thank you, Sabina. Great to be here is a backup as a service platform. That's built natively on AWS for AWS, and we do support other use cases beyond AWS. But our primary mission is to basically deliver, you know, a ransomware data protection solution, you know, on AWS for AWS customers. Right? So if we think about it, you know, one of the things that's, you know, typically holding back any company to put mission critical workloads on a fantastic platform, a public cloud platform like AWS is to make sure that the data is protected in the event of any attack. And it's also done with extreme amount of simplicity, right? So that nobody is doing the heavy lift of doing backup themselves, right? So that's what really drew me or provides. It's a service. It's a turnkey service that provides, you know, data protection on AWS, whatever. >>Well, you're a frequent cube alumni. We're always talking about the importance of that, but I want to ask you this year more than ever, you're seeing it at the center of the conversation built in from day one, you're seeing a lot more threats, certainly mentioned ransomware and more there's more and more online attacks that's impacting this particular area more than ever before. Can you comment on what your focus has been this year around that? >>Yeah, I see it. If you think about tumor's evolution, our primary mission has been to go and protect every data source, but guess what? Right with more and more move to the public cloud and you look just AWS is journey and that pioneer in public cloud going from, you know, whatever 3 billion in revenues, 10 years ago to north of 70 billion run rate today, there's so much of data that is in the public cloud and the, and the most important thing that customers need is they want to free themselves from going and protecting this data themselves. Right? And, and there's a lot of scale in these environments, right? If you look at customers running hundreds of thousands of AWS accounts across every region on AWS, and if you give them that kind of flexibility and that kind of scale, what they want is give me a turnkey solution that just allows me to go and protect all of these workloads running across all of these regions in a service that takes the data out of my accounts separately in an air gap fashion, right. And that's really what we basically provide. And that's what we focused on over the last 12 months. Right? So if you look at what we have done is we've gone after every important service on AWS TC to EBS RDS, S3, dynamo, sequel databases, and other databases running on top of BC too. So now that becomes the comprehensive set of things that somebody needs to use to really deliver an application on top of the public cloud. And that's where we want for, >>And the growth has been there and the results on Amazon because of the refactoring has been huge. Can you share any examples of some successes that you've had with, with the AWS refactoring and all that good stuff going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think that what we have seen is, you know, customers that basically told us that before you guys existed, we had to go and build these things ourselves, right. Again, you know, they had all the, the, the blocks to go and do it themselves, but it was so much of a heavy lift to go and do it themselves. And again, they didn't want to be in a, you know, in that business. So, so what we have done essentially for, and we have, you know, we have some joint customers at a pretty massive scale that basically have said that, okay, let me just use your solution to protect my critical assets. Like, you know, things, you know, sitting in S3 and really, you know, we'll use gloomy as a, as a >>Yeah, I think that's a great example of the refactoring Sabina. Gotta, I gotta ask you, you obviously you're at the center of this. You have your hand on the wheel of the partnerships and all the innovators out there. The growth of AWS just has been spectacular because there's value being created. Again, companies are refactoring their business on the cloud and you're at the center of it. So talk about the partnership with Clooney. Can you tell us how it all started and where it's going? >>Yeah, thanks for having me here, John, and good to see you again, Fujian, if I'm not mistaken for John, we met each other at the San Francisco summit, the AWS San Francisco summit, actually I believe it was in 2016 or 2017. You can correct me if I'm wrong here, but yes, I think so. It was, it was in the 8% a month of April. I still remember it. And that's when, you know, you kind of mentioned to me about and this modern backup as a service solution that you were creating, you're still in stealth mode. So you couldn't talk a lot about it. And B started to engage deeply on the partnership, right from 2017. And initially we were kind of focused around helping Colombia build a solution using our well-architected review. And then as soon as we all came out of stealth mode, we started to engage more deeply around deeper integrations and also on go to market activities. >>As you know, AWS has a very prescriptive approach to our partnerships. So we started to work with around the five pillars of security, reliability, cost optimization, performance, and operational excellence to really help them tune the solution on AWS. And we also started to engage with our service teams and I have to thank Paul John and his team here. They really embraced those deeper and broader integrations, many services that Pooja mentioned, but also specifically want to mention S3 EBS. And our Columbia was also a launch partner for AWS outpost when AWS in fact, launched outpost. So I want to kind of commend CLU, CLU MEO, and the entire team kind of embracing this technology and innovation and this modern backup as a service approach. And also also embracing how we want to focus on the five key pillars that I mentioned. >>And that's a great example of success when you ride the wave, which I talk about the ACLU, Colombia trends in the data protection, because one of the things that you pointed out earlier is the ransomware. Okay. That's a big one, right? That's a big, hot area. How, how is the cloud, first of all, how is that going? And then how has the cloud equation changed the ransomware defense and protection piece of it? >>Yeah. Now I just, I wonder I had a little bit on what Sabina mentioned before I answered the question, John, if you don't mind. Sure. I think that collaboration is where is the reason why we are here today, right? Like if you think about it, like we were the first design partners to go and build, you know, the EBS direct API, right. And we work closely with the EBS teams, not just for the API, but the cost structure of it. How would somebody like us use it? So we are at the bleeding edge of some of these services that we are using and that has enabled us, you know, to be where we are today. So again, thank you very much to be enough for this fantastic partnership. And again, there's so much to go and do to really go and nail this in a, in a, in a, in a great way on, on the public cloud. >>So now coming back to your question, John, you know, fundamentally, if you see right, you know, what happened is when, when, when customers move to the public cloud, you know, right there, you know, the ease of use with which, you know, AWS provides these services, right? And the consumption of these services actually drives some amazing behavior, right? Where people actually want to go and build, build, build, and build. But then it comes a time where somebody comes in and says, okay, you know, are you compliant? Right. You know, do you have the right compliance in place? You have all these accounts that you have, but what is running in each of these accounts, you have visibility in those accounts. And are these accounts that the data in these accounts is this gap, right? This is getting air gap in the same region, or does it need to be across regions? >>Right. You know, I'm in the east, do I need to, you know, have an air gap in the west and so on and so forth. Right? So all of these, you know, confluence of all these things come in and by the, all these problems existed in on-premise world, they get translated in, in the public cloud, where do I need to replicate my data, doing it to back it up? Do I need air gapped in a, like an on-prem world? You had a data domain of plans, which was separate from your primary storage for a reason, same similar something similar now needs to happen here for compliance reasons and for ransomware reason. So a lot of parallels here is just that here we are, it almost feels like, you know, as they say, right, the more things changed. The more they remain the same. That's what it is in the public cloud again. >>Well, that's a good point. I mean, let's take that example of on premises versus the cloud. Also, the clouds got more scale too, by the way. So now you've got regions, this is a common problem that customers are having, you can build your own and, or use solutions, but if you don't get ahead of it, the compliance question can bite you in the, you know what, because you then got to go back and retrofit everything. So, so that's kind of what I hear a lot on my end is like, okay, I want to be compliant from day one. I want to have an answer when asked, I don't want to have to go to old techniques that don't fit the cloud. That comes up a lot. What's your answer to that? >>Yeah, no, no. We were pretty much right. I think it's like, you know, when it, when it comes to compliance and all of these things, you know, people at the end of the day are looking for that same foundation of, of things. The same questions are asked for an encryption. You know, you know, I is my data where it needs to be when it needs to be right. What is my recovery point? Objective? What is my recovery time objective? All of these things basically come together. And now, as you said, it's just the scale that you're dealing is, is extremely different in the cloud and the, and the services, right? The easier it is that, you know, it is to use these services. And especially what AWS does, it makes it so easy. So compelling that same ease of use needs to get translated with a SAS service, like what we are doing with data protection, right? That that ease of use is very important. You have to preserve that sanctity >>Sabina. Let's get back to you. You mentioned earlier about the design partner, that benefits for Colombia. Now let's take it to the next level. As customers really realize they have a problem, they need solutions and you're on the AWS side. So you gotta have the answers for the customers. You've got to put people together, make things work. There's a variety of things that you guys offer. What are some of the different facets of the ISV or the partner programs that you offer to partners like Clooney, you know, that they can benefit from? >>Absolutely John, we believe in a win-win approach to the partnerships because that's what makes partnerships durable over time. We're always striving to do better here. And we continue to broaden our investments. As you know, John, the AWS management team, right from Adam Phillipsky, our CEO down firmly believe that partners are critical to our success, our longterm success, and as partners like CLU MEO work to lean in with us with more investment resources, our technology innovation. We also ensure that we are doing our part by providing value back to Cleo about a few years ago, as you might recall, right. We really did a lot of investment in our sales team on the AWS side. Well, one of the tanks me and also our partners observed is while we were making investments in the AWS sales team, I don't think we were doing a great job at helping our partners with reaching out to those customers. >>What we call as co-sale and partners gave us feedback on this. We are very partner and customer feedback driven, and we introduced in fact, a new role called the ISP success manager, ISS, who are basically embedded in our field. And they work with partners to help them close opportunities. And also net new opportunities are we've also in 2020. I believe that re-invent, we launched the ISB accelerate program whereby we offer incentives to the AWS field team to work with our partners to close existing opportunities and also bring in net new opportunities. So all of this has led to closer collaboration in the field between both our field teams, Muir's field team and our field team, but also accelerated mutual customer wins. I'm not saying that we are doing everything great. We still have a long ways to go. And we are constantly getting feedback from cluneal and also some of our other key partners, and we'll continue to get better at it. But I think the role of the ISV success manager and also the ISP accelerate program has been key to bringing in cold cell success. >>Well, John, what's your take on, is this a good partnership for you? I mean, see, the wave of Vegas has got the growth numbers. You mentioned that, but from a partnership standpoint, you're closing business, they got scale. Is it working? How do you organize your company to take advantage of these benefits? Can you share your thoughts? >>Absolutely not. We have embraced the ecosystem wholeheartedly 100%, but if you think about it, what we have done is look at our offering on AWS marketplace. There's an example, right? We are the only company I would say in our domain, obviously that routes our entire business through AWS marketplace. Whether obviously we get a lot of organic benefit from AWS marketplace, people go and search for a solution and from your shows up, and obviously they go and onboard self onboard themselves, and guess what? We let them self onboard themselves. And we rely on AWS's billing automatically. So you don't need to talk to us. You can just get billed automatically in your AWS bill and you get your data protection solution. Or if you directly reached out to us, guess what we do. We actually route you through AWS marketplace. All the onboarding is just to one place and it's a fantastic experience. >>So we have gone like all in, on that experience and completely like, you know, internalized that that's the right way to do things. And of course, thanks to, you know, Sabina's team and the marketplace team to create that platform so that we could actually plug it into it. But that's the kind of benefits that we have that we have, you know, taken advantage of a DWI. That's one example, another example that Sabina mentioned, right, which is the whole ACE program. We put a ton of registrations on AIS and with all the wins that we get on AWS, they could broadcast it to the sellers. So that creates its own vicious cycle in terms of more coming into the pipeline and more closing in. So, so these are just two small examples, but there's other examples that we look at our recent press release, where AWS, you know, when we, when we launched yesterday data protection and backup, the GM of AWSs three supported us in the press release. So there's things like that, that it's a, it's a fantastic collaboration. That's working really well for our joint customers. Sorry. >>And tell us something about the partnership between 80 of us, including, you know, that people might not be aware of some of the things that Poojan said that they're different out there that, that are, co-selling go marketing, that you guys offer people you guys work together on. >>Yeah. The, the ISV accelerate program that was created, it was really created with partners like Klunier in mind, our SAS partners. I think that that is something very, very unique between our partnership and, you know, I, I want to double click on what Poojan said, which is riding their opportunities through marketplace, right? All of their opportunities. That is something pretty unique. They understand the richness of the platform and also how customers are procuring software today in this world. And they've embraced that. And we really appreciate that. And I want to say, you know, another thing about Qumulo is they're all in on AWS, which is another unique thing. There are not a lot of, I would say all in partnerships in my world and I manage infrastructure, business apps, applications, and industry partnerships from the Americas globally. And all of those things are very, very unique in our partnership, which has led to success. Right. We started very, very early stage when Columbia was in stealth mode in 2017 and look where we've come today. And it's really kudos to Paul, John and his entire team for believing in the partnership for leaning in with us and for placing that trust with us. >>Awesome. Pooja, any final words you'd like to share for folks out there about the conversation and what's going on in Columbia? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, as I said, I think we have been fortunate to be very early adopters of all these technologies and go and really build what a true cloud native solution has to be. Right. And, and again, right, you know, this is what customers are really looking for. And people are looking for, you know, at least on the data protection side, you know, ransomware air gap solution, people are looking for a solution natively built on the cloud because that's the only way a solution can deliver something at the scale and the cost structure that is needed to have, you know, a data protection solution in the public cloud. So, so this has been just a fantastic thing end to end, you know, for us overall. And we really look forward to, you know, going, you know, doing much more with AWS as we essentially go and scale, >>I have to ask, but before we, before we go, cause you're the CEO of the company and founder having all that backend infrastructure from Amazon, just on the resources, great. It creates a market for your product, but also the sales piece, you know, they got the marketplace, you mentioned, that's a big expense that you don't have to carry, you know, and you get revenue and top line. I mean, that's an impact for startups out there and growing companies. That's a pretty big deal. What's your, what's your advice to folks out there who are trying to think about the buy versus use the leverage of the, of the marketplace, which is, which is at large scale, because as a CEO, you're, you've got to make these decisions. What's your opinion on that? >>It's not, it's not as, as easy as I make it sound to do your own part. You know, AWS is, is, is, is huge, right? It's huge. And so we have to do our part to educate everybody within the, you know, even the AWS seller base to make sure that they internalize the fact that this is the right solution for the customers, for our joint customers, right? So we have to do that all day long. So there's no running away the no shortcut to everything, but obviously AWS does its part to make it very, as easy as possible, but there's a lot of heavy lifting we still have to do. And I think that'll only become easier and easier over the next few years >>And Sabina your takeout at AVS. You've got a great job. You were with all the hot growth companies. This is the big wave we're on right now with the cloud next generation clouds here, a lot of opportunities. >>Absolutely. And it's, and it's thanks to Pooja and, and partners like Lumeo that really understand what it takes to build a cloud native solution because it's part of it is building. And part of it is the co-selling go-to-market engine and embracing both of that is critical to success. >>Well, thank you both for coming on this journey here on the cube, as part of the showcase, push on. Great to see you to being a great to see you as well. And thanks for sharing that insight. Appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. AWS partners showcase speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Ford, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Partner Showcase season one, episode two. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guest here. Douglas Ko, Director of product marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph General Manager of AWS, Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Great to see you Sabina and Douglas. Great to see you, congratulations at Cohesity. Loved the shirt, got the colors wearing there on Cohesity, Always good I can't miss your booth at the shows, can't wait to get back in person, but thanks for coming in remotely. I got to say it's super excited to chat with you, appreciate it. >> Yeah, pleasure to be here. >> What are the trends you're seeing in the market when it comes to ransomware threats right now. You guys are in the middle of it right now more than ever. I was hearing more and more about security, cloud scale, cloud refactoring. You guys are in the middle of it. What's the latest trends in ransomware? >> Yeah, I have to say John, it's a pleasure to be here but on the other hand, when you asked me about ransomware, right? The data and the statistics are pretty sobering right now. If we look at what just happened in 2020 to 2021, we saw a tenfold increase in a ransomware attacks. We also saw the prediction of a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds meaning by the time I finished this sentence there's going to be another company falling victim to ransomware. And it's also expected by 2031 that the global impact of ransomware across businesses will be over $260 billion, right? So, that's huge. And even at Cohesisity, right, what we saw, we did our own survey, and this one actually directly to end users and consumers. And what we found was over 70% of them would reconsider doing business with a company that paid a ransom. So all these things are pretty alarming and pretty big problems that we face today in our industry. >> Yeah, there's so many dimensions to it. I mean, you guys at Cohesity have been doing a while. It's being baked in from day one, security in the cloud and backup recovery, all that is kind of all in one thing now. So to protect against ransomware and other threats is huge Sabina, I got to ask you Amazon's view of ransomware is serious. You guys take it very seriously. What's the posture and specifically, what is AWS doing to protect customers from this threat? >> Yeah, so as Doug mentioned, right, there's no industry that's immune to ransomware attacks. And just as so we all level set, right? What it means is somebody taking control over and locking your data as an individual or as a company, and then demanding a ransom for it, right? According to the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework, there are basically five main functions which are needed in order to plan and manage these kind of cybersecurity ransomware attacks. They go across identifying what do you need to protect, actually implementing the things that you need in order to protect yourself, detecting things if there is an attack that's going on, then also responding, how do you get out of this attack? And then bringing things, recovery, right? Bringing things back to where they were before the attack. As we all know, AWS takes security very seriously. We want to make sure that our customer's data is always protected. We have a number of native security solutions, but we are also looking to see how we can work with partners. And this is in fact when in the fall of 2019, the Cohesity CEO, Mohit Aron, myself and a couple of us, we met and we brainstorm, what could we do something that is differentiated in the market? When we built this data management as a service native solution on top of AWS, it's a first of a kind solution, John. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the market, even to even today. And we really focused on using the well architected review, the five pillars of security, reliability, operational excellence, performance, and cost optimization. And we built this differentiated solution together, and it was launched in April, 2020. And then of course from a customer viewpoint, they should use a comprehensive set of solutions. And going back to that security, that cyber security framework that I mentioned, the Cohesity data management as a service solution really falls into that recovery, that last area that I mentioned and solution actually provides, granular management of data, protection of data. Customers can spin up things very quickly and really scale their solution across the globe. And ensure that there is compliance, no matter how many times we do data changes, ads and so on across the world. >> Yeah, Sabina, that's a great point about that because a lot of the ransomware actually got bad actors, but also customers can misconfigure things. They don't follow the best practice. So having that native solutions are super important. So that's a great call out. Douglas, I got to go back to you because you're on the Cohesity side and a the partner of AWS. They have all these best practices that for the good actors, got to pay attention to the best practices and the bad actors also trying to get in creates a two, challenge an opportunity. So how do organizations protect their data against these attacks? And also how do they maintain their best practices? Because that's half the battle too, is the best practices to make sure you're following the guidelines on AWS side, as well as protecting the attacks. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, right? As an organization, you need to understand how ransomware operates and how it's evolved over the years. And when you first look at it, Sabina already mentioned it, they started with consumers, small businesses, attacking their data, right? And some of these, consumers or businesses didn't have any backup. So the first step is just to make sure your data is backed up, but then the criminals kind of went up market, right? They understood that big organizations had big pocket and purses. So they went after them and the larger organizations do have backup and recovery solutions in place. So the criminals knew that they had to go deeper, right? And what they did was they went after the backup systems themselves and went to attack, delete, tamper with those backup systems and make it difficult or impossible to recover. And that really highlighted some solutions is out there that had some vulnerabilities with their data immutability and capabilities around WORM. And those are areas we suggest customers look at, that have immutability and WORM. And more recently again, given the way attacks have happened now is really to add another layer of defense and protection. And that includes, traditionally what we used to call, the 3-2-1 rule. And that basically means, three copies of data on two different sets of media with one piece of that data offsite, right? And in today's world and the cloud, right? That's a great opportunity to kind of modernize your environment. I wish that was all that ransomware guys we're doing right now and the criminals were doing, but unfortunately that's not the case. And what we've seen is over the past two years specifically, we've seen a huge increase in what you would call data theft or data exfiltration. And that essentially is them taking that data, a specific sense of the data and they're threatening to expose it to the dark web or selling it to the highest bidder. So in this situation it's honestly very difficult to manage. And the biggest thing you could do is obviously harden your security systems, but also you need a good understanding about your data, right? Where all that sensitive information is, who has access to it and what are the potential risks of that data being exposed. So that takes another step in terms of leveraging a bunch of technologies to help with that problem set. >> What can businesses do from an architectural standpoint and platform standpoint that you guys see there's key guiding principles around how their mindset should be? What's the examples of other approaches- >> Yeah. >> Approach here? >> No, I think they are both us at Cohesity and I'll speak for Sabina, AWS, we believe in a platform approach. And the reason for that is this a very complicated problem and the more tools and more things you have in there, you add risk of complexity, even potential new attack surfaces that the criminals can go after. So we believe the architecture approach should kind of have some key elements. One is around data resiliency, right? And that again comes from things like data encryption, your own data is encrypted by your own keys, that the data is immutable and has that, right, want to read many or WORM capabilities, so the bad guys can't temper with your data, right? That's just step one. Step two is really understanding and having the right access controls within your environment, right? And that means having multi factor authentication, quorum, meaning having two keys for the closet before you can actually have access to it. But it's got to go beyond there as well too. We got to leverage some newer technologies like AI and machine learning. And that can help you with detection and analysis of both where all your sensitive information is, right? As well as understanding potential anomalies that could signify attack or threat in progress. So, those are all key elements. And the last one of course is I think it takes a village, right? To fight the ransomware war. So we know we can't do it alone so, that's why we partner with people like AWS. That's why we also partner with other people in the security space to ensure you really have a full ecosystem support to manage all those things around that framework. >> That's awesome. Before I get to Sabina, I want to get into the relationship real quick, but I want to come back and highlight what you said about the data management as a service. This is a joint collaboration. This is some of the innovation that Cohesity and AWS are bringing to the market to combat ransomware. Can you elaborate more on that piece 'cause this is important. It's a collaboration that we're going to gather. So it's a partner and you guys were going to take us through what that means for the customer and to you guys. I mean, that's a compelling offering. >> So when we start to work with partners, right? we want to make sure that we are solving a customer problem. That's the whole working backwards from a customer. We are adding something more that the customer could not do. That's why when either my team or me, we start to either work on a new partnership or a new solution, it's always focused on, okay, is this solution enabling our customer to do something that they couldn't do before? And this approach has really helped us, John, in enabling majority of the fortune 500 companies and 90% of the fortune 100 companies use partner solutions successfully. But it's not just focused on innovation and technology, it's also focused on the business side. How are we helping partners grow their business? And we've been scaling our field teams, our AWS sales teams globally. But what we realized is through partner feedback, in fact, that we were not doing a great job in helping our partners close those opportunities and also bring net new opportunities. So in our field, we actually introduced a new role called the ISV Success Manager, ISMs that are embedded in our field to help partners either close existing opportunities, but also bring net new opportunities to them. And then at re:Invent 2020, we also launched the ISB accelerate program, which enables our field teams, the AWS field teams to get incentive to work with our partners. Cohesity, of course, participates in all of these programs and has access to all of these resources. And they've done a great job in leveraging and bringing our field teams together, which has resulted in hundreds of wins for this data management as a service solution that was launched. >> So you're bringing customers to Cohesity. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, I got to get the side. So they're helping you, how's this relationship going? Could you talk about the relationship on the customer side? How's that going? Douglas, what's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going great. That's why we chose to partner with AWS and to be quite honest, as Sabina mentioned, we really only launched data management and service back in 2020, late 2020. And at that time we launched with just one service then, right, when we first launched with backup as a service. Now about 15 months later, right? We're on the brink of launching four services that are running on AWS cloud. So, without the level of support, both from a go to market standpoint that Sabina mentioned as well as the engineering and the available technology services that are on the AWS Cloud, right? There's no way we would've been able to spin up new services in such a short period of time. >> Is that Fort Knox and Data Govern, those are the services you're talking about Or is that- >> Yeah, so let me walk you through it. Yeah, so we have Cohesity DataProtect, which is our backup as a service solution. And that helps customers back their data to the cloud, on-prem, SaaS, cloud data like AWS, all in a single service and allows you to recover from ransomware, right? But a couple months ago we also announced a couple new services that you're alluding to John. And that is around Fort Knox and DataGovern. And basically Fort Knox, it is basically our SaaS solution for data isolation to a vaulted copy in the AWS cloud. And the goal of that is to really make it very simple for customers, not only to provide data immutability, but also that extra layer of protection by moving that data offsite and keeping it secure and vaulted away from cyber criminals and ransomware. And what we're doing is simplifying the whole process that normally is manual, right? You either do it manually with tapes or you'll manually replicate data to another data center or even to the cloud, but we're providing it as a service model, basically providing a modern 3-2-1 approach, right? For the cloud era. So, that's what's cool about Fort Knox, DataGovern, right? That's also a new service that we announced a few months ago and that really provides data governance and user behavior analytics services that leverages a lot that AI machine learning that everybody's so excited about. But really the application of that is to automate the discovery of sensitive data. So that could be your credit card numbers, healthcare records, a personal information of customers. So understanding where all that data is, is very important because that's the data that the criminals are going to go after and hold you host. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is again, leveraging machine learning, actually looking at how users are accessing and managing that data is also super important because that's going to help you identify potential anomalies, such as people sharing that data externally, which could be a threat. It could be in improper vault permissions, or other suspicious behaviors that could potentially signify data exfiltration or ransomware attack in progress. >> That's some great innovation. You got the data resiliency, of course, the control mechanism, but the AI piece machine learning is awesome. So congratulations on that innovation. Sabina, I'm listening to conversation and hear you talk. And it reminds me of our chat at re:Invent. And the whole theme of the conference was about the innovation and rapid innovations and how companies are refactoring with the cloud and this NextGen kind of journey. This is a fundamental pillar of AWS's rapid innovation concept with your partners. And I won't say it's new, but it's highly accelerated. How are you guys helping partners be with this rapid innovation, 'cause you're seeing benefits can come faster now, Agile is here. What are some of the programs that you're doing? How are you helping customers take advantage of the rapid innovation with the secret sauce of AWS? >> Yeah, so we have a number of leadership principles, John, and one of them, of course, is customer obsession. We are very focused on making sure we are developing things that our customers need. And we look for these very same qualities when we work with partners such as Cohesity. We want to make sure that it's a win-win approach for both sides because that's what will make the partnership durable over time. And this John, our leadership team at AWS, right from our CEO down believes that partners are critical to our success and as partners lean in, we lean in further. And that's why we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with Cohesity in April, 2020, where data management as a service solution was launch as part of that agreement. And for us, we've launched this solution now and as Doug said, what are the next things we could be doing, right? And just to go back a little bit when Cohesity was developing this solution with us, they used a number of our programs. Especially on the technical side, they used our SaaS factory program, which really helped them build this differentiated solution, especially focused around security compliance and cost optimizing the solution. Now that we've launched this solution, just like Doug mentioned, we are now focused on leveraging other services like security, AIML, and also our analytic services. And the reason for that is Cohesity, as we all know, protects, manages this data for the customer, but we want to make sure that the customer is extracting value from this data. That is why we continue to look, what can we do to continue to differentiate this solution in this market. >> That's awesome. You guys did a great job. I got to say, as it gets more scale, there's more needs for this rapid, I won't say prototyping, but rapid innovation and the Cohesity side does was you guys have been always on point on the back and recovery and now with security and the new modern application development, you guys are in the front row seats of all the action. So, I'll give you the final worry what's going on at Cohesity, give an update on what you guys are doing. What's it like over there these days? How's life give a quick plug for Cohesity. >> Yeah, Cohesity is doing great, right? We're always adding folks to the team, on our team, we have a few open racks open both on the marketing side, as well as the technology advocacy side. And of course, some of our other departments too, and engineering and sales and also our partner teams as well, working with AWS partners such as that. So, in our mind, the data delusion and growth is not going to slow down, right? So in this case, I think all tides raises all the boats here and we're glad to be innovative leader in this space and really looking to be really, the new wave of NextGen data management providers out there that leverages things like AI that leverages cybersecurity at the core and has an ecosystem of partners that we're working with, like AWS, that we're building out to help customers better manage their data. >> It's all great. Data is in the mid center of the value proposition. Sabina, great to see you again, thanks for sharing. And Douglas, great to see you too. Thanks for sharing this experience here in theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's AWS Partner Showcase special presentation, speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode two. I'm your host, John furry with the cube. I'm joined by two cube alumni as Andy Langston, SVP and GM at Veem and Sabina Joseph, the general manager of technology partners at AWS. We're here talking about speeding the innovation with AWS. Welcome to the show. >>Ready to meet you >>And good to see you, Andy again. >>Great to have you guys back on. I hope you guys are doing well. Great to see both of you Veem. Obviously we've been covering you guys for a long time. You got your VIMANA event coming up in person, which is great. Congrats on the continued success of the company and the product you guys have always been all in on AWS. We've been covering for many, many years. Andy, what's the innovation going on now at Veem? Lots of lots happening, lots going on. What's the new innovation. >>Well, I think, you know, clearly people are in, you know, when we talk to people they're interested in, in ransomware, so ransomware protection, we they're interested in a hybrid cloud hybrid. Um, you know, AWS in particular, we get a lot of interest there. Um, clearly modern data protection, uh, what we're doing in office 365, people are looking at all those things >>And what's the, the platform, uh, approach that you guys have with AWS. You guys have a broad range. It's not just the classic. I call it the green classic solution. That's also a good product. What's some of the new platform advantages you guys got going on with the cloud native with AWS. >>Well, you know, look we are, our strategy is to protect as many AWS services as possible, you know, and, and, you know, from the ECE to EBS, S3, RDS, uh, VMC, and many of the services that they're coming out with. And in many times they come to us and say, Hey, you know, these are important to us. We'd like you to, to support these. So clearly we're, um, we're focused on those, uh, Kubernetes workloads is, is a newer set of workloads on AWS. That we're a very interested, we made an acquisition and have a product called, uh, Kasten that we've been investing in and working with AWS with their, uh, uh, EKS anywhere. So very excited. >>Great. So being on the partnership, you guys, it's growing a lot's going on. Can you tell us more about how Veeam and abs AWS are jointly helping customers? >>Yeah. As, um, as both of, you know, right. Data is exploding. And, uh, that means, you know, we have to keep backing up this data and finding new ways to back up this data because people are stepping away from the traditional backup methods, tape libraries, secondary storage sites and things like that. And they're backing up data into the cloud. And we AWS offers a number of different storage services, data transfer methods and networking solutions, which provide unmatched your ability, reliability, security. And of course, uh, AWS and Veem have been partnering together enough for quite a number of years and the cost effective. And so you mentioned that Veem has on AWS really enables customers to have offsite storage solutions, providing that physical separation between their on premises, primary data, and also utilizing the pay as you go cloud economics. So we have a great collaboration and, you know, beam has a great solution on AWS and they're constantly innovating and providing capabilities for our customers. Just like Andy said, providing as many capabilities for our services to back up, >>Andy, the volume of data I'll say is always the story. Every year, the volume is tsunami of data. It's getting worse it's every day. Um, and as you got more cloud scale, you guys have been doing a lot integration. You guys always have, you have demanding customers, you have a lot of customers actually. So as you leverage Amazon for data protection, the security conversation is front and center these days. Can you give us an update on how you guys are doing, uh, the data protection security in the cloud with AWS? That's, that's, um, that's hot with your customers, >>You know, it's a great, it's a great comment. You know, you've talked about a lot of customers. Veem has over 400,000 customers now it's, it's truly extraordinary when you think about the size and scope and scale. And if you think, uh, my belief is a majority, almost all of them will tear up two and move their data up into the cloud at some point in our, in the next few years. And so we've just, I think we've described the surface and we're moving hack, you know, hundreds of petabytes or more per year up to the cloud at the same time when I make customer executive calls. It's kind of interesting. A lot of times you think they're going to want to talk about backup and disaster recovery. They want to talk about security. And when this first started happening, I thought, Hey, why don't you talk to your security vendor now? >>And what I realized was that data protection is front and center because of the, we just, we just published a study where a number jumped out at me, 71% of the thousands of people that responded said that they had already been a victim of, or had had a ransomware attack. It's a staggering number. And, um, so, you know, when we look at our relationship with Amazon and we look at the integration we've done around what we call cloud during that's moving, are moving data up to object storage. AWS has a capability called immutable data sets. And so that allows you affords you some great protection against ransomware as an example. And that's one of the areas that we're investing in very heavily. And by the way, our mutual customers are backing up and restoring with Veem and we're doing it on AWS and, and, uh, the data volumes are exploding, I think, because of that. Yeah. >>You know, it's interesting. And you made me have a throwback for, you know, 10 years ago, we used to talk about backup and recovery. And you know, the big thing back then was, was the conversation was don't think of backup as a, as a last minute thing, think of it at the front end, it was always kind of an afterthought and a, of the it decision makers. And you mentioned that security comment about call your security vendor. It's almost the scripts has flipped backup and recovery is the security solution. And so it's not, it's not an afterthought. This is 10 years ago. It was the primary message. It's the primary thought. So when you talk about automated tiering, that's kind of a networking thing. It's like, policy-based hearing. I mean, I mean, if you go back 10 years and we're talking, policy-based hearing, you were like, what? So this is a really different dynamic. And I want you guys to comment because this is the, this is the market right now. This is with the flip, the script has flipped. >>Yeah. Sabina. What do you, what, what do you from y'all's perspective kind of in, in your technology, partnerships, storage vendors, Veem security, what, what do you w what do you see? >>Well, I think that there is an interplay here because I think customers are looking at various ways, right? When I look at those five cybersecurity framework, right? First is identifying what you need to protect, protecting it. And then that's a very important step of, out of those five steps is recovery, right? How do you get your business back to normal? But you cannot do that if you are not protecting and backing up your data. And that's where our partnership comes in. Right? So I believe that all of those five stages in the NIST cybersecurity framework kind of go together and be in place nicely into the very critical phase of recovery. Would you agree, Andy? >>I would. You know, and, and I look at, um, you know, when you're doing a recovery and your gut, your secure backups and AWS, it's, it's like your last line of defense, you know, beam and AWS deliver a mutable backups and has three tiers through S3 object lock integration. And I think that's, that's pretty much, you know, even if a ransomware attack is successful, we can, we can ensure that the backup data hadn't been changed and encrypted or deleted. And, uh, that's pretty exciting, you know, for customers and prospects, they're really worried about this. And I think the teamwork and the, the, the partnership between the two companies to build a solution like this is pretty awesome. >>Yeah. Let me, let me just double, double click on that for a second. You mentioned it got a lot of customers. Ransomware does not discriminate with the size of the company. It could be, it could be a hospital school. It could be a big company. Ransomware is bad, and we see that, and it's a great conversation. And how do you take that solution out to the customers? You got hundreds of thousands of customers. So Sabine, I guess the question is, how is this 80 of us in Veem work together? There's this channel first concept you guys are talking about, tell us about how you guys work together, because there's millions of customers who want this, and you guys actually have hundreds of thousands of customers that Veem, how do you get the customers to leverage that, the relationship and what can you bring to them? >>Yeah, I'll give you like four numbers, right? So AWS has millions of customers and we have, um, hundred thousand partners across 150 countries. Now Veem has, as Andy mentioned, right, has over 400,000 customers and 35,000 partners worldwide. So somewhere in these four numbers, we all intersect both of us intersect both on those customers and also on those partners. And one of the initiatives that my team is heavily focused on is triangulating between the partners that Veeam has. We have, and also our technology partnership. And how can we provide value to our customers by bringing together these partners together with AWS Veeam and Veeam is a V it's a hundred percent channel driven business, and they know how to do this. That is why we are heavily partnered with them to see what we can do for our customers through our mutual partner. >>And he wants you to weigh in here, you know, the channel business, it's gotta be easy, it's got to add value. And I got to wrap services around it. That's what partners love. Well, how does this work? How does that work? >>Well, I, I think to extend beyond what, what did take, what Sabina had said is, you know, we have kind of been subsetted. Our partners are the ones that, that do business with AWS and, and which is a exploding number of partners. And so they have a relationship database. We have a relationship at S and we have this solution set that have, are of interest to our customers through these partners. And AWS has customers through these partners. And so a lot of times we'll share, um, information and customers, uh, information on, around, um, how we can kind of go to these customers who are both AWS customers and Veem customers and market, this joint solution protect them from ransomware. >>And how's it been going so far? What's your, what's your assessment? >>It's been fantastic. I think the, I think one of the, the, the real proof points is that we've moved, uh, over a half a petabyte of data, you know, uh, recently up into their cloud. And, uh, you know, that says that people not only are using the solution, but they're, uh, they're actually delivering on it. >>Well, why got you here, Andy, I want to ask you for the, all the people watching the customers, what's the biggest change that's happening in this market right now. Again, I love this shift that we're seeing backup and recovery. Isn't a point solution anymore. It's the solution it's baked in, and everyone's talking about this, it's integrated in, it's not, it's, it's totally front and center. What's the big change that customers should be thinking about now as they move forward. And, uh, obviously ransomware is still front and center. That's not going away anytime soon. What's the big thing to focus on for customers? >>Well, I think, you know, I always say, you know, listen to the customer and focus on what their specific needs are, right? You can assume, obviously in the business war and everybody, everybody has a backup solution. And, uh, so you're not trying to create a market there, but like I said, you know, people are very focused on security. They're focused on cost, they're focus on skillset or lack of skill sets, right? I mean, we have a shortage of skills in the industry. So we try to make our products easy to use. We try to work with our partners, putting AWS to deliver the best solution we can for our customers. And, uh, you know, I think we have the broadest invest, you know, ransomware protection, uh, and recovery in the storage space. And so we're very focused on that, leveraging all of our technologies across the platforms, physical, virtual Kubernetes, uh, type environments. >>And you have this and you get the beam on event coming up and that's going to be good in person. Right. That's a confirmed, >>It's a, it's a, it's a hybrid yet. In-person and virtual. >>Awesome. Great to see you guys in person. So being a, for the folks, watching the Amazon partnerships, as you guys scale up these, these partnerships and take it the next level, what's your, what's your closing comment. Yes. >>Yeah. I also want to say, write something that I should mention, right. We miss also invested in AWS marketplace. So it's not just the direct consulting partners and the partners that I mentioned, the a hundred thousand and 35,000, right. They, customers can also purchase beam on AWS marketplace through consulting partner, private offers. And that's why Viva's embraced many of these aspects to try to help our customers and continue to grow that 400,000 customer base, which is a pretty phenomenal number. >>Yeah. I've always been impressed with beam's customer base and they've got a very loyal base as well. I point that out and give props to the VM team. Andy closing comments for you, the V natives relationship, how would you summarize that? >>I'd say it's fantastic. You know, years ago it started as just a normal technology partnership. You know, now we're an advanced technology partner with storage competency, numerous programs like APN, uh, customer engagement. We're a marketplace seller. And I would say that it's not only that, but, but customers can take advantages of their, um, EDP with AWS to purchase on the marketplace and get credits against that. And our partners can as well. That's a, that's a very important thing because we're seeing more and more interest in that today. Uh, we're a public sector partner with them. We're an ISV accelerate SAS revenue recognition program. We're, we're, uh, I think we're checking a lot of boxes, but really taking advantage of it. The last thing I would say is, uh, I've known Sabina for quite a few years now. And I think it's the people relationships in the two companies that make this work. >>We have a lot of people, a lot smarter than me on the, on the speeds and feeds here. But at the end of the day, um, Sabina has a team of people that work with us on a, on a, almost a daily basis to solve customer problems. Right. We get people calling in all the time. How do I make Veem work on AWS? How do I get AWS solutions to work with theme? And our job is to make it as easy as possible because we both believe, uh, that customers, they say customer first. I always say, customer always are always right, but, but, but, but you know, at the end of the day, that's what makes this >>Yeah. Customer is always right. Customer obsession, working backwards from the customer fucking customer first Sabina. This is really interesting. This is a good point. I just come quick, go back to you real quick. This integration of relationships and also cloud technology integration is a big theme this year, post re-invent. Your thoughts >>Absolutely means, um, uh, to be candid. Uh, one of the goals that me and my team take is how do we bring technology partners together to add more value to our customers in end to end solutions, along with technology partners and consulting partners. So that is a huge focus for us because we need to do that in order to scale, not just for each other, but also for our customers and bring that, bring together meaningful, comprehensive end to end solutions. >>That's awesome. Andy, great to see you. We'll see at Veem on as well, coming up for the Veem show and your conference. You've been conference hybrid conference in person and virtual and digital to be in a great to see you again. Thanks for sharing all the great updates. And this is the season two. It's all about the data and the innovations with AWS. I'm John for your host of the cube season one episode, two of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is Showcase season one, episode two. I've got Danielle Greshock, Worldwide Director of ISV Partner Solutions Architects At AWS. Welcome to the kickoff, Speeding Innovation with AWS. Good to see you. >> Good to see you as well. Thanks, John. >> Okay, we've got some great companies we're presenting with this week, talking about kind of speeding innovation, really with the cloud. And obviously Amazon, you guys are number one and doing this has been the big theme from Reinvent, this past conference. A lot of people are refactoring in the cloud, from observability to new ways to counter ransomware, to even back up and recover. These were once point solutions, now they're not point solutions, they're part of the cloud platform that's powering new modern application. You know, from DS city pipelining, cloud native, it's out there now, it's now well known, people are looking at this and going, "okay, this is cloud next level," or "super cloud," or whatever we want to call it. It's happening, and people are having solutions and you're in the middle of it. So what's your take on this? Because you know, Veeam, Splunk Clumio and others, they're all doing great business and now refactoring in the cloud with AWS. >> Yeah, well I think that what a lot of companies are finding now is that moving to the cloud is really speeding their innovation. And of course there's been a faster move to the cloud because they realize the benefits that they can get from that movement. And, you know, companies like Veeam, like Clumio, they are building on top of AWS and coming up with new ways to solve customer problems. And then of course the other thing is that there's so much much access to data and insights that you weren't able to have before. But now that you can retain that data with the scale of the cloud, lots of companies are finding new and exciting things to do and innovate with that data that they are able to hang onto. >> You know, it's interesting, you see the entrepreneurial activity. I mean, I was reading- >> Yeah >> This is what I do on the weekends. I go back to 2006 and I look at the early Amazon posts of EC2 and S3. And that was a real great startup movement and that changed the game. Now, even today, the startups are out there. You look at Clumio, right? Poojan over there, he's been doing great stuff. He came from Nutanix, a hyperscale, and now he's got a startup that's growing like a weed out there and Amazon's powering that. You got Cohesity, they're almost going to go public, I believe. They've announced that, they're about to go public so they're going to be a public company. And you have Veeam, which has been in the ecosystems for many, many years, a decade. So these are a good mix of companies, and this is the makeup of the kind of customers you have. What's the thing that they have in common? Why should people pay attention to these companies and the relationship with Amazon web services? >> I mean, I think the thing that these companies really have in common is thinking about the cloud as this new paradigm that they are building for. You know, if I think about Veeam, you know we have really amped up a lot of, both our building and co-selling with Veeam and they're having a lot of success with small companies, medium companies big companies as well, just with their product. And so that is what I think is the difference is they are looking at us as an opportunity to innovate with their product and take advantage to what the opportunities the cloud provides there. >> What are you guys seeing as solution architects in your customer base? Look at AWS from a partnership standpoint. It used to be you get into the marketplace, you have some programs, okay, all good. You guys have shifted that. Can you give us an update on what you guys are doing with respect to offering new kinds of value as your customers change and grow? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely we've seen a lot of success with our SaaS factory program that is looking to, you know help companies make the transformation to SaaS. Also our workload migration program, helping ISVs to move even faster, their on premises business into AWS for sure. But I also just think that, you know, what our customers demand actually at this point is, they're really looking for full blown solutions. So us working with them on solutions, working closely with systems integrators who can help execute on those solutions. Those are all things that our successful ISVs are really leaning into. >> This month's featured companies all have one thing in common, they're all using data at scale and data as part of the developer process. You're seeing data being available, and they have to be available for machine learning and other things cause you have to be more agile. And the scale. So you got more flow and also scalable in terms of users and whatnot. So this is a common theme. What's happening from a customer standpoint as they start to rearchitect? Because you guys have to provide that now next level headroom. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, again we're seeing a lot of companies wanting to do different things with the volume of data that they actually have, and things that they were never even considering in on-prem. So we talk about refactoring, it's not simply a lift and shift, they're looking to get some technology benefit out of the move, right? So just kind of having a net net from on-prem into the cloud is not going to be good enough. And so we're looking to add that value when they go and make that investment. >> You know, we've been always writing about and covering Snowflake as an example, bring them up. You know you have Redshift that's also, you know competing I guess, with Redshift. But they're a partner, they're growing. They built on AWS and became valuable because they did it differently in the cloud. We're using that, there's many other examples like that, they're companies are coming in and building and taking advantage of the gift called scale. CapEx gift from AWS. And also you got Silicon coming, so more and more goodness on the Amazon side, enabling the partners. So I have to ask you, and that's all kind of documenting that's happening in real time, but what it's teasing out is that the integrations are changing, right? So you're seeing a lot more tightly coupled engineering or solutions with AWS and your top partners. Can you share insight into what that looks like and how you guys think about that? >> Yeah, and definitely a lot of our top partnerships really do start with integrations. That's where we're able to, you know, find the value, that differentiated solution on AWS. So, you know, Snowflake, as an example, just talked about how their integration with private link and some of their serverless integrations were really the cornerstones of the new partnership that they've built with us. And same thing with other ISVs, they've really looked at the integrations to be core, building the value with AWS, with our services and for our AWS customers. Of course these are very bespoke, you know? What's going to be important to a data company isn't going to be the same thing that's important to a storage based company, but still being able to bring the full value of the innovation that AWS makes and have that better together story is really where we find a lot of value there. >> Yeah, and you're in the middle of it too. You have the keys to the kingdom. Solution architects are all where the action is right now. Everyone's looking, okay I got to build on what I got and also I got to build the architecture in real time. And build on top, it's not a tear down, it's a continuation of what they had. >> Yeah, and even our most mature solutions and partnerships, those that are full SaaS solutions, the companies that are innovating and continuing to bring new features to market are the ones that we end up finding to have the most success with. And that is really what my team does is building those integrations and new solutions on AWS. It is our core reason we exist and you know, what we feel is the cornerstone to great partnerships >> You know, Dave Vellante and I on our team, we're always commenting about how the cloud scale is a real benefit to anyone, whether it's leveling up talent, bias, and you know women in tech is coming up, international women's day coming up around the corner. >> Yeah. >> That's happening, so it's all good, right? So, whether you're a startup or a big company if you get that one feature right in the cloud you can and really change your business. And I think this always used to be elusive for the product marketing teams of the old way things were built. You know, you got to test it out and put it out there. Now you got real time information, and for companies that are ISVs out there, they really can be nimble. >> Well, and that's the thing too, is we try very hard to make sure our ISVs have access to customers, our customers, and that's how they can figure out like what is the right thing to build for them. >> Whether you're big or small, the cloud's great. So I got to ask you, this is season one of the AWS partner showcase, we're proud to present that with you guys. It's been a great partnership, we love getting the stories out there. Episode two is about this theme about, you got little data here, you got backup recovery you got ransomware, you know, old point solutions. We've had a great conversation. Why should people pay attention to this episode in your opinion? What's the big aha going on here in this episode? >> I mean, for me, I think ISVs ask me all the time, how can I innovate with AWS? How can I have a successful partnership? This series will give you that answer. You can see real world examples of what other companies are doing to be successful. So I mean, that is reason enough when it's a very competitive tech technology market. So, you know, lots of good ideas there to see. >> Great stuff, and of course, again, these are big ISVs, they're doing great stuff. They're software developers, they're building the next modern applications. Danielle, thanks for coming out. You're the worldwide director of the ISV Partner Solution Architects at AWS, you're in the middle of all the great action. Must be fun, isn't it? >> It's a lot of fun. I couldn't ask for a better job. >> Alright, well thanks for coming on this keynote kickoff. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, you're watching, and we've got the whole series coming up, but this is the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. Showcase season one, episode two, enjoy the great presentations. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome today's session of the cube presentation of the 80 best startup showcase. The next big thing in security featuring Anitian for the security track. I'm your host John Furrier. We're here with the CEO of Anitian, Rakesh Narasimhan, and Aditya Muppavarapu global segment leader of Dev ops for 80 minutes partner network, Rakesh, Aditya, Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, John. Pleasure is mine. >> So this is the track session. We're going to get into the, the into the details on the leadership of digital transformation and dev sec ops automation, cloud security and compliance. So let's get started. But first Rakesh, we last talked you guys had some awards, RSA conference, 2021, virtual. You guys got some serious awards. Give us the update. >> Yeah, thank you very much, John. Yeah, we were, you know, humbled to be recognized. You know, industry recognition is always a great thing. We deliver value for customers and the industry is recognizing it. So at the RSA conference, we got seven different awards you know, very excited that we were chosen for, you know publishers choice and security company of the year editor's choice and blood security and heart company in cloud security automation. So really thrilled about the recognition thanks. >> Awesome. Seven awards. I mean, RSA is obviously a show that's in transition itself. They're transforming no longer part of Dell technologies now kind of on their own kind of speaks to the wave we're in. So congratulations on the success. They're hot startup here in security track. Give us a quick overview what you guys are enabling because this transformation is everywhere. It's in every sector, it's in every vertical dev sec ops shifting left, you know day two operations get ops. All. This is all talking to one thing, developer, productivity programmable infrastructure with security. Rakesh give us a quick overview of >> Yeah. Exactly. Right. John, I think there's a big shift happening obviously to the cloud and, you know, affects every one of our lives in productivity in enterprise applications, consumers you name it. There's a huge change happening, but central to that theme is security. And so it's one of the areas we focus on Anitian is the fastest way for both existing and new applications to be developed in the cloud. And so we make sure that you can get there fastest time to value and time to revenue pretty quickly by providing the best secure and compliance environment for you. That's really the core of what we do as a company. And we look forward to helping all of our customers and the industry >> Aditya you're a global segment lead at AWS partner network. You seeing on successful companies, you've got a winner here, obviously a success story. I want to get your take on this because this is a trend in cloud native scale, you know, heart, you know horizontally scalable, large scale, but shifting left, okay. Get ops big topics where code is being inspected in real time. People want automation. So I've got to ask you, what does shift left mean to to being out there and this in the security world? What does that mean? >> So, instead of applying your security and compliance guard rails only in production, we also need to apply them across your application development and delivery cycles. Instead of having one gate that becomes a bottleneck we should have multiple checkpoints at various stages. This provides a fast feedback for the developers while they're still in the context of developing that feature. So it's easier and less expensive fix the issues and what it is not is this doesn't mean you move all your focus to dev and ignore production. It also doesn't mean developers are now responsible for security and you can get rid of your security teams. We needed a process and a mechanism in place to leverage the expertise off the security teams and offer their services to the developers very early on in the development cycles, thereby enabling and empowering developers to write secure and compliant code >> I mean, to me not to put my old school hat on, but it's, you know I think to me, I view it as security at the point of coding right at the point of, I don't want to say point of sale but the point of writing the code and the old days it used to be like a patches and getting updates and provisioned into, into production. Same that kind of concept. But as a developer, that's kind of the focus is getting the latest knowledge either through tools and technologies to make it easier for me as a developer to inject at the point of code. Is that right? >> That's right. Yeah. >> So what makes Anitian so different and what's successful within AWS? That's, what's the why the success there? Can you share with us why they're so unique in AWS? >> So I think the biggest case for that is really you know, security, oftentimes security is thought of as an impediment sometimes actually believe it or not. So the configuration, the management, the deployment all of that, you got to be able to do and you got to be able to do that at scale. The great thing about the cloud at is scale and a big portion of that is automation. So what we at Anitian have done is taken that lifecycle of taking, you know applications on a variety of states. If you will, if you're trying to get to production you're trying to do one of two things. You're either you're trying to get into a compliance standard, like Fed Ramp you want a very predictable process, or you're just trying to get an application secure pretty quickly. So how can you do either one of those things becomes the challenge and we help you do that by having a pre-engineered environment where configuration defining deployment all that becomes very consistent and very predictable which means we've automated it in a way that it can scale. You can sort of almost have this regularly happening and not just one application with multiple applications for any company. That is, I think the biggest obstacle that has happened for a lot of folks in the enterprise for sure, to try to get to production and keep that cycle going continuously. And we help with that in a big way. That's one of the reasons why we're having a lot of adoption customers working with partners of course and getting industry recognition for it. >> Yeah. I mean, this is one of the benefits of cloud. I want to get you guys both reaction to this, where as things get going, it's kind of like that, you're you you got to take advantage. You can take advantage of all these solutions. So how many of his customer, I want to look for solutions that help me move the ball forward, not backwards right? So, or help me move the ball forward without building anything that I don't need or that's already been built. So here it sounds like if I get this right Anitian is saying, Hey if you're an Amazon customer I can accelerate you with Fed Ramp compliance. So you don't have to spend all these cycle times getting ready or hiring or operationalizing it is that right? I mean, is that the value proposition? >> They're very accurate, John. So what happens is, you know, we're working with Amazon web services, who's really innovated quite a bit in building all the building blocks, if you will. And so, you know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants if you will, to basically get the max level of automation and acceleration happen. So that just like customers have gotten used to not having to buy servers, but guide, compute and storage. If you will, now they're able to secure and also become compliant with the services that we offer. That level of acceleration I think is needed. If you believe that there's going to be a lot more cloud applications, lot more cloud. If you're going to achieve scale, you've got to automate. And if you want to automate, but secure as well you need a mechanism to doing that. That's really where Anitian comes in, if you will. >> Yeah. And I think Fedramp to me is just a great low hanging fruit example because everyone wants to get into the public sector market. They know how hard it is. Kind of like, you know, we want to do it, but stand in line we've got to get some resources. I'm not kind of get that. But the question I want to get to you Rakesh and Aditya is the bigger picture, which is, as you said more cloud applications are coming. So customers in the enterprise have, have or are building fast dev ops teams accelerate the security paradigm. How do you help those, those folks? Because that's really kind of where the action's going. The puck is going to go there too. Right? So beyond Fed Ramp there's other things >> Right? So I think, I think the way we approached it is really, there's like at least two different sets of customers, right? In the federal market itself. You just think about a commercial SAS companies who are trying to enter the, the, the, the the public sector market. Well, you need to clear a standard like Fed Ramp. So we're the fastest way to not just complete it but be able to start selling and producing revenue. That'd be market per using that functionality. If you will, to that market. Similarly, there's a lot of public sector organizations who are trying to move to the cloud because they have traditionally developed applications and architectures based on what they've done over the last 20 plus years. Well guess what, they're also trying to migrate. So how do you help both commercial companies as well as public sector companies transition, if you will to the cloud in a secure way, but also meeting a public standard. We're helping both those organizations to do that migration and that journey if you will, but it's premised on with pre-engineered it, it's the fastest way for you to get there for you to be able to provide your capability and functionality to the larger marketplace. That's one of the main reasons why I think the productivity jump is enormously high because that's how you get to larger marketplace, if you will, to serve that market >> Aditya. So they have to change your title from global segment leader, dev ops to dev sec ops 80 of his partner network here with this solution in a way it's kind of becoming standard. >> Yeah. Security is getting him embedded into all of your development and delivery life cycle. So that dev sec Ops is becoming more and more critical with customers migrating to the cloud and modernizing their applications. >> How much has automation playing into this? Because one of the things we're talking about fueling digital transformation is the automation component of the security piece here Rakesh How important is automation and what how do you set yourself up for that to be successful? >> That's big question. I think that the big key to that is automation. I think automation is there in general in the cloud space. People expect it, frankly. But I think that the key thing what we have done is pre-integrated not just our platform but a variety of the partner ecosystem are on AWS. And so when a customer is looking forward to taking an application and going to the cloud they're not just getting functionality from us and AWS but also a lot of partner functionality around it so that they don't have to build it. Remember this discussion we had earlier about how do you jumpstart that? Well, it's, it's, it's really, instead of them having the best of breed assemble we've pre done it for them, which means it's predictable, it's consistent it's configured correctly. They can rely on it. That allows us to be able to help them move faster which means they can go serve larger markets and obviously make money around it. >> Rakesh, I got to follow up on that and ask you specifically around this business model. Obviously cloud has become great service. Everyone kind of knows that and then kind of sees the edge coming next and all these other issues that are going to provide more opportunities. But I got to ask you for your company what industries and business models are you disrupting? >> Yeah, I think primarily to we're a classic example of software eating the world, right? Primarily what happens is most of the folks that certainly in the compliance arena are really trying to figure out how to do it themselves, right? And then that's primarily the group of people who are sort of trying to figure that out. And then there's a class of who do consulting who are trying to consult with you and what you should do. And we have taken a very software oriented approach built on Amazon that we will not only help you fast forward that but also, you know, get you compliant but also keep you compliant because it's a cycle much like in other industries you've seen there used to be a time when people that email and they used to run email servers and ran the email servers and backups and things of that nature that transitioned over time where people procure that service from somebody else. And it's still a secure, it's still a scalable and they can rely on that service without having to be in that business if you will. So we see us disrupting the consulting and do it yourself world to actually providing a dependable service out there that you can rely on for security and compliance. >> Awesome. Aditya, I got to ask you on the Amazon side obviously you see a lot of it there. What are some of the challenges that you see with security? >> One of the main challenges I see that is that the landscape itself is rapidly changing. As customers are migrating to the cloud and modernizing what used to be a simple monolithic application running on a server and a office or a data center is now distributed hybrid and spans across development practices like microservices managed services, packaged applications, et cetera and also in the infrastructure platform choices have dramatically increased to from on-prem to call data centers, to edge computing, IOT VMs containers, serverless a lot more options. All these leads to more complexity and it increased the number of threat vectors exponentially though this advancement was great from a usability perspective. It now created a whole slew of challenges. This, this is complex. It's very hard to keep up. It's not something you set and forget. One needs to make sure you have the right guardrails in place to make sure you're continuously compliant with with your own policies are also with regulatory compliance frameworks that are needed for your business. Like GDPR, PCI, DSS, Nast, HIPAA Sox, Fed Ramp, et cetera >> For Rakesh. We're specifically on the dev ops efficiency with Amazon. What do you guys, what's your top few value proposition points? You say >> Biggest value proposition honestly is keeping and maintaining security while you're in compliance at scale with speed. I think those are big issues for companies. Like if you, if you're a company you're trying to be in the cloud, you want to enter the federal market. For example, you got to get that quickly. So what could take a lot of money? 18 - 24 months, our prawn malleable we've just completely automated back. And so within a quarter, depending on quickly the two organizations can work. We can get you into the marketplace. That that speed is of enormous value to companies. But also to remember that as Aditya pointed out there's a lot of complexity in the kind of architecture that is evolved but we have to feel like people like in the issue of what we can help customers would is as much as you take advantage of all the cloud style architecture providing the simplicity of providing security consistently and providing compliance consistently quickly. I think there'll always be a value for that because people are always trying to get faster and cheaper quicker. And I think we're able to do that. But remember, security is not just about fast. It's got to be secure, right? We got to be effective, not just efficient but I think that's a big value prop that we're able to bring to the table on AWS. >> Well I want to go, I got you here. I'll see what showcasing you guys as the hot startup who is your customer on Amazon? I'll see, you have customers that sell in marketplace for fedramp. That's a huge, that's the people who are in business to sell software but also other enterprises as well. Right? So could you just quickly break down your customers? And then when do they know it's time to call a Anitian? >> Yeah, so we have two large groups of customers. If you will. Certainly the commercial segment, as well as in the public sector and the commercial side, you have lots of companies in the cyber security enterprise collaboration as a little robotic process automation, all those categories of companies in the commercial environment they're trying to enter the public sector federal market to go sell their services. Well, you have to get compliant. We are the fastest path to get you there time to value type of revenue we can accomplish for you. That's a group of customers we, we have in market. And then we have the other side, which is a lot of government agencies who are themselves trying to migrate to the cloud. So if you're trying to get your applications for sure once on hybrid or on-premise, and you're trying to go to the AWS cloud, well, we're a great way for you to have a pre-engineered environment into which you can move in. So not only are you secure it's, pre-built, it can scale to the cloud that you're in front of migrate to. So we have both those particular sites if you will, of the marketplace. And then in market, we have lots of agencies, big and small and the government side, but also all these categories in the commercial side that I mentioned >> For Rakesh, Anitian's helping a lot of companies sell them to the public sector market. How big is the public sector federal market >> Right? Yeah. Billions of dollars. More than $250 billion is what people say but it's a very large market, but, but remember it's any any commercial SAS company who's trying to go into that federal market is a target market. We can help that customer get in into that market. >> And just real quick, their choice alternative to not working with the Anitian is what? months the pain. And what's the heavy lift as Andy Jassy would say the heavy lifting, undifferentiated lifting a lot of paperwork, a lot of hoops to jump through. Good. Can you just paint a picture of the paths with, and without >> There's three key areas that I think customers or, you know companies have to do, A. they have to understand the standard B. They have to really figure out the technology the integration, the partners, and the platform itself. It's a lift to basically get all of that together and then actually produce the documentation produce all the configuration and in a repeatable way. And that's just to get one application up there. Well, guess what? Not only do you need to get that up there you need to keep that compliant. And then our future standards come in. You need to go upgrade to that. So the best way for me to describe that is either you you come to the Anitian and we make that age just a service that is subscribed to to keep you compliant and grow or you can try to build it yourself, or you try to go get consulting companies to tell you what to do. You still have to do the work. So those are your sort of choices, if you will, which is one of the reasons why we're enjoying the growth we are because we're making it easy and productive for for companies to get there faster. >> Aditya, I want to get to you real quick. Obviously AWS partnering, they're also known as APN. You guys see some of the best hot startups. They all kind of have the same pattern like this. They do something that's hard. They make it easier. They go faster, more. Cost-effective what's the pattern in this cloud-scale world as startups. We're going to be featuring, you know, every as much as we can hot startups coming out of your network, there's a pattern here. What would you say? They are? Well as the DevOps obviously cloud native, besides iterate, move faster. What's the pattern you're seeing for the successful companies. >> It's like, like Andy's says, it's figuring out how to continuously reinvent yourself is the key to stay successful in this market. >> Awesome. For Rakesh, real big success. Congratulations on your awards. I got to ask you, we're asking all the, all the companies this question, what is your defining contribution to the future of cloud scale? >> Great question. I think when I think about what can be accomplished in the future, not just in the past, I think cloud is a huge phenomenon that has completely up-ended the architecture for all sorts of things commercial government, you know, consumer and enterprise. If you will, I would think we would be humbly the people who will ensure that lots of B2B companies and government organizations are able to move to the cloud and are able to be secure and compliant because I believe that there'll be more and more of that happening in the cloud. And the more that is available, just like the commercial world is takes advantage of all those features. I feel like public government organizations also can accomplish the same things very quickly because of folks like us, which means you have a larger segment of population that you can support. That's only going to make the planet more successful. I'm a big optimist when it comes to tech. I know there's a lot of folks who would look down upon tech or I'll think about it as not great. I'm a very big optimist around tech improving people's lives. And I think we have our own humble role in enabling that to happen in the security and compliance >> Well, anything, in my opinion I'm really a big fan of your work and your team. Anything that could bring great innovation into the public sector faster and more effective as good win for society. So I think it's a great mission. Thanks for, for sharing and congratulations on your awards and thanks for being part of our 80 best startup showcase. Appreciate it Rakesh thank you >> Thank you. >> Okay. This is the cube coverage of 80 startup showcase. I'm John for your host of the cube. This is the next big thing in security Anitian in the security track. Thanks for watching. (Up beat music)