Charley Dublin, Acquia | StormForge Series
(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Great to see you, Charley Sure, so Acquia is the largest And more experience, you call the ability to solve their but the things that you were facing And so that involves the Sometimes that creates other challenges. and err on the side of that flexibility. and the power of Kubernetes and containers that if they had to redo And so what you have is a very And so there are, and the power of those So it sounds like you sort outsource that to StormForge is the capability, maybe that allows for the right sizing of here's a path that you want to go down, experts to have a hand in it Third is that the machine learning talent So that puts money in your pocket but it's a relatively and to support our business so rapidly. as having that kind of the engagement with them has proven, and the partnership with StormForge. We're going to uncover use cases, Sounds like you had a great business Thank you very much, And thank you for watching theCUBE,
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Charley Dublin, Acquia | StormForge
(upbeat music) >> We're back with Charley Dublin. He's the Vice President of Product Management at Acquia. Great to see you, Charley welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to meet you Dave. >> Acquia, tell us about the company. >> Sure, so Acquia is the largest and best provider of Drupal hosting capabilities. We rank number two in the digital experience platform space, just behind Adobe. Very strong business growing well and innovating every day. >> Drupal open source, super deep high quality content management system. And more experience, you call it an experience platform. >> An experience platform, open, flexible. We want our customers to have choice the ability to solve their problems how they want leveraging the power of the open source community. >> What were the big challenges? Just describe your, kind of the business drivers. We're going to talk about StormForge but the things that you were facing some of the challenges that's kind of led you to StormForge. >> Sure, so our objective first is to provide the best experience with Drupal. So that entails lots of capabilities around ease of use for Drupal itself. But that has to run on a world class platform. It has to be the most performance. It has to be the most secure. It needs to be flexible to enable customers to run Drupal however they want to run Drupal. And so that involves the ability to support thousands of different kinds of modules that come out of the community. We want our customers to have choice with Drupal and to be able to support those choices on our platform. >> So optionality is key. Sometimes that creates other challenges. Like you've got one of everything. How do you deal with that challenge? >> That's a great question. Every strength is a form of weakness. And so our objective is really first to provide that choice but to do it in a cost efficient way. So we try to provide reference architectures for customers, opinionation for our customers to standardize take out some of the complexity that they might have if everything were a snowflake. But our objective is really to support their needs and err on the side of that flexibility. >> So you guys had to go through a major replatforming effort around containers and Kubernetes can you talk about that and what role StormForge played? >> Sure, so tied to the last point, our objective is to provide customers the highest performance, most secure platform. The entire industry of course is moving to Kubernetes and leveraging containers. We are a large consumer of AWS Services and are undergoing a major replatforming away from Legacy AWS towards Kubernetes and containers. And so that major replatforming effort is intending to enable customers to run applications how they want to and the power of Kubernetes and containers is to support that. And so we looked at StormForge as a way for us to right size resource capacity to support our customer's applications. >> I love it, AWS is now Legacy. But Andy Jassy one time said that if they had to redo Amazon they'd it in Lambda using serverless and so, it's been around a long time now. Okay so what were the outcomes that you were seeking? Was it, better management, cost reduction and how'd that go? >> Our customers run a wide range of applications. We support customers leveraging Drupal in every industry. Globally we do business in 30 different countries. And so what you have is a very wide range of applications and consumer and consumption models. And so we felt that leveraging StormForge would put us in a position where we'd be able to right size resource to those different kinds of applications. Essentially let the platform align to how customers wanted to operate their applications. And so StormForge's capability in conjunction with Kubernetes and containers really puts us in a position where customers are able to get the performance that they want, and when they need it on demand. A lot of the auto scaling capabilities that you get from Kubernetes and containers supports that. And so it really enables customers to run their applications how they want to functionally, as well as from a performance perspective. >> So this move toward containers and microservices sort of modern application development coincides with a modern platform like StormForge. And so there are, I'm sure there are alternatives out there, why StormForge? Maybe you could explain a little bit more about why, from your perspective what it does and why you chose them. >> So we leverage AWS in many respects in terms of the underlying platform, but we are a very strong DIY for how that platform supports Drupal applications. We view our expertise as being the best of Drupal. And so we felt like for us to true really maximize Kubernetes and containers and the power of those underlying technologies. On the one hand allows us to automate more and do more for customers. On the other side of it, it puts a tremendous burden on the level of expertise in order to do that well for every customer every day at scale. And so that at scale part of that was the challenge. And so we leverage StormForge to enable us to rightsize applications for performance, provide us cost benefits, allocate what you need when you need it for our customers. And that at scale piece is a critical part. We could do elements of it internally. We tried to do elements of that internally, but as you start getting to scale from, a few apps to hundreds of apps to certainly across our fleet of tens of thousands of applications, you really need something that leverages machine learning. You really need a technology that's integrated well within AWS and StormForge provided that solution. >> Make sure I got this right. So it sounds like you sort of from a skill standpoint transitioned or applied your skills from turning knobs if you will, to automation and scale. >> Correct. >> And what was that like? Was the team leaning into that, loving it? Was it a, a challenging thing for you guys to get there? >> That's a good question. The benefit in the way that StormForge applies it. So they leverage machine learning to enable us to make better decisions. So we still have the control elements, but we have much greater insight into what that would mean ahead of time before customers would be affected. So we still have the knobs we need, but we're able to do it at scale. And then from the automation point, it allows us to focus our deep expertise on making Drupal and the core hosting platform capabilities awesome. Sort of the stuff and resource allocation resource consumption. That's an enabler we can outsource that to StormForge >> This is not batch it's, you're basically doing this in sort of near realtime Optimize Live, is the capability, maybe you can describe what it is. >> So Optimize Live is new, we're in testing with that. We've done extensive testing with StormForge on the core call it decision making logic that allows for the right sizing of consumption and resources for our customer application. So that has already been tested. So the core engine's been tested. Optimize Live allows us to do that in real time to make policy decisions across our fleet on what's the right trade off between performance cost, other parameters. Again, it informs our decision making and our management of our platform. That would be very, very difficult otherwise. Without StormForge we'd have to do massive data aggregation. We'd have to have machine learning and additional infrastructure to manage to derive this information, and, and, and. And that is not our core business. We don't want to be doing that. We want insights to manage our platform to enable customers and StormForge for provides that. >> So it's kind of human in the loop thing. Hey, here's what like our recommendation or here's some options that you might want to, here's a path that you want to go down, but it's not taking that action for you necessarily. You don't want that. You want to make sure that the experts are have a hand in it still, is that correct? >> Correct, you still want the experts to have a hand in it but you don't want them to have a hand in it on each individual app. You need that, that machine learning capability that insight that allows you to do that at scale. >> So if you had to step back and think about your relationship with StormForge what was the business impact of bringing them in? >> First, from a time to market perspective we're able to get to market with a higher performing more cost effective solution earlier. So there's that benefit. Second benefit to the earlier point is that we're able to make resource allocation decisions focused on where our core competency is, not into the guts of Kubernetes containers and the like. Third is that the machine learning talent that StormForge brings to the table is world class. I've run machine learning teams, data science teams and would put them in the top 1% of any team that I've worked with in terms of their expertise. The logic and decision making and insights is outstanding. So we can get to the best decision, the optimal decision much more quickly. And then when you accompany that with the newer product in Optimize Live with that automation component you mentioned, all the better. So we're able to make decisions quicker, get it implemented in our platform and realize the benefits. What customers get from that is much better performance of their applications. More real time, higher, able to scale more dynamically. What we get is resource efficiency and our network and platform efficiency. We're not over allocating a capacity that costs us more money than we should. We're under allocating capacity that could have a lower performance solution for our customers. >> So that puts money in your pocket and your customers are happier. So there are higher renewal rates, less churn, high air prices over time as you add more capabilities. >> That's correct. >> What's it like, new application approach, Kubernetes containers, fine. Okay I need a modern platform but it's a relatively new company StormForge. What's it like working with them? >> Their talent level is world class. I wasn't familiar with them when I joined Acquia came to know them and been very impressed. There's many other providers in the market that will speak to some similar capabilities and will make many claims. But from our assessment our view is that they're the right partner for us, they're the right size, they're flexible, excellent team. They've evolved their technology roadmap very quickly. They deliver on their promises and commits a very good team to work with. So I've been very impressed for such an early stage company to deliver and to support our business so rapidly. So I think that's a strength. And then I think again the quality that people that's been manifested in the product itself, it's a high quality product. I think it's unique to the market. >> So Napoleon Hill famous writer, thinker, he wrote "Think and Grow Rich." If you haven't read it, check it out. One of his concepts is this a lever, small lever can move a big rock. It can be very powerful. Do you see StormForge as having that kind of effect on your business that change on your business? >> I do. Like I said, I think the engagement with them has proven, and this isn't, debatable based on the results that we've had with them. We ran that team through the ringer to validate the technology. Again, we'd heard lots of promises from other companies. Ran that team through the ringer with extensive testing across many customers, large and small, many use cases, to really stress test their capabilities. And they came out well ahead of any metric we put forth even well ahead of claims that they had coming into the engagement. They exceeded that. And so that's why I'm here. Why I'm an advocate. Why I think they're an outstanding company with a tremendous amount of potential. >> Thinking about, what can you tell us about where you want to take the company and the partnership with StormForge. >> I think the main next step is for us to engage with StormForge to drive automation drive decisioning, as we expand and move more and more customers over to our new platform. We're going to uncover use cases, different challenges as we go. So I think the, it's a learning process for both both sides, but I think the it's been successful so far and has a lot potential. >> Sounds like you had a great business and a great new partnership. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, appreciate your time. >> My pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, you're global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
Great to see you, Charley Sure, so Acquia is the largest And more experience, you call the ability to solve their but the things that you were facing And so that involves the Sometimes that creates other challenges. and err on the side of that flexibility. and the power of Kubernetes and containers that if they had to redo And so what you have is a very And so there are, and the power of those So it sounds like you sort outsource that to StormForge is the capability, maybe that allows for the right sizing of here's a path that you want to go down, experts to have a hand in it Third is that the machine learning talent So that puts money in your pocket but it's a relatively and to support our business so rapidly. as having that kind of the engagement with them has proven, and the partnership with StormForge. We're going to uncover use cases, Sounds like you had a great business Thank you very much, And thank you for watching theCUBE,
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Mike Feinstein, Michael Skok & Ben Haines | AWS Startup Showcase
(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)
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and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor that really is going to come I think, you know, for each company accelerated, the time to value, Or the application of data that you know, I mean, you might go out of business. that you just showcase, But the business model, you could have it, the business model has to You mentioned you know, edge and compute, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, So back to, you know, Michael's point of, because they are, you know, and then you got the bottoms up And one of the things that we do at AWS And you can consume it to Ben's point about how you have to work And the reason Michael we and we're still stuck in this you know, They have their, you know, the first to tell you that What are the things to look for Now of course the enterprise customers they need to be paying attention to? that tended to data's forms and big data but the more you can do to And Salsify, by the way, is you know, and you wanted to play the long game we, you know, we recently, You're VC, do you think about this or the other extreme, you know, Ben, are you going And anything you can do to speed that up Again, that's back to data. And, you know, the blockchain and around the world. from it that you need to. go to school or to you know, And you know, if you're not flexible with Thank you very much on behalf Thank you John and thanks of theCUBE and Dave Vellante,
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Joel Marchildon, Accenture & Benoit Long, Gov. of Canada | AWS Public Sector Partner Awards 2020
>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Program". I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California doing the remote interviews, during this pandemic we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners and here to feature the most Innovative Connect Deployment. We have Accenture of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada known as ESDC. Guys, congratulations Joel Marchildon, Accenture Canada, managing director and Benoit Long, ESDC of Canada chief transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on, and congratulations on the award. >> Thank you. >> Thank you and nice to be here >> So obviously, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing you got a business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this Connect has been interesting. Its been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the Public Sector Summit with Teresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution that is starving and deserving of the award? >> Maybe I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that was stood up fairly quickly, over the course of about four days and really in support of benefit that the Government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end, its a fully functioning featured contact center solution. Includes an IVR. And, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents. So that's the the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to how it came about so quickly. >> Yeah, we're happy to actually, we were obviously like every other government facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need. The jobs are being lost, our current systems were in trouble because of their age and their archaic nature. And so the challenge was quickly how do we actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called the Canada emergency response benefit that we had to support clients directly and so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a firestorm, to say, well, what could you do? And how could you help. And so we had an established relationship with a number of our system integrators, including Accenture. And we were able to run a competition very rapidly, and Accenture won. And then we deployed in, as Joel said, in a matter of four days, what for us was an exceptional and high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in a pandemic of all things, but with the uncertainty that comes with loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody a real; a human being, as well as to be able to efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, was pretty fundamental for us. So the the people in the groups that we're talking through here we're speaking to millions of people, who were literally being asked to accept the payment rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and of high quality personally as a technology solution, it would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >> And well, that's a great point. One of the things that you see with the pandemic, its a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right. So like other things, you can kind of plan for things, hypothetical, you got scenarios. But this is truly a case where every day counts, every minute counts, because humans are involved. There's no ROI calculation. Its not like, well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think. This is real results, fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud, can I stand up something quick, and you did it with a partner, okay. This is like not, like normal. Its like, its like unheard of, right. Four days, with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room. As you guys knew this was here. Take us through through what happened. >> So I think I can start. As you can imagine the set of executives that were overseeing the payment process was an exceptional, it was like a bunker, frankly, for about two weeks. We had to suspend the normal operations of the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody has seen before the level of simplicity was maximized in order to deliver the funds quickly. So you can imagine its a Warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around timing. Timing is fundamental. People are literally losing their jobs, there is no support, there is no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So, and the trust that people have in the government is pretty much at risk right there. And there is straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment, if you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed is unheard of on all fronts. When it came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support in a service context, the clients that were desperate to reach us, and we're talking hundreds of thousands of calls a day. We're not talking a few thousand here, ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in overtaken by volumes, call centers, because we had our regular ones still operating. Over a million calls were coming in the day. With the capacity to answer 10s of thousands and so the reality is that the Call Centers that we put up here, very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular call centers. And that speaks to the the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it. And I have to say maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate the conditions to lead to this are rare. But I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often. Why can't we operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances, now realizing the new normal will never be the same. That these types of solutions and technology and their scalability, their agility, their speed of deployment, is frankly something we want we want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do them during normal timeline conditions, but even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us a while I can actually tell you because I was the lead technologist to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it, and five years to install it. That's the last experience we have of call center, enterprise scale capabilities. And in this case we went from years, to literally days. >> Well, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say, why didn't we do this before? The waterfall meetings getting everyone arguing kind of gets in the way and the old software model, I want to come back to the transformation Benoit a minute, Because I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel, because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently, this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is, "We're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that, a consulting firm, taking our times trying to get a pound of flesh from the client." This is an example of my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this is not new to Accenture. So take us through how you guys reacted, because one, you got to sync up and get the cadence of what Benoit was trying to do sync up and execute take us through what happened on your side. >> Yeah, I mean, so its an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly. And, we've had to look at, to get this specific solution out the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that we had to get pretty agile ourselves internally on, how we go through approvals, etc, to make sure that we were there to support Benoit and his team and I think that we saw this as a broader opportunity to really respond to it. To help Canada in a time of need. So I think we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally even for our organization would have taken, could have taken weeks, right, and we were down to hours and a lot of instances. So it forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean to Benoit's point I think this is really going to hopefully change the way... It illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how quickly we can look at problems and we reduce deployment timeframes from years to months and months to weeks, etc. For solutions like this. And I think the AWS platform specifically in this case, Benoit touched on a lot of things beat the market scalability, but just as the benefit itself has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is, its simple to use technologically. I mean, we trained, as I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend. And they're not normal agents. These were people who were furloughed from other jobs potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents, by training, but they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours. And I think, from that perspective, that was important as well to have something that people could use to answer those calls that we know that we knew were going to come. >> Benoit this is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know its under circumstances of the pandemic and you guys did solve a big problem really fast and saved lives and then help people get on with their day. But transformation is about having people closest to the problem, execute. And also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This is kind of the playbook. Amazon came in and said, "Hey, you want to stand something up?" You wired it together the solution quickly, you have close to it. Looking back now its almost like, hey, why aren't we doing this before, as you said, and then you had to bring people in, who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This is the playbook to share your thoughts on this because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time, and it actually is playing out in real time. >> Well, I would definitely endorse the idea that its a playbook. Its I would say its an ideal and dream playbook to bid like showing up on a basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically. It is exactly that. So a lot of things had to happen quickly but also correctly, because you can't pull all these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly I think, as Canadians we were very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this but also literally putting themselves into these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond and quickly do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change, I was shocked into existence. I mean, I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some higher level of energy was thrown in quickly, mobilize everybody all at once. Nobody was said he is sitting around saying, I wonder if we have changed management covered off, this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental, if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly, then the best pay your plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of spontaneous driving change, exception, acceptance, and adoption, is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now will be continuing that kind of progression going forward. And we now found the way and we certainly use the way to work with the private sector in an innovative capacity and innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and scalable, to be able to pull all of the organization all at once very rapidly and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning, we had 10 year plans for our big transformations, because some of our programs are the most important in the country in many ways. We support people about 8 million Canadians a month, depending on the benefits payments that we deliver. And they're the most marginal needing and requires our support from seniors, to the unemployed, to job seekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself, and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have its just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us a way that we had never forecast, and I have to say I had to throw up my 10 year plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 to nine to eight year plans going forward. And so its exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then, obviously as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible. So the benefits of all these solutions can make a difference in people's lives. >> What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable, but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time to leverage the people and the resources you have. And take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that's needs to be refreshed, you can always be on that bleeding edge. And this just brings up the DevOps kind of mindset, agility, the lean startup, the lean company, this is a team effort between Amazon Accenture and ESDC. Its, pass, shoot, score really fast. So this is the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, new pass, shoot, score combination because you got speed, you got agility, you're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary in solving problems? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah. So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we were able to show in what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate, getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens, that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly, is what's becoming more important, obviously, security and privacy, those things are of the utmost importance as well. But its ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, test it again, and just always be iterating on the solution. Like I can say what we put out on April 6, within four days, is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added an integrated workforce management solution from NICE, and we added some other ISVs to do outbound dialing from Acquia and things like that. So the solution has grown from that MVP. And I think that's one other thing that's going to be a big takeaway. If you're not going to do anything till you got the final end product out there, then its going to be late. So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >> Benoit, talk about that dynamic because that's about building blocks, on foundational things and then services. Its the cloud model. >> Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwartz, which I believe you are quite familiar with. And, I spent an hour and a half with him. We were talking and he was so exciting and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him and I used to be the chief technology officer for the Government of Canada, right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting. And I'm sure its possible in some other places, and maybe in some other countries where they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon. I'll have to apologize for not believing him enough. I think the building blocks of Agile the building blocks sprints and MVPs. I mean, they're enough fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest Harriers and scariest problems technologically. And then from a business perspective, service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult. Arduous you make change over years, not months, not days, for sure. And so I think that new method is not only a different way of working, its a completely revamped way of assembling solutions. And I think that the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are going to be assembled. We know in working, I'm saying this in front of Joel, he doesn't know that yet. (all laughing) (indistinct) partners. We're going to be assembling MVP maps of an entire long program and its going to be iterative, it is going to be designed built, it will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, as much as we can govern it because the government is... We may have changed a lot, but the government is not necessarily caught on to most of these approaches. But the reality is that, that's where we're heading. And I will say, I'll close perhaps on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of mobilization, speed and solutioning, and being engaged rapidly, you just can't take that away from an organization once they've tasted that. If you let them down, well, they'll remember and frankly, they do remember now because they want more of this. And its going to be hard. But its a better hard, better challenge, than the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterate quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the the other comment I would add is most of this was driven by a client need. And that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to a common focus. If it had been just about, well, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better as providers. Yeah, would it work perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilization that comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus, and then we drive everyone to that solution. >> Shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new wave, you're oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of this just look could feel its success and performance. So as people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice synergy. This is a key! Joe, take us home here on the Accenture. The award winner, you guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have had the opportunity to help. And it was a it was a complete team effort and continues to be. Its not a bunch of eccentric technologists in the background doing this. The commitment from everyone to get this in place and to continue to improve it from Benoit team and from other folks across the government has been paramount to the success. So its been a fantastic if world win like experience and look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been well said, I think one thing that's done is its created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Benoit team. >> Well, congratulations for the most innovative Connect Deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the Hockey-Reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. Its pass, shoot, score every time and its contagious. (Benoit laughs) Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and congratulations for winning the election. Take care! >> Thanks. >> Take care. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's Coverage "AWS Public Sector Partner Awards" show. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)
SUMMARY :
and here to feature the most and a lot of business still needs to go on And in the end, and to be able to connect with us quickly. One of the things that and most of the government and get the cadence of what and the commercial This is the playbook to and to be able to support them the resources you have. is the backbone of what's Its the cloud model. than the one of having to down to the citizens and from other folks across the government I have to use the Hockey-Reference. host of theCUBE.
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Karthik Rau & Arijit Mukherji, SignalFx | AWS Summit SF 2018
>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018 with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have two great guests. Hot startup from SingleFx, the CEO, Karthik Rau, and the CTO, Arijit Mukherji. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Karthik: Yeah, great to see you again. Thanks for having us. >> So, we've been following you guys. You've been out five years. Two years in stealth, three years ago you launched on theCUBE. >> Karthik: Right here on theCUBE. >> We see you at AWS and VMware. Cloud's changed a lot. So, let's get an update. Karthik, take a minute to explain where you guys are at now company-wise, employees, traction momentum, product. Where are you guys at now? >> Karthik: Yeah, absolutely. So, SignalFx, first of all, let me tell you what we do. SignalFx is a realtime streaming operational intelligence solution. Basically, what that means is we collect monitoring data, operational data across the entire cloud environment, from the infrastructure all the way up to the applications. And we apply realtime analytics on that data to help people be a lot more proactive in their monitoring of these distributed environments. We launched the company in 2015. We come ... I'll let Arijit talk about our origins. We came out of Facebook. And we had a lot of experience building this to Facebook. In the past three years, we've been building up our company aggressively. We've now got hundreds of customers including several large Fortune 500 accounts, large web scale accounts like Acquia and HubSpot and Yelp and KAYAK. And we're over 100 employees now, about 120 employees. And yeah, doing great. >> So, Werner Vogels, the CTO, laid out on stage plus a great Matt Wood conversation about machine learning but the real thing that Werner laid out was the old way, the web server, multi-tier architecture stack kind of thing going on there to a more cloud DevOps horizontally scalable where sets of servers that could be spawned in parallel creates a new kind of operating model but also creates challenges around what to instrument. You know, as we would joke, someone left the lights on, implying EC2s been running. And all these kinds of things are going on. And you mentioned some of the Facebook kind of challenges. People were building their own scale. What have you guys learned and how does that apply today's modern infrastructure? What are some of the threshold challenges that companies are facing when they say, one, already there or I want to get there? How do you guys look at the main issues? >> Karthik: Do you want to take that? >> Yeah, so monitoring modern environments and infrastructure is actually quite a challenge. There's obviously a few things going around. One, as you mentioned, is the variety, the sheer variety of things. No longer just the three-tier architecture I have cloud services. I have containers. I have lambdas. I have my own applications. I have the cloud infrastructure itself that all needs to be monitored. And things are also becoming far more numerous. So, there's just many more of everything, right? And so, making sense of that space is becoming a big challenge. And our company was founded on the idea that monitoring is becoming an analytics problem. So, it's no longer about looking at individual servers or applications instances. It's more about making sense holistically over what's going on and being able to combine different types of data from different systems together to provide you with that high level view and that's the kind of functionality that we at SignalFx have been trying to provide. >> What are some of the data flows volumes look like. Cause I've heard multiple people talk about either Facebook or in open compute environments where there's just so much data coming in from the instrumentation that no human could actually get their arms around it. And you need to supplement it with machine learning and intelligence. I mean, is that something that you're seeing? What are some of the -- >> Yes, so actually what we see is different prospects or customers will be in different stages of a spectrum where maybe they were in a stage one where they're sort of using traditional architectures and then moving to these more modern systems. And as they get more modernized themselves, their use cases or the ways they wanted to do monitoring also gets more advanced. And so, we see the whole spectrum of it, as you mentioned. And so, understanding analytically how what we're is doing is great. But then you also want to take the human out of things as much as possible, right? >> Yeah. >> And make things more automated. And you want to look at the data and how things are behaving to learn from existing patterns to find outlines. So, that's really a very interesting challenge. And what I look at what we can do as a company going forward, like all the technological stuff that we can invest in, it's quite interesting. >> Yeah, Karthik, take us inside your customers. How does this modern monitoring, how does it change their business? How does it impact things like feedback loops and DevOps and everything that customers are having to deal in this kind of ever changing environment? >> Yeah, well I'll give you an example. There's a Fortune 500 company. They do product launches. And this is one of our customers and their product launches drive so much traffic that they do 80% of their business in the first two minutes of a product launch. And this is not at all uncommon in today's economy. And they're leveraging a lot of modern technologies, container architectures, serverless function architectures to spin up a bunch of capacity during these launches. And they were effectively flying blind most of the time. Because most of the traditional systems management monitoring solutions are not designed, A, to handle that volume. But, B, to handle the instant discovery requirements of if you're going to do 80% of your business in the first two minutes. So, the challenge is you're always playing defense. You're reacting to issues. And you're mostly flying blind. By leveraging SignalFx, they're getting realtime visibility, realtime discovery of these components as they're coming up. We're the only solution that can do that. So, literally within seconds of spinning up all of these containers, they're getting live streams into their dashboards, and live analytics, and live alerts. And what that's enabled them to do is be a lot more aggressive and effectively doing a lot more of these launches. So, that's driving their business and it's helping them drive their digital strategy forward. >> And microservices is really enabling you guys to be more relevant. Because truly the signal from the noise is where all these services reporting to? >> Karthik: Yeah. >> You talk about container madness. >> Karthik: There are two fundamental problems. So, one there's an architecture shift. And that's driving massive amounts of volume. You have physical machines that will live for three years in a data center. Divide it up into VMs, 10, 20 VMs per server. That'll maybe live for a few months. To now every process running in it's own container that might live for a few minutes. So, you have a massive exponential explosion in the number of components. But that's not the only problem. I was part of an architectural shift at VMware for a number of years. We weren't just affecting an architecture change. What's happening now is there's a cultural change and a process change that's happening as well. Because with containers, your development team can push changes directly out into a production environment. And what you're finding is you're going from sequential product development to parallel product development and a massive exponential increase in the number of code pushes. The only way you can operationalize that is you have to have realtime visibility in everything that's happening. Otherwise, the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. >> John: And you need prescriptive and predictive analytics. >> Exactly. And you need predictive analytics to identify there's something unusual here. It's not a problem yet. But this is highly unusual and maybe it's your canary release. We need to do a code push. So, you want to roll it back. So, having that level of predictiveness becomes absolutely critical. >> Yeah, you mentioned realtime. We used to argue what really is realtime. And it was usually well in time to react to what the customer needs. What does realtime mean to your customers? Architecturally, is there something you do different to kind of understand what that means? >> Arijit: Yeah, so we actually fundamentally took a very different approach when we build a product. Where, typically, monitoring our metrics, monitoring was done with what we call a store and create or a batch-like architecture where you store all the data points that are coming in, then you create from it to any other use cases. While what we build at SignalFx is a fully end-to-end streaming architecture which is realtime. And what we mean by realtime is like two to three seconds between a data point coming through us and it's firing an alert or showing up in your chart. So, that's the kind of realtime. And it requires us to do lots of innovations up and down the stack. And we've built a lot of IP. We've got now patterns. And more are coming because the approach we took was quite novel. Different from-- >> John: You guys got a great management team. And looking at what you guys have done. I've been impressed with you guys. I want to just ask, Karthik, you mentioned about all these parallel processes that are going on. Totally agree. The process change, operationalizing an all new cultural way to create software manage the data. I mean, it really is the perfect storm for innovation. But also, it could literally screw people up. So, I got to ask you, who are you targeting for your customer? Who is the person that you talk to? Assuming it's kind of DevOps, so it's more like a cloud architect. Who do you target? Who do you sell to? Who's the buyer? Who uses your service? >> Karthik: Well, we see ... Every enterprise we see following a very similar journey. So, the first stage is, typically, you're just getting familiar with cloud. And you're probably just lifting and shifting enterprise workloads into the cloud. Probably experimenting with big data on the cloud. You're not yet doing microservices or containers or DevOps. And for them, we're still selling largely to classic IT. There just trying to get better visibility into their digital environment, you know, they're cloud environment. But then, what ends up happening is they very quickly get to what we call basically chaos. It's stage two. And it has a lot of parallels to shadow IT. What happened with SAS, where you have hundreds of different SAS tools is happening all over again with cloud but you've got hundreds or thousands of different operational tools. Different ways of doing monitoring, logging, security. And every team is doing it's own thing. And so, that's a big problem for enterprises who are trying to build best practices across their broader team. In that place, we're typically selling to departments because they don't have a centralize strategy yet. But what we find is the organizations at maturity have figured out that it's important to have certain centralized core services. And that doesn't mean they're forced on the end users. But they provide best practices around monitoring, logging, and such. And just make it easy for them to use those solutions. So, that's almost a new IT organization. It's platform engineering -- >> John: Is that a cloud architect? >> Platform engineering team, infrastructure engineering team, and they are effectively building best practices around the new stack not the traditional stack. >> So, you are or aren't targeting department level? Are you are? >> We sell to departments. But we also sell to the teams that are standardizing across the entire organization. >> So, cloud architects, for instance? >> Depends on the stage of the cloud journey. >> Or company. >> And the company, exactly. >> From an architectural standpoint, you talked that there's virtualization, there's containers, now serverless. How do you even figure out what to monitor in serverless? How fast is that changing? And how is that impacting your road map? >> So, serverless brings a very interesting challenge because they are very, very ephemeral. Like they're ephemeral in some sense. So, we realize there are two things. One is serverless, there's a reason why things are moving faster. It's because you want to be able to move faster. But then you also need to be able to monitor faster. It's no good monitoring serverless at five minutes later, for example. So, one of the things we invested in was how to get metrics, etc. and telemetry from these serverless environments in a very fast fashion. And that's something that we've done. The second thing we are doing that really works for this environment is afterall it's not about how many times a serverless function ran, it's about the value that it's providing the application that's running on it. And by focusing on a platform that let's you send these application metrics in great detail and then be able to monitor and analyze them, I think really amplifies the value in some sense. So, those are the two ... >> John: And talk about the ecosystems. One of the things I want to ask you guys because we've been seeing a collision between a lot of the different clouds. Clients want multicloud. Well, obviously, we're here at Amazon. They believe they should be the only cloud. But I think most customers would look at either legacy systems with some instrumentation and operational data to edge of the network, for instance. I mean, look at the edge of the network. That's just an extension of the data center depending on how you look at it. So, how do you guys view that kind of direction where customer says, "Hey, you know, I got a cloud architect. We're on Amazon. Of course, we have some old Microsoft stuff. So, we've got Azure going up there. We're kicking the tires on Google. And I got this whole IoT Edge project. SignalFx, instrument that for me. (laughs) Is that what you do? Or how do you deal with that? How would you deal with that kind of conversation? >> Well, I think most enterprises, the larger companies we see looking at multiple clouds. And they have different workloads running in different clouds, depending on the needs and what they're looking to do. So, the nice thing about a solution like SignalFx is we span all of these different architectures. And what we find is that most of the larger companies want to separate their business process solutions from their runtime architectures. Because they want to have a solution like SignalFx that it doesn't matter who you're using. If you choose to have your analytics intensive workloads in Google Cloud and your eCommerce workloads in Amazon, but you only want one system that will page someone in the middle of the night if there's a problem, then you have SignalFx to do that. And then you have your choice of runtime environments depending on what your developers need or what the business demands. We provide a lot of that glue across the different environments. >> Do you see that as the preferred architecture with most customers? Cause that makes a lot of sense. I mean, whether you're doing other data services, it kind of makes sense to separate out. Is that consistent? >> To have different applications >> Yeah. >> In different clouds? It depends. I mean, I think we see some people who are more comfortable running on a single cloud vendor and they make the decision based on what a portfolio of platforms and service features that are available. And they really like those, and they say it's easy to just go with one. But more often, we find people wanting to at least have some percentage running in a different cloud vendor. >> John: All right, final question. What's the secret sauce for the company? Tell us about the secret sauce. >> Arijit: I think-- >> We got the patents. I heard patents. You don't have to show all this exactly. But what is the secret DNA of the tech? What's the magic? >> I think it's our very unique architecture. It's entirely different from what you have. It's streaming and it focuses on scale, on timeliness, as well as on analytics capability. I think that unique combination is very special for us. And that, in a way, sort of allows us to address very, very different use cases, including this hybrid environments and what not, in a very effective way. So, it's a very, very powerful platform that can be used for many use cases. >> All right, so that was John's final question. Karthik, I've got one last one for you. What's it like being a CEO of a software company in the cloud era today compared to what it's been earlier in our career? >> Well, it's moving very, very quickly, right? I mean, technology always move very quickly. But I think compared to when I was at VMware in the mid 2000s, it just feels like every 18 months there's a new technology wave. You know, when we started our company five years ago, that was the first year that AWS eclipsed a billion dollars in sales and Dagra hadn't even launched. It launched a month after we started the company. And then serverless came. And now function architecture is all there. So, there's just so much change happening, and it's happening so quickly, it forces vendors like us to really be on the cutting edge and forward looking and making sure that you're keeping an eye out for what's coming cause the markets are moving way faster, I think, then they were 15 years ago. >> John: Well, Karthik, thanks so much. We appreciate you guys coming on, SignalFx. I'll give you the final word on the interview. Take a minute to share something with the audience that they might not know about SignalFx that they should know about. >> Well, I think what people may not realize is how realtime we can actually get. I think most people are used to doing all their monitoring and observation, and they think of realtime in the order of minutes, or if you can get stuff every 30 seconds. We really are the only realtime solution. That's why we say real realtime. We're on the order of seconds. You can build really, really sophisticated analytics and get visibility like you can't anywhere else. So, it's real, realtime. >> And that's soon to be table stakes. TheCUBE is realtime. We're live right here, on theCUBE here, in San Francisco at Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit 2018. We've been covering all the Amazon re:Invents since it started, of course. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music) (gentle instrumental music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Good to see you again. Karthik: Yeah, great to see you again. So, we've been following you guys. explain where you guys are at now on that data to help people And you mentioned some of the and that's the kind of functionality And you need to supplement it But then you also want to And you want to look at and DevOps and everything that customers Because most of the really enabling you guys You talk about But that's not the only problem. John: And you need prescriptive And you need predictive analytics to react to what the customer needs. So, that's the kind of realtime. Who is the person that you talk to? So, the first stage is, typically, the traditional stack. across the entire organization. of the cloud journey. And how is that impacting your road map? So, one of the things we invested in One of the things I want to ask you guys And then you have your choice it kind of makes sense to separate out. And they really like those, for the company? We got the patents. from what you have. in the cloud era today But I think compared to We appreciate you guys We're on the order of seconds. And that's soon to be table stakes.
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