>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in Bahrain, for the exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS Summit here in the region. Obviously, huge news, Amazon's having a region here, a full region, that's going to create a lot of connections, new opportunities, and hopefully make the life easier for all the developers and whatnot. Great guest here, so we're just talking with Kim on camera, about all the exciting developments on Amazon. We've got Abdul Raman, who's the group EVP of tech, at the ATG, which is the Al Tayyar Travel Group, in Saudi Arabia. >> Yep. >> Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks a lot for having me. >> So, I'll quickly fast forward, you guys started in 2015, programming in the cloud, your like, we were late. I think that's actually a good time, 'cause Amazon had a lot of mature services ready. Went from zero to billions in revenue. >> Correct. >> Really big success story, that's large scale, all cloud based right? >> Yep, correct. >> Tell your story, what do you guys do, real quick, take a minute to explain your group, what you guys do, and then, what were the architectural things you decided, how did you get the growth? >> So, we are a 40 years old company, we started in 1979, we are the largest travel and tourism company in the Middle East. We went public, through our IPO in 2012. And 2015, our new board, and new management, including myself, we started building our ten-year strategy plan. And we said, we need to diversify our investment, so it mandated that we need to have an online presence. In 2015, we had a choice to build our online presence, which is very late, either on-premise using, building a data center, or we go to the cloud. We had multiple metrics including the cost efficiency, including scalability, security and so on, and all these metrics, when we compared on-premise versus cloud, cloud always win. And we selected Amazon to build our online presence. And beginning of 2015, we had zero presence, zero revenue. Our total revenue from the classic legacy systems, for the retail was almost two billion dollars. But we had zero revenue from the online. We were able, within six weeks, to build the proof of concept, and launch it immediately, and we started heavily investing in various components, from back-end, front-end, DevOps, and so on. And this year, we anticipate, we're going to be generating more than two billion riyal of revenue, that's about 450 >> Online >> Online only. >> Via cloud. >> Exactly, only on Amazon. And for us, that has been the best success story we had for years. >> It's an amazing success story actually. >> We look backward to our decision back then. >> I'll break for you, that's like actually really amazing. This is something that I think people don't really understand, what about the cloud, and certainly Amazon, and the kind of scale that you can get, if you get something right, both on the business model side and architecturally, you can be a unicorn. You're really a unicorn in revenue, that's the word that they hear in the startup world, unicorn, but mostly that's stock value, that's not actually real cash, in how many years? This is pretty phenomenal. This is the entrepreneurial dream, that is now a reality. >> Yep, that's correct. >> This is the story here. >> Exactly, and I'm happy that you mentioned that. We actually, when we started this venture, we said, to the founders, you guys are a startup. We rented out, in 2015, a garage, literally. >> Yeah, get out of the way. >> A house, A very old warehouse, we brought like, five guys, you are the core team, we told them, you are a startup, give us whatever you want to do. And it has been very successful since then. >> It's kind of like the Steve Jobs story, you got Apple, with the Mac II, and then the little group over here, you know, doing the Macintosh. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> That's your group, because you got to get out of their way, it's a mindset, I want to ask you that, that was one of my questions, but we got there a little early, but, this is a cultural shift. Cloud is a different mindset. >> Yep. >> It's not the old way of planning, team-building. >> Yep. >> It really is a different dynamic both execution wise, but team makeup. >> Correct. >> Can you share that piece of it? >> We gave our founders complete freedom, in how they're going to make up their management style. So we have a complete agile team, we have diverse geographical locations, we have people from India, developers in Egypt, in Dubai, in Saudi, and be all work and collaborate, using DevOp tools from Amazon, so we divide the work load, our product teams, weekly launch feature list. They tell us when they would like to launch every two weeks, or three weeks, a new version of the website, or the mobile apps. So, we have a completely agile development methodology, and we give our new venture a truly startup culture. >> And the key for you, if I get this right, is to have executive leadership say, we're doing this? >> Yep. >> Was that in place, did you drive that? >> Absolutely, so when our board said, told us, the new board in 2015, guys we don't have an online, go and get it, me and the CEO said, the best way to do it, is just spin off a completely different unit, completely independent, startup mentality, intro manuals, and told them, guys, sky is limit. We need to be the number one player in the Middle East. >> So, I got to dig deeper, 'cause I love, you know, it's all sexy, and great story when you say, this is how we started, and we finished strong, but as Andy Jassy would say, the CEO of AWS, the learning's in the middle, the ups and downs, as you figure things out, 'cause a lot of things about cloud, is iteration. >> Yep. >> 'Cause you have the ability to move very fast, and you get smart people together, so there's a glorious start and a glorious outcome, but in the middle is the experimentation, that's where the real work gets done. Can you share some of the learnings? Was it a technology selection? Did you really, do you have more queuing, more database, as you start to play with Amazon, this becomes, actually, a business process. >> Our biggest, yeah. >> Playing with the different pieces and which services are right for which process. Can you share something? >> Correct. So our biggest challenge was finding the right skillset, who are people who understand how Amazon, AWS, works. In the Middle East, we don't have that many skillset, or skillful people, so we had to wait, train the people, send them to Amazon workshops, be very patient with the mistakes, we don't mind people refactoring all the old code. Every month we start from scratch. We were very aware that this is, what we are doing, is never been done before in the Middle East. And what we have developed, in terms of, for example, the big data, the big data platform we build today, is one of the largest, we are processing terrabytes of data every week. It's one of the largest in the Middle East. The number of developers we have today, more than 500, working on AWS. I don't think any company in the Middle East, have that number of developers, working on this platform. So we're very proud that we gave our developers the trust and we are aware that you need to fail fast, learn, and quickly adapt. >> And it's a contagious mindset too, when you start seeing success. >> Yep. >> So talk about some of the architectural, talk about the stack that you're using. Obviously, you must be using a variety of the Amazon goodness, EC2, that's pretty obvious, are you guys using the queuing, are you using Kinesis? How you, can you talk about some of the architectural things, if you can? >> Yep, so we have, the front-end that we have today, is completely built on Node.js and AngularJS, so it's very fast, very agile. Our back end is built on Java, most of the code built on Java. We have multiple messaging buses, that asynchronous mode, so whenever there is something that needs to be given to a certain component, we don't have to wait for serial queuing. It's all parallel. At the same time, we have a lot of Auto Scaling components. One of the examples I gave earlier today, is that, we had, the beginning of this summer, we had so many marketing campaigns, and we were surprised by how successful these marketing campaigns. We have noticed, in one marketing campaign, that our demand, from our customer, have reached 300 percent, within 24 hours, and the Auto Scaling that we have in place, have been very successful. We were able to immediately meet that demand. >> Talk about how good the Auto Scaling is. Isn't that a relief? >> Absolutely. >> I mean, explain how it works because, essentially, when the demand comes in, explain how it works. >> Yep, so, just to give an example, if we had this infrastructure on-premise, we would have needed six weeks to procure a new infrastructure, install it, configure it, and we would have lost all this six weeks of revenue. >> And then, by the way, you would have lost the first 24 hour surge, then you'd go over-billed, and then wait around, and then not know if you over-provisioned. >> Absolutely. >> This is, the old way. The new way is, you configure Auto Scaling, based on policy, and then it just spins up. >> Absolutely. >> Resources. >> Absolutely. >> While you're sleeping. >> Exactly, so in a few seconds, the Auto Scaling fires up a lot of instances, and we immediately cope with the demand. >> You know, it's funny you mentioned that. One of the comments we have inside our company is, you know you're successful online, when you're making money while you're sleeping. And, you know, if you have Auto Scaling, and things of that nature, these things are programmatic, this is what elastic is all about, this is what coders, >> Yep. >> Not system administrators do >> True. >> And once they do it, they're highly motivated not to manage it again. >> Correct, absolutely. >> Again, this is back to the culture of DevOps. >> Yep, yep. >> How have you guys innovated on that piece, can you give some other examples? >> Yes, so today we have, our big data has feeds from all the buys from the big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, and also from Google, and we have all this analytical data, into our big data, and we analyze all our customer behavior, what they're looking for, what kind of destinations, holidays, business travel, and we try to adapt every two, three weeks, our product and services to meet our customer demand. Next year, we're going to be launching our machine learning, and AI infrastructure. This way, we'll be able to do real time, predictive analysis, and we will be able to serve each customer, unique, fully personalized, customized, web page and experience. We will be able to exceed our customer expectations, and we'll be able to give our customer exactly what they're looking for. >> Abdul, I got to ask you a personal question. >> Sure. >> What are you most proud of, of this success story? What are some of the things, that you look back and say, wow, we really knocked it out of the park, we did great on this, and then an example where you had a good learning experience. Maybe a trip and a fall, that was a learning opportunity. What are you most proud of? And areas that you learned the most about from, tripping and falling, and failure. >> Yep, so I think the most thing I'm proud of, is we have gathered great minds, and we have created great culture. I think great companies have great people behind them, and this, I've learned from reading the stories of Apple or Microsoft, or Google and so on. So, I think we've been very successful in this area, in the Middle East, where the resources are very scarce, and the ability to attract very smart people is very difficult, to bring them in the Middle East. And I think, we've been very successful in that regard, we've been able to gather a lot of smart people, and create great culture. >> You know, Marc Andreessen wrote that article, book about, or maybe it was a tweet, I can't even remember, the 10x engineer. >> Yep. >> And that concept is one engineer, that does cloud and DevOps right is worth ten engineers in the old world. And so, if you can collect, a selection of these 10x multipliers, that can do architecture. >> Correct. >> Now I personally believe that the full-stack developer, might be obsoleted with the cloud, or reduce the requirement for full-stack developer, but you'll still need full-stack developers for cloud, in general, but you don't need to stockpile full-stack developers. >> True, true, I agree. >> If you have good full-stack developers, you then can hire application developers >> True. >> Because the full-stack takes care of all the scale. >> Exactly, you can always repurpose those guys, and up-skill them to do something different. Instead of being a full-stack, you really want to focus on solution developer. >> Google's proven this with their SRE, if you've seen, they have operators, and developers. And this, as you scale, you're operating infrastructure, or you're writing code for applications. >> Correct. >> Alright, so what's the learnings that have been magnified for you? In the middle of the journey here, there's always the, you know, situation were, you know, you have to take care of personnel issue, or technology selection tweak or change, iteration, I won't say pivot, 'cause people don't pivot, when they're succeeding, it's just navigating through the journey. What was something that you've experienced that was magnified in the learnings, that have helped you get better? >> Yep, I believe that the multi-culture and the multi-nationalities and multi-discipline and people coming from different backgrounds. We have people from Asia, from Europe, from the U.S., in our company, and this helped having different backgrounds, different experiences, and this has helped us to build a nice, multi-dimensional solutions. And people have been able to share this experience, in a very nice way. >> That's great, Abdul, thanks so much for sharing, taking the time. >> Thank you. >> Here on theCUBE, and sharing your insight, and amazing success story, congratulations to you and your team, really love to hear these amazing success stories, essentially building from zero start, online, to billions in revenue, that's an amazing success story. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And it certainly is great. Exclusive coverage here, we are in Bahrain, this exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @furrier, or just search my name, reach out to me, let me know what you think. Stay with us for more coverage, after this break. (techno music fades out)

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Welcome back to the cubes coverage here in by rain in the Middle East for AWS Summit wrapping up event here with the cloud computing shift that's happening. Amazon regions live lot of innovation in the area Middle East and Africa. We're here with the head executive of A W s who manages the territory. Suban Shag, part head of Middle East Africa for public sector. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. John, Thank you. Thank you for having me here. And thanks for being here with your team, learning about this story from the Middle East and, of course, all the way to North Africa and Africa as well to >> Well, it's been a lot of work that you're on your team have done it been successful, were super interested because there's a big story developing here. The Amazon region, which was announced two years ago, is available on Day one. Pun intended a lot of couples shipping their products on the cloud, but it's also a cultural revolution happening for a whole another generation that could change the landscape of the Middle East. Culture, technology, innovation, banking, entrepreneurship. This is a grass roots groundswell of change, empowerment, self esteem, money making, banking. I mean, all this that's going on >> absolute in the middle of it. Well, hey, we're proud to be part of it, and we're proud to be partners with many different organizations here as well. I think it's actually coming from all different directions, not just the ground swell, but even the leadership, the leadership of the countries that can Bahrain, but also the other countries in the Middle East and across the region. What we're seeing is that these countries air creating these vision plants, and these vision plans air about diversifying the economy, creating opportunity for youth, creating opportunity for folks that are diversifying from the economy. So then they're actually being displaced, and where do you turn to sew? These countries are turning to technology and in ah, Bahrain, in particular, they've set up programs where they helped to develop youth. They helped develop citizens, they could get free training on technology, all that to do, sees it and take it. And we've seen that uptake as well to have seen a lot of Bahrainis just taking courses, getting trained and then building. And that's what you witnessed today at our summit. >> You know, innovation takes on many forms you've seen in every way from the mobile wave. You saw, um, countries that didn't have good infrastructure, stand up mobile, fisher and Beam or connected than some of the incumbent countries that had connectivity last mile into >> an elite leap is >> the lead frog, right? So So this is happening here. But the trend we're seeing is that the old business school adage of focus on your core competency and then it's okay to outsource that that's not a core competency is a trend we're seeing with Cloud where you guys are providing the infrastructure for countries, not just businesses. Yeah, to focus on their core competency, and it's making things go faster. So speed is the table stakes, so it's slow. It's probably the old way. What are some of the conversations around this? Because this seems to be the hottest topic from things I've seen in the United States with CIA and Jed I that Therese has been involved in two education with educate and now here with the government modernizing with cloud first. Yeah, that's trickling throughout the entire country. >> Yeah, well, I mean, it's it's need, I'm part of that is needs. So in some of the countries in the region barring included, they wanted to spend controls. They want to reduce their costs. You want to get away from legacy, They want to get away from licenses they're not using or hardware that's sitting on shelves. So then they come and look at what we're doing in the same Well, wait a second. You're investing in the region. You're making infrastructure available. I can build on top of that, I can leverage open source I can create I could make citizen service is it's almost a no brainer for them to one of the biggest problems they have is that the train people and then those folks go in. They do start ups where they're going to start work for other businesses. Well, which is fantastic. It's actually creating that Gertrude a cycle that we want to be a part of his well too. So already starting to see that happening in the past couple of years. Have you been here? And of course, now we have the region lunch, which is only accelerating the journey. >> Talk about the business because you guys are active. Your presents early with a region which we think is a revitalisation, creates economic value. That's something we've been reporting on. But there's more than that. It's not just by rain. It's the whole region that you cover. What's the business landscape like? What if some of the deals you're doing? What's the startups look like when you talk about some of the the landscape dynamics? >> Absolutely. So first, let's start up Eco system is very, um, I was gonna say robust, but it's it's some to use the word that use. It's a groundswell Right now. We're seeing a lot of interest, Lot of activity. Ah, lot of folks getting into in experimenting very quickly. But it's not easy as we know. Doing a start. It's not easy, so that robust war will come with time. Ah, we're seeing that more funding is going into the space now. It's still very anemic. So in the Middle East, there's not enough funds going in there, especially for the early stage. We're seeing interest coming from outside for the later stages. We're talking about the creams, and we're talking about the cabbages and some of those companies, but at the earliest, ones >> that are clearly validated, growing like >> exactly the ones who have already earned market share with ones that air. Starting right now, they're finding their way. So we didn't do you need more funding for experimentation? Enter AWS and we provide is programs like Activate, which is an early stage start, a program. We work very closely with the V C's and the accelerators, so they're leveraging that now, too. So we're starting to see that growth, whether it's in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh or Cairo or here. It's just starting to grow, which is great. And we're seeing that interest and some of that, um, should I go into this field? Would what When my mom's safe, I'm an entrepreneur versus a doctor that started swaying Now to where people say entrepreneurship is actually pretty >> cool, it's a legitimate field. >> It's a legitimate feeling that, believe it or not, which is excited, and people are going into it as well. On the enterprise side, s Emi's all the way to large enterprises. We're seeing that folks are saying, Hey, I can actually maybe even get new markets. So if you look at Al Tayyar Group, which are telltale Travel Group, which is out of Saudi Arabia, they're using that to learn more about their custom. Customers come up with new solutions and new packages that they can offer, all using a I and ML, which is incredible or fly Dubai FlyDubai in, In. In Dubai, you probably guessed that Ah, they need to stand up very quickly and online booking system. They did it in four months. It's leveraging cloud. So they're getting that they're getting that idea that you can kick it off real quick, get it running, and then launch it as well, too, and then the government. So we're seeing governments across the region saying, Hey, we've got a controller cost first of all, and we've got to make a better citizen service is we want to make sure that we improve the lives of citizens. So been able to launch new service is in a short amount of time. Today we heard about the I G A. Working on a building permit system that allows people to build quicker because they're able to get a permit in days instead of months. This is an example scene where speed matters to the point where we now have the government challenging business in terms of moving quicker, which is unheard of anywhere else in the world, which is super exciting, >> not certainly in the United States, that's for sure. I would like just to point out that from my standpoint, I heard this many V C. C are seeing them in the hallways mix of veces entrepreneurs business, globalize V's and New Eyes bees. The Amazon partner networks here. Yeah, it is partner Network. So it's all the things are in place now. Yes, What's missing? What do you see? It's to do items. Where do you think that you can raise the bar for AWS? What's what do you sees as to do items for you? What's your plan? >> Well, to your point, I mean, all the ingredients are here. So in terms of what's missing, I don't think there's anything missing spoke putting the ingredients together and build baking that cake. That's what we gotta work on right now, too. So that's why we're doing a lot of activity in the schools across the region, getting our program Educate and Academy, which of two different programs, ones broad. One is very directed to the schools. That is what we're helping to make sure that we get the next generation of learners. We're working on items, a cloud degrees. So in four years you can actually a degree leveraging all the technologies that are enabled by cloud. That's happened at the University of Bahrain, and we hope to get that in other schools. But also just getting training out there, just getting quick training. So you learn a little mint modules and you go and build something that's another area. Need spend more time and again encouraging experimentation. Try some new things, get it out there, see what the market says. So in terms of what we could do more of it. AWS is continue to push that message. Continue developing the people out here so that they're building. >> I gotta ask you, you know, you've been in Silicon Valley. You know that game for the folks living in silicon value in the U. S. What should they know about what's going on in your territory out here that they may not know? Or maybe this was fleeting thought or something that's not being reported. What's what. What's should did people know about what's going on in this region? >> Absolutely. I think sometimes for for many markets that are outside of Silicon Valley outside of the U. S. It's about copycats, start ups, which is fine. You can actually do quite well with that. Ah, usually the returns on that when you go to an exit event is less than what you might see it in the valley. Ah, but again, there's a great triage opportunity. So you want to bring the funds here? But I do see now a change where folks are building original technologies as well, too. And I think we're going to see more of the multiples, tens or 20 time multiples out here in the region, which would be wonderful. Ah, we saw a company today. You know, phonic, which is from Saudi Arabia that is building telecommunications, and, uh, contact invoice type of service is that's gonna be huge if they get this right. And I think they will, because they got a really scrappy and hungry team. That's one of those companies that actually could start getting people to notice the Middle East is a place for original innovation. >> Awesome. Um, anything else on your to do list for next year? What's Ah, Give a quick plug for your crew. You guys hiring? I see the region here. You gotta fill staff here. Actually got curriculum in the schools here. What are you looking >> for? You coming all the big What's not here to do? Yeah. You know, into this is continue to develop my team. We got a wonderful team here. Ah, lot of people that are local to the, uh, to the region. Ah, that We want to make sure that they're growing and contributing. A swell too. Our team missions to do good into. Well, at the same time, I think they go hand in hand. So we want to do more around programs that help to develop communities. You know, there are refugee crisis is around the region. We want to make sure we can help out over there. Ah, women in tech is a big area of focus for us. How can we get more women into technology and leading and technology as well? To have got my team having a mandate to get more solution architects that our women as well to we don't have one yet. We have a lot of great women on our team, but we need more technical women, too. That's another key focus area for us. Um, and just continue building continued to help the communities build solutions on the cloud. >> Zubin Chang, part here, head of the territory here in the Middle East and Africa. That's the cubes coverage of eight of US Summit and buyer in the Middle East. Signing off our second year. We'll be back with more next year and you'll see it around in the territory. Thanks for Thanks for watching.