(upbeat techno music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in beautiful, warm, and sunny Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. I got the Chris and Chris show, next. Bear with me. Chris Degnan joins us again. One of our alumni, the Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake. Good to have you back, Chris. >> Thank you for having us. >> Lisa: Chris Grusz also joins us. Director of Business Development AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog at AWS. Chris and Chris, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Good to be back in person. >> Isn't it great. >> Chris G: It's so much better. >> Chris D: Yeah. >> Nothing like it. So let's talk. There's been so much momentum, Chris D, at Snowflake the last few years. I mean the momentum at this show since we launched yesterday, I know you guys launched the day before with partners, has been amazing. A lot of change, and it's like this for Snowflake. Talk to us about AWS working together with Snowflake and some of the benefits in it from your customer. And then Chris G, I'll go to you for the same question. >> Chris G: Yep. >> You know, first of all, it's awesome. Like, I just, you know, it's been three years since I've had a Snowflake Summit in person, and it's crazy to see the growth that we've seen. You know, I can't, our first cloud that we ever launched on top of was, was AWS, and AWS is our largest cloud, you know, in in terms of revenue today. And they've been, they just kind of know how to do it right. And they've been a wonderful partner all along. There's been challenges, and we've kind of leaned in together and figured out ways to work together, you know, and to solve those challenges. So, been a wonderful partnership. >> And talk about it, Chris G, from your perspective obviously from a coopetition perspective. >> Yep. >> AWS has databases, cloud data forms. >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Talk to us about it. What was the impetus for the partnership with Snowflake from AWS's standpoint? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, they're building on top of AWS. And so that, by default, makes them a great partner. And it's interesting, Chris and I have been working together for, gosh, seven years now? And the relationship's come a really long way. You know, when we first started off, we were trying to sort out how we were going to work together, when we were competing, and when we're working together. And, you know, you fast forward to today, and it's just such a good relationship. Because both companies work backwards from customers. And so that's, you know, kind of in both of our DNA. And so if the customer makes that selection, we're going to support them, even from an AWS perspective. When they're going with Snowflake, that's still a really good thing for AWS, 'cause there's a lot of associated services that Snowflake either integrates to, or we're integrating to them. And so, it's really kind of contributed to how we can really work together in a co-sell motion. >> Talk to us, talk about that. The joint GOTO market and the co-selling motion from Snowflake's perspective, how do customers get engaged? >> Well, I think, you know, typically we, where we are really good at co-selling together is we identify on premise systems. So whether it's, you know, some Legacy UDP system, some Legacy database solution, and they want to move to the cloud? You know, Amazon is all in on getting everyone to the cloud. And I think that's their approach they've taken with us is saying we're really good at accelerating that adoption and moving all these, you know, massive workloads into the cloud. And then to Chris's point, you know, we've integrated so nicely into things like SageMaker and other tool sets. And we, we even have exciting scenarios where they've allowed us to use, you know, some of their Amazon.com retail data sets that we actually use in data sharing via the partnership. So we continue to find unique ways to partner with our great friends at Amazon. >> Sounds like a very deep partnership. >> Chris D: Yeah. Absolutely. >> Chris G: Oh, absolutely, yeah. We're integrating into Snowflake, and they're integrating to AWS. And so it just provides a great combined experience for our customers. And again, that's kind of what we're both looking forward from both of our organizations. >> That customer centricity is, >> Yeah. >> is I think the center of the flywheel that is both that both of you, your companies have. Chris D, talk about the the industry's solutions, specific, industry-specific solutions that Snowflake and AWS have. I know we talked yesterday about the pivot from a sales perspective >> Chris D: Yes. >> That snowflake made in recent months. Talk to us about the industries that you are help, really targeting with AWS to help customers solve problems. >> Yeah. I think there's, you know, we're focused on a number of industries. I think, you know, some of the examples, like I said, I gave you the example of we're using data sharing to help the retail space. And I think it's a really good partnership. Because some of the, some companies view Amazon as a competitor in the retail space, and I think we kind of soften that blow. And we actually leverage some of the Amazon.com data sets. And this is where the partnership's been really strong. In the healthcare space, in the life sciences space, we have customers like Anthem, where we're really focused on helping actually Anthem solve real business problems. Not necessarily like technical problems. It's like, oh no, they want to get, you know, figure out how they can get the whole customer and take care of their whole customer, and get them using the Anthem platform more effectively. So there's a really great, wonderful partnership there. >> We've heard a lot in the last day and a half on theCUBE from a lot of retail customers and partners. There seems to be a lot of growth in that. So there's so much change in the retail market. I was just talking with Click and Snowflake about Urban Outfitters, as an example. And you think of how what these companies are doing together and obviously AWS and Snowflake, helping companies not just pivot during the pandemic, but really survive. I mean, in the beginning with, you know, retail that didn't have a digital presence, what were they going to do? And then the supply chain issues. So it really seems to be what Snowflake and its partner Ecosystem is doing, is helping companies now, obviously, thrive. But it was really kind of like a no-go sort of situation for a lot of industries. >> Yeah, and I think the neat part of, you know, both the combined, you know, Snowflake and AWS solution is in, a good example is DoorDash, you know. They had hyper growth, and they could not have handled, especially during COVID, as we all know. We all used DoorDash, right? We were just talking about it. Chipotle, like, you know, like (laughter) and I think they were able to really take advantage of our hyper elastic platforms, both on the Amazon side and the Snowflake side to scale their business and meet the high demand that they were seeing. And that's kind of some of the great examples of where we've enabled customer growth to really accelerate. >> Yeah. Yeah, right. And I'd add to that, you know, while we saw good growth for those types of companies, a lot of your traditional companies saw a ton of benefit as well. Like another good example, and it's been talked about here at the show, is Western Union, right? So they're a company that's been around for a long time. They do cross border payments and cross currency, you know, exchanges, and, you know, like a lot of companies that have been around for a while, they have data all over the place. And so they started to look at that, and that became an inhibitor to their growth. 'Cause they couldn't get a full view of what was actually going on. And so they did a lengthy evaluation, and they ended up going with Snowflake. And, it was great, 'cause it provided a lot of immediate benefits, so first of all, they were able to take all those disparate systems and pull that into Snowflake. So they finally had a single source of the truth, which was lacking before that. So that was one of the big benefits. The second benefit, and Chris has mentioned this a couple times, is the fact that they could use data sharing. And so now they could pull in third data. And now that they had a holistic view of their entire data set, they could pull in that third party data, and now they could get insights that they never could get before. And so that was another large benefit. And then the third part, and this is where the relationship between AWS and Snowflake is great, is they could then use Amazon SageMaker. So one of the decisions that Western Union made a long time ago is they use R for their data science platform, and SageMaker supports R. And so it really allowed them to dovetail the skill sets that they had around data science into SageMaker. They could now look across all of Snowflake. And so that was just a really good benefit. And so it drove the cost down for Western Union which was a big benefit, but the even bigger benefit is they were now able to start to package and promote different solutions to their customers. So they were effectively able to monetize all the data that they were now getting and the information they were getting out of Snowflake. And then of course, once it was in there, they could also use things like Tableau or ThoughtSpot, both of which available in AWS Marketplace. And it allowed them to get all kinds of visualization of data that they never got in the past. >> The monetization piece is, is interesting. It's so challenging for organizations, one, to get that single source view, to be able to have a customer 360, but to also then be able to monetize data. When you're in customer conversations, how do you help customers on that journey, start? Because the, their competitors are clearly right behind them, ready to take first place spot. How do you help customers go, all right this is what we're going to do to help you on this journey with AWS to monetize your data? >> I think, you know, it's everything from, you know, looking at removing the silos of data. So one of the challenges they've had is they have these Legacy systems, and a lot of times they don't want to just take the Legacy systems and throw them into the cloud. They want to say, we need a holistic view of our customer, 360 view of our customer data. And then they're saying, hey, how can we actually monetize that data? That's where we do everything from, you know, Snowflake has the data marketplace where we list it in the data marketplace. We help them monetize it there. And we use some of the data sets from Amazon to help them do that. We use the technologies like Chris said with SageMaker and other tool sets to help them realize the value of their data in a real, meaningful way. >> So this sounds like a very strategic and technical partnership. >> Yeah, well, >> On both sides. >> It's technical and it's GOTO market. So if you take a look at, you know, Snowflake where they've built over 20 integrations now to different AWS services. So if you're using S3 for object storage, you can use Snowflake on top of that. If you want to load up Snowflake with Glue which is our ETL tool, you can do that. If you want to use QuickSite to do your data visualization on top of Snowflake, you can do that. So they've built integration to all of our services. And then we've built integrations like SageMaker back into Snowflake, and so that supports all kinds of specific customer use cases. So if you think of people that are doing any kind of cloud data platform workload, stuff like data engineering, data warehousing, data lakes, it could be even data applications, cyber security, unistore type things, Snowflake does an excellent job of helping our customers get into those types of environments. And so that's why we support the relationship with a variety of, you know, credit programs. We have a lot of co-sell motions on top of these technical integrations because we want to make sure that we not only have the right technical platform, but we've got the right GOTO market motion. And that's super important. >> Yeah, and I would add to that is like, you know one of the things that customers do is they make these large commitments to Amazon. And one of the best things that Amazon did was allow those customers to draw down Snowflake via the AWS Marketplace. So it's been wonderful to his point around the GOTO market, that was a huge issue for us. And, and again, this is where Amazon was innovative on identifying the ways to help make the customer have a better experience >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Chris D: and put the customer first. And this has been, you know, wonderful partnership there. >> Yeah. It really has. It's been a great, it's been really good. >> Well, and the customers are here. Like we said, >> Yep. >> Yes. Yes they are. >> we're north of 10,000 folks total, and customers are just chomping at the bit. There's been so much growth in the last three years from the last time, I think I heard the 2019 Snowflake Summit had about 1500 people. And here we are at 10,000 plus now, and standing-room-only keynote, the very big queue to get in, people turned away, pushed back to an overflow area to be able to see that, and that was yesterday. I didn't even get a chance to see what it was like today, but I imagine it was probably the same. Talk about the, when you're in customer conversations, where do you bring, from a GTM perspective, Where do you bring Snowflake into the conversation? >> Yeah >> Obviously, there's Redshift there, what does that look like? I imagine it follows the customer's needs, challenges. >> Exactly. >> Compelling events. >> Yeah. We're always going to work backwards from the customer need, and so that is the starting point for kindling both organizations. And so we're going to, you know, look at what they need. And from an AWS perspective, you know, if they're going with Snowflake, that's a very good thing. Right? 'Cause one of the things that we want to support is a selection experience to our AWS customers and make sure that no matter what they're doing, they're getting a very good, supported experience. And so we're always going to work backwards from the customer. And then once they make that technology decision, then we're going to support them, as I mentioned, with a whole bunch of co-sell resources. We have technical resources in the field. We have credit programs and in, you know, and, of course, we're going to market in a variety of different verticals as well with Snowflake. If you take a look at all the industry clouds that Snowflake has spun up, financial services and healthcare, and media entertainment, you know, those are all very specific use cases that are very valuable to an AWS customer. And AWS is going more and more to market on a vertical approach, and so Snowflake really just fits right in with our overall strategy. >> Right. Sounds like very tight alignment there. That mission alignment that Frank talked about yesterday. I know he was talking about that with respect to customers, but it sounds like there's a mission alignment between AWS and Snowflake. >> Mission alignment, yeah. >> I live that every week. (laughter) >> Sorry if I brought up a pain point. >> Yeah. Little bit. No. >> Guys, what's, in terms of use cases, obviously we've been here for a couple days. I'm sure you've had tremendous feedback, >> Chris G: Yeah. >> from, from customers, from partners, from the ecosystem. What's next, what can we expect to hear next? Maybe give us a preview of re:Invent in the few months. >> Preview of re:Invent. Yeah. No, well, one of the things we really want to start doing is just, you know, making the use case of, of launching Snowflake on AWS a lot easier. So what can we do to streamline those types of experiences? 'Cause a lot of times we'll find that customers, once they buy a third party solution like Snowflake, they have to then go through a whole series of configuration steps, and what can we do to streamline that? And so we're going to continue to work on that front. One of the other places that we've been exploring with Snowflake is how we work with channel partners. And, you know, when we first launched Marketplace it was really more of an app store model that was ISVs on one side and channel partners on the other, and there wasn't really a good fit for channel partners. And so four years ago we retrofitted the platform and have opened it up to resellers like an SHI or SIs like Salam or Deloitte who are top, two top SIs for Snowflake. And now they can use Marketplace to resell those technologies and also sell their services on top of that. So Snowflake's got a big, you know, practice with Salam, as I mentioned. You know, Salam can now sell through Marketplace and they can actually sell that statement of work and put that on the AWS bill all by virtue of using Marketplace, that automation platform. >> Ease of use for customers, ease of use for partners as well. >> Yes. >> And that ease of use is it's no joke. It's, it's not just a marketing term. It's measurable and it's about time-to-value, time-to-market, getting customers ahead of their competition so that they can be successful. Guys, thanks for joining me on theCUBE today. Talking about AWS and >> Nice to be back. Nice to be back in person. >> Isn't it nice to be back. It's great to be actually sitting across from another human. >> Exactly. >> Thank you so much for your insights, what you shared about the partnership and where it's going. We appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Cool. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right guys. For Chris and Chris, I'm Lisa Martin, here watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas. I'll be back with my next guest momentarily, so stick around. (Upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco, North America all over the world, and most of the parts Asia, Pacific Amazon Summit is the hashtag. This is part of theCUBE Virtual Program, where we're going to be covering Amazon Summits throughout the year. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And of course, we're not at the events. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios, with our COVID-19 quarantine crew. And we got a great guest here from AWS, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, leads the team on elastic compute, and its business where it's evolving and most importantly, what it means for the customers in the industry. Dave, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE virtual program. >> Hey John, it's really great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So we got the summit going down. It's new format because of the shelter in place. They're going virtual or digital, virtualization of events. And I want to have a session with you on EC2, and some of the new things they're going on. And I think the story is important, because certainly around the pandemic, and certainly on the large scale, SaaS business models, which are turning out to be quite the impact from a positive standpoint, with people sheltering in place, what is the role of data in all this, okay? And also, there's a lot of pressure financially. We've had the payroll loan programs from the government, and to companies really looking at their bottom lines. So two major highlights going on in the world that's directly impacted. And you have some products, and news around this, I want to do a deep dive on that. One is AppFlow, which is a new integration service by AWS, that really talks about taking the scale and value of AWS services, and integrating that with SaaS Applications. And the migration acceleration program for Windows, which has a storied history of database. For many, many years, you guys have been powering most of the Windows workloads, ironic that you guys are not Microsoft, but certainly had success there. Let's start with the AppFlow. Okay, this was recently announced on the 22nd of April. This is a new service. Can you take us through why this is important? What is the service? Why now, what was the main driver behind AppFlow? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launcher AppFlow, what we're really trying to do is make it easy for organizations and enterprises to really control the flow of their data, between the number of different applications that they use on premise, and AWS. And so the problem we started to see was, enterprises just had this data all over the place, and they wanted to do something useful with it. Right, we see many organizations running Data Lakes, large scale analytics, Big Machine Learning on AWS, but before you can do all of that, you have to have access to the data. And if that data is sitting in an application, either on-premise or elsewhere in AWS, it's very difficult to get out of that application, and into S3, or Redshift, or one of those services, before you can manipulate it, that was the challenge. And so the journey kind of started a few years ago, we actually launched a service on the EC2 network, inside Private Link. And it was really, it provided organizations with a very secure way to transfer network data, both between VPCs, and also between VPC, and on-prem networks. And what this highlighted to us, is organizations say that's great, but I actually don't have the technical ability, or the team, to actually do the work that's required to transform the data from, whether it's Salesforce, or SAP, and actually move it over Private Link to AWS. And so we realized, while private link was useful, we needed another layer of service that actually provided this, and one of the key requirements was an organization must be able to do this with no code at all. So basically, no developer required. And I want to be able to transfer data from Salesforce, my Salesforce database, and put that in Redshift together with some other data, and then perform some function on that. And so that's what AppFlow is all about. And so we came up with the idea about a little bit more than a year ago, that was the first time I sat down, and actually reviewed the content for what this was going to be. And the team's been hard at work, and launched on the 22nd of April. And we actually launched with 14 partners as well, that provide what we call connectors, which allow us to access these various services, and companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake, to name a few. >> Well, certainly you guys have a great ecosystem of SaaS partners, and that's you know well documented in the industry that you guys are not going to be competing directly with a lot of these big SaaS players, although you do have a few services for customers who want end to end, Jassy continues to pound that home on my Cube interviews. But I think this, >> Absolutely. is notable, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because this seems to be the key unlocking of the value of SaaS and Cloud, because data traversal, data transfer, there's costs involved, also moving traffic over the internet is unsecure, and unreliable. So a couple questions I wanted to just ask you directly. One is did the AppFlow come out of the AWS Private Link piece of it? And two, is it one directional or bi-directional? How is that working? Because I'm guessing that you had Private Link became successful, because no one wants to move on the internet. They wanted direct connects. Was there something inadequate about that service? Was there more headroom there? And is it bi-directional for the customer? >> So let me take the second one, it's absolutely bi-directional. So you can transfer that data between an on-premise application and AWS, or AWS and the on-premise application. Really, anything that has a connector can support the data flow in both directions. And with transformations, and so data in one data source, may need to be transformed, before it's actually useful in a second data source. And so AppFlow takes care of all that transformation as well, in both directions, And again, with no requirement for any code, on behalf of the customer. Which really unlocks it for a lot of the more business focused parts of an organization, who maybe don't have immediate access to developers. They can use it immediately, just literally with a few transformations via the console, and it's working for you. In terms of, you mentioned sort of the flow of data over the internet, and the need for security of data. It's critically important, and as we look at just what had happened as a company does. We have very, very strict requirements around the flow of data, and what services we can use internally. And where's any of our data going to be going? And I think it's a good example of how many enterprises are thinking about data today. They don't even want to trust even HTTPS, and encryption of data on the internet. I'd rather just be in a world where my data never ever traverses the internet, and I just never have to deal with that. And so, the journey all started with Private Link there, and probably was an interesting feature, 'cause it really was changing the way that we asked our customers to think about networking. Nothing like Private Link has ever existed, in the sort of standard networking that an enterprise would normally have. It's kind of only possible because of what VPC allows you to do, and what the software defined network on AWS gives you. And so we built Private Link, and as I said, customers started to adopt it. They loved the idea of being able to transfer data, either between VPCs, or between on-premise. Or between their own VPC, and maybe a third party provider, like Snowflake, has been a very big adopter of Private Link, and they have many customers using it to get access to Snowflake databases in a very secure way. And so that's where it all started, and in those discussions with customers, we started to see that they wanted us to up level a little bit. They said, "We can use Private Link, it's great, "but one of the problems we have is just the flow of data." And how do we move data in a very secure, in a highly available way, with no sort of bottlenecks in the system. And so we thought Private Link was a great sort of underlying technology, that empowered all of this, but we had to build the system on top of that, which is AppFlow. That says we're going to take care of all the complexity. And then we had to go to the ecosystem, and say to all these providers, "Can you guys build connectors?" 'Cause everybody realized it's super important that data can be shared, and so that organizations can really extract the value from that data. And so the 14 of them at launch, we have many, many more down the road, have come to the party with with connectors, and full support of what AppFlow provides. >> Yeah us DevOps purists always are pounding the fist on the table, now virtual table, API's and connectors. This is the model, so people are integrating. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I think you said low code, or no code on the developer simplicity side. Is it no code, or low code? Can you just explain quickly and clarify that point? >> It's no code for getting started literally, for the kind of, it's basic to medium complexity use case. It's not code, and a lot of customers we spoke to, that was a bottleneck. Right, they needed something from data. It might have been the finance organization, or it could have been human resources, somebody else in organization needed that. They don't have a developer that helps them typically. And so we find that they would wait many, many months, or maybe even never get the project done, just because they never ever had access to that data, or to the developer to actually do the work that was required for the transformation. And so it's no code for almost all use cases. Where it literally is, select your data source, select the connector, and then select the transformations. And some basic transformations, renaming of fields, transformation of data in simple ways. That's more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. And then obviously through to the destination, with the connector on the other side, to do the final transformation, to the final data source that you want to migrate the data to. >> You know, you have an interesting background, was looking at your history, and you've essentially been a web services kind of guy all your life. From a code standpoint software environment, and now I'll say EC2 is the crown jewel of AWS, and doing more and more with S3. But what's interesting, as you build more of these layers services in there, there's more flexibility. So right now, in most of the customer environments, is a debate around, do I build something monolithic, and or decoupled, okay? And I think there's a world where there's a mutually, not mutually exclusive, I mean, you have a mainframe, you have a big monolithic thing, if it does something. But generally people would agree that a decoupled environment is more flexible, and more agile. So I want to kind of get to the customer use case, 'cause I can really see this being really powerful, AppFlow with Private Link, where you mentioned Snowflake. I mean, Snowflake is built on AWS, they're doing extremely, extremely well, like any other company that builds on AWS. Whether it's theCUBE Cloud, or it's Snowflake. As we tap those services, customers, we might have people who want to build on our platform on top of AWS. So I know a bunch of startups that are building within the Snowflake ecosystem, a customer of yours. >> Yeah. >> So they're technically a customer of Amazon, but they're also in the ecosystem of say, Snowflake. >> Yes. >> So this brings up an interesting kind of computer science problem, which is architecturally, how do I think about that? Is this something where AppFlow could help me? Because I certainly want to enable people to build on a platform, that I build if I'm doing that, if I'm not going to be a pure SaaS turnkey application. But if I'm going to bring partners in, and do integration, use the benefits of the goodness of an API or Connector driven architecture, I need that. So explain to me how this helps me, or doesn't help me. Is this something that makes sense to you? Does this question make sense? How do you react to that? >> I think so, I think the question is pretty broad. But I think there's an element in which I can help. So firstly, you talk about sort of decoupled applications, right? And I think that is certainly the way that we've gone at Amazon, and been very, very successful for us. I think we started that journey back in 2003, when we decoupled the monolithic application that was amazon.com. And that's when our service journey started. And a lot of that sort of inspired AWS, and how we built what we built today. And we see a lot of our customers doing that, moving to smaller applications. It just works better, it's easier to debug, there's ownership at a very controlled level. So you can get all your engineering teams to have very clear and crisp ownership. And it just drives innovation, right? 'Cause each little component can innovate without the burden of the rest of the ecosystem. And so that's what we really enjoy. I think the other thing that's important when you think about design, is to see how much of the ecosystem you can leverage. And so whether you're building on Snowflake, or you're building directly on top of AWS, or you're building on top of one of our other customers and partners. If you can use something that solves the problem for you, versus building it yourself. Well that just leaves you with more time to actually go and focus on the stuff that you need to be solving, right? The product you need to be building. And so in the case of AppFlow, I think if there's a need for transfer of data, between, for example, Snowflake and some data warehouse, that you as an organisation are trying to build on a Snowflake infrastructure. AppFlow is something you could potentially look at. It's certainly not something that you could just use for, it's very specific and focused to the flow of data between services from a data analytics point of view. It's not really something you could use from an API point of view, or messaging between services. It's more really just facilitating that flow of data, and the transformation of data, to get it into a place that you can do something useful with it. >> And you said-- >> But like any of our services-- (speakers talk over each other) Couldn't be using any layer in the stack. >> Yes, it's a level of integration, right? There's no code to code, depending on how you look at it, cool. Customer use cases, you mentioned, large scale analytics, I thought I heard you say, machine learning, Data Lakes. I mean, basically, anyone who's using data is going to want to tap some sort of data repository, and figure out how to scale data when appropriate. There's also contextual, relevant data that might be specific to say, an industry vertical, or a database. And obviously, AI becomes the application for all this. >> Exactly. >> If I'm a customer, how does AppFlow relate to that? How does that help me, and what's the bottom line? >> So I think there's two parts to that journey. And depending on where customers are, and so there's, we do have millions of customers today that are running applications on AWS. Over the last few years, we've seen the emergence of Data Lakes, really just the storage of a large amount of data, typically in S3. But then companies want to extract value out of, and use in certain ways. Obviously, we have many, many tools today, from Redshift, Athena, that allow you to utilize these Data Lakes, and be able to run queries against this information. Things like EMR, and one of our oldest services in the space. And so doing some sort of large scale analytics, and more recently, services like SageMaker, are allowing us to do machine learning. And so being able to run machine learning across an enormous amount of data that we have stored in AWS. And there's some stuff in the IoT, workload use space as well, that's emerging. And many customers are using it. There's obviously many customers today that aren't using it on AWS, potential customers for us, that are looking to do something useful with data. And so the one part of the journey is taking up all of that infrastructure, and we have a lot of services that make it really easy to do machine learning, and do analytics, and that sort of thing. And then the other problem, the other side of the problem, which is what AppFlow is addressing is, how do I get that data to S3, or to Redshift, to actually go and run that machine learning workload? And that's what it's really unlocking for customers. And it's not just the one time transfer of data, the other thing that AppFlow actually supports, is the continuous updating of data. And so if you decide that you want to have that view of your data in S3, for example, and Data Lake, that's kept up to date, within a few minutes, within an hour, you can actually configure AppFlow to do that. And so the data source could be Salesforce, it could be Slack, it could be whatever data source you want to blend. And you continuously have that flow of data between those systems. And so when you go to run your machine learning workload, or your analytics, it's all continuously up to date. And you don't have this problem of, let me get the data, right? And when I think about some of the data jobs that I've run, in my time, back in the day as an engineer, on early EC2, a small part of it was actually running the job on the data. A large part of it was how do I actually get that data, and is it up to date? >> Up to date data is critical, I think that's the big feature there is that, this idea of having the data connectors, really makes the data fresh, because we go through the modeling, and you realize why I missed a big patch of data, the machine learnings not effective. >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's only-- >> Exactly, and the other thing is, it's very easy to bring in new data sources, right? You think about how many companies today have an enormous amount of data just stored in silos, and they haven't done anything with it. Often it'll be a conversation somewhere, right? Around the coffee machine, "Hey, we could do this, and we can do this." But they haven't had the developers to help them, and haven't had access to the data, and haven't been able to move the data, and to put it in a useful place. And so, I think what we're seeing here, with AppFlow, really unlocking of that. Because going from that initial conversation, to actually having something running, literally requires no code. Log into the AWS console, configure a few connectors, and it's up and running, and you're ready to go. And you can do the same thing with SageMaker, or any of the other services we have on the other side that make it really simple to run some of these ideas, that just historically have been just too complicated. >> Alright, so take me through that console piece. Just walk me through, I'm in, you sold me on this. I just came out of meeting with my company, and I said, "Hey, you know what? "We're blowing up this siloed approach. "We want to kind of create this horizontal data model, "where we can mix "and match connectors based upon our needs." >> Yeah. >> So what do I do? I'm using SageMaker, using some data, I got S3, I got an application. What do I do? I'm connecting what, S3? >> Yeah, well-- >> To the app? >> So the simplest thing is, and the simplest place to find this actually, is on Jeff Bezos blog, that he did for the release, right? Jeff always does a great job in demonstrating how to use our various products. But it literally is going into the standard AWS console, which is the console that we use for all of our services. I think we have 200 of them, so it is getting kind of challenging to find the ball in that console, as we continue to grow. And find AppFlow. AppFlow is a top level service, and so you'll see it in the console. And the first thing you got to do, is you got to configure your Source-Connect. And so it's a connector that, where's the data coming from? And as I said, we had 14 partners, you'll be able to see those connectors there, and see what's supported. And obviously, there's the connectivity. Do you have access to that data, or where is the data running? AppFlow runs within AWS, and so you need to have either VPN, or direct connect back to the organization, if the data source is on-premise. If the data source happens to be in AWS, and obviously be in a VPC, and you just need to configure some of that connectivity functionality. >> So no code if the connectors are there, but what if I want to build my own connector? >> So building your own connector, that is something that we working with third parties with right now. I could be corrected, but not 100% sure whether that's available. It's certainly something I think we would allow customers to do, is to extend sort of either the existing connectors, or to add additional transformations as well. And so you'd be able to do that. But the transformations that the vast majority of our customers are using are literally just in the console, with the basic transformations. >> It comes bigger apps that people have, and just building those connectors. How does a partner get involved? You got 14 partners now, how do you extend the partner base contact in Amazon Partner Manager, or you send an email to someone? How does someone get involved? What are you recommending? >> So there are a couple of ways, right? We have an extensive partner ecosystem that the vast majority of these ISVs are already integrated with. And so, we have the 14 we launched with, we also pre announced SAP, which is going to be a very critical one for the vast majority of our customers. Having deep integration with SAP data, and being able to bring that seamlessly into AWS. That'll be launching soon. And then there's a long list of other ones, that we're currently working on. And they're currently working on them themselves. And then the other one is going to be, like with most things that Amazon, feedback from customers. And so what we hear from customers, and very often you'll hear from third party partners as well, who'll come and say, "Hey, my customers are asking me "to integrate with the AppFlow, what do I need to do?" And so, you know, just reaching out to AWS, and letting them know that you'd be interested in integrating, that you're not part of the partner program. The team would be happy to engage, and bring you on board, so-- >> (mumbles) on playbook, get the top use cases nailed down, listen to customers, and figure it out. >> Exactly. >> Great stuff Dave, we really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to digging in AppFlow, and I'll check on Jeff Bezos blog. Sure, it's April 22, was the launch day, probably had up there. One of the things that want to just jump into, now moving into the next topic, is the cost structure. A lot of pressure on costs. This is where I think this Migration Acceleration Program for Windows is interesting. Andy Jassy always likes to boast on stage at Reinvent, about the number of workloads of Windows running on Amazon Web Services. This has been a big part of the customers, I think, for over 10 years, that I can think of him talking about this. What is this about? Are you still seeing uptake on Windows workloads, or, I mean,-- >> Absolutely. >> Azure has got some market share, >> Absolutely. >> but now you, doesn't really kind of square in my mind, what's going on here. Tell us about this migration service. >> Yeah, absolutely, on the migration side. So Windows is absolutely, we still believe AWS is the best place to run a Windows workload. And we have many, many happy Windows customers today. And it's a very big, very large, growing point of our business today, it used to be. I was part of the original team back in 2008, that launched, I think it was Windows 2008, back then on EC2. And I remember sort of working out all the details, of how to do all the virtualization with Windows, obviously back then we'd done Linux. And getting Windows up and running, and working through some of the challenges that Windows had as an operating system in the early days. And it was October 2008 that we actually launched Windows as an operating system. And it's just been, we've had many, many happy Windows customers since then. >> Why is Amazon so peak to run workloads from Windows so effectively? >> Well, I think, sorry what did you say peaked? >> Why is Amazon so in well positioned to run the Windows workloads? >> Well, firstly, I mean, I think Windows is really just the operating system, right? And so if you think about that as the very last little bit of your sort of virtualization stack, and then being able to support your applications. What you really have to think about is, everything below that, both in terms of the compute, so performance you're going to get, the price performance you're going to get. With our Nitro Hypervisor, and the Nitro System that we developed back in 2018, or launched in 2018. We really are able to provide you with the best price performance, and have the very least overhead from a hypervisor point of view. And then what that means is you're getting more out of your machine, for the price that you pay. And then you think about the rest of the ecosystem, right? Think about all the other services, and all the features, and just the breadth, and the extensiveness of AWS. And that's critically important for all of our Windows customers as well. And so you're going to have things like Active Directory, and these sort of things that are very Windows specific, and we can absolutely support all of those, natively. And in the Windows operating system as well. We have things like various agents that you can run inside the Windows box to do more maintenance and management. And so I think we've done a really good job in bringing Windows into the larger, and broader ecosystem of AWS. And it really is just a case of making sure that Windows runs smoothly. And that's just the last little bit on top of that, and so many customers enterprises run Windows today. When I started out my career, I was developing software in the banking industry, and it was a very much a Windows environment. They were running critical applications. And so we see it's critically important for customers who run Windows today, to be able to bring those Windows workloads to AWS. >> Yeah, and that's certainly-- >> We are seeing a trend. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. >> Well, they're certainly out there from a market share standpoint, but this is a cost driver, you guys are saying, and I want you to just give an example, or just illustrate why it costs less. How is it a cost savings? Is it just services, cycle times on EC2? I mean what's the cost savings? I'm a customer like, "Okay, so I'm going to go to Amazon with my workloads." Why is it a cost saving? >> I think there are a few things. The one I was referring to in my previous comment was the price performance, right? And so if I'm running on a system, where the hypervisor is using a significant portion of the physical CPU that I want to use as well. Well there's an overhead to that. And so from a price performance point of view, I look at, if I go and benchmark a CPU, and I look at how much I pay for that per unit of that benchmark, it's better on AWS. Because with our natural system, we're able to give you 100% of the floor. And so you get a performance then. So that's the first thing is price performance, which is different from this price. But there's a saving there as well. The other one is a large part, and getting into the migration program as well. A large part of what we do with our customers, when they come to AWS, is supposed to be, we take a long look at their license strategy. What licenses do they have? And a key part of bringing in Windows workloads AWS, is license optimization. What can we do to help you optimize the licenses that you're using today for Windows, for SQL Server, and really try and find efficiencies in that. And so we're able to secure significant savings for many of our customers by doing that. And we have a number of tools that they use as part of the migration program to do that. And so that helps save there. And then finally, we have a lot of customers doing what we call modernization of their applications. And so it really embraced Cloud, and some of the benefits that you get from Cloud. Especially elasticities, so being able to scale for demand. It's very difficult to do that when you bound by license for your operating system, because every box you run, you have to have a license for it. And so tuning auto scaling on, you've got to make sure you have enough licenses for all these Windows boxes you've seen. And so the push the Cloud's bringing, we've seen a lot of customers move Windows applications from Windows to Linux, or even move SQL Server, from SQL server to SQL Server on Linux, or another database platform. And do a modernization there, that already allows them to benefit from the elasticity that Cloud provides, without having to constantly worry about licenses. >> So final question on this point, migration service implies migration from somewhere else. How do they get involved? What's the onboarding process? Can you give a quick detail on that? >> Absolutely, so we've been helping customers with migrations for years. We've launched a migration program, or Migration Acceleration Program, MAP. We launched it, I think about 2016, 2017 was the first part of that. It was really just a bringing together of the various, the things we'd learned, the tools we built, the best strategies to do a migration. And we said, "How do we help customers looking "to migrate to the Cloud." And so that's what MAP's all about, is just a three phase, we'll help you assess the migration, we'll help you do a lot of planning. And then ultimately, we help you actually do the migration. We partner with a number of external partners, and ISVs, and GSIs, who also worked very closely with us to help customers do migrations. And so what we launched in April of this year, with the Windows migration program, is really just more support for Windows workload, as part of the broader Migration Acceleration Program. And there's benefits to customers, it's a smoother migration, it's a faster migration in almost all cases, we're doing license assessments, and so there's cost reduction in that as well. And ultimately, there's there's other benefits as well that we offer them, if they partner with us in bringing the workload to AWS. And so getting involved is really just reaching out to one of our AWS sales folks, or one of your account managers, if you have an account manager, and talk to them about workloads that you'd like to bring in. And we even go as far as helping you identify which applications are easiest to migrate. And so that you can kind of get going with some of the easier ones, while we help you with some of the more difficult ones. And strategies' about removing those roadblocks to bring your services to AWS. >> Takes the blockers away, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, the crown jewel of AWS, breaking down AppFlow, and the migration to Windows services. Great insights, appreciate the time. >> Thanks. >> We're here with Dave Brown, VP of EC2, as part of the virtual Cube coverage. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on an industry topic. Given what you've done with EC2, and the success, and with COVID-19, you're seeing that scale problem play out on the world stage for the entire population of the global world. This is now turning non-believers into believers of DevOps, web services, real time. I mean, this is now a moment in history, with the challenges that we have, even when we come out of this, whether it's six months or 12 months, the world won't be the same. And I believe that there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of applications. And an architecture that's going to look a lot like Cloud, Cloud-native. You've been doing this for many, many years, key architect of EC2 with your team. How do you see this playing out? Because a lot of people are going to be squirreling in rooms, when this comes back. They're going to be video conferencing now, but when they have meetings, they're going to look at the window of the future, and they're going to be exposed to what's failed. And saying, "We need to double down on that, "we have to fix this." So there's going to be winners and losers coming out of this pandemic, really quickly. And I think this is going to be a major opportunity for everyone to rally around this moment, to reset. And I think it's going to look a lot like this decoupled, this distributed computing environment, leveraging all the things that we've talked about in the past. So what's your advice, and how do you see this evolving? >> Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think, just the speed at which it happened as well. And the way in which organizations, both internally and externally, had to reinvent themselves very, very quickly, right? We've been very fortunate within Amazon, moving to working from home was relatively simple for the vast majority of us. Obviously, we have a number of our employees that work in data centers, and performance centers that have been on the front lines, and be doing a great job. But for the rest of us, it's been virtual video conferencing, right? All about meetings, and being able to use all of our networking tools securely, either over the VPN, or the no VPN infrastructure that we have. And many organizations had to do that. And so I think there are a number of different things that have impacted us right now. Obviously, virtual desktops has been a significant sort of growth point, right? Folks don't have access to the physical machine anymore, they're now all having to work remote, and so service like Workspaces, which runs on EC2, as well, has being a critical service data to support many of our largest customers. Our client VPN service, so we have within EC2 on the networking side, has also been critical for many large organizations, as they see more of their staff working everyday remotely. It has also seen, been able to support a lot of customers there. Just more broadly, what we've seen with COVID-19, is we've seen some industries really struggle, obviously travel industry, people just aren't traveling anymore. And so there's been immediate impact to some of those industries. They've been other industries that support functions like the video conferencing, or entertainment side of the house, has seen a bit of growth, over the last couple of months. And education has been an interesting one for us as well, where schools have been moving online. And behind the scenes in AWS, and on EC2, we've been working really hard to make sure that our supply chains are not interrupted in any way. The last thing we want to do is have any of our customers not be able to get EC2 capacity, when they desperately need it. And so we've made sure that capacity is fully available, even all the way through the pandemic. And we've even been able to support customers with, I remember one customer who told me the next day, they're going to have more than hundred thousand students coming online. And they suddenly had to grow their business, by some crazy number. And we were able to support them, and give them the capacity, which is way outside of any sort of demand--. >> I think this is the Cambrain explosion that I was referring to, because a whole new set of new things have emerged. New gaps in businesses have been exposed, new opportunities are emerging. This is about agility. It's real time now. It's actually happening for everybody, not just the folks on the inside of the industry. This is going to create a reinvention. So it's ironic, I've heard the word reinvent mentioned more times now, over the past three months, than I've heard it representing to Amazon. 'Cause that's your annual conference, Reinvent, but people are resetting and reinventing. It's actually a tactic, this is going on. So they're going to need some Clouds. So what do you say to that? >> So, I mean, the first thing is making sure that we can continue to be highly available, continue to have the capacity. The worst scenario is not being able to have the capacity for our customers, right? We did see that with some providers, and that honesty on outside is just years and years of experience of being able to manage supply chain. And the second thing is obviously, making sure that we remain available, that we don't have issues. And so, you know, with all of our stuff going remote and working from home, all my teams are working from home. Being able to support AWS in this environment, we haven't missed a beat there, which has been really good. We were well set up to be able to absorb this. And then obviously, remaining secure, which was our highest priority. And then innovating with our customers, and being able to, and that's both products that we're going to launch over time. But in many cases, like that education scenario I was talking about, that's been able to find that capacity, in multiple regions around the world, literally on a Sunday night, because they found out literally that afternoon, that Monday morning, all schools were virtual, and they were going to use their platform. And so they've been able to respond to that demand. We've seen a lot more machine learning workloads, we've seen an increase there as well as organizations are running more models, both within the health sciences area, but also in the financial areas. And also in just general business, (mumbles), yes, wherever it might be. Everybody's trying to respond to, what is the impact of this? And better understand it. And so machine learning is helping there, and so we've been able to support all those workloads. And so there's been an explosion. >> I was joking with my son, I said, "This world is interesting." Amazon really wins, that stuff's getting delivered to my house, and I want to play video games and Twitch, and I want to build applications, and write software. Now I could do that all in my home. So you went all around. But all kidding aside, this is an opportunity to define agility, so I want to get your thoughts, because I'm a bit a big fan of Amazon. As everyone knows, I'm kind of a pro Amazon person, and as other Clouds kind of try to level up, they're moving in the same direction, which is good for everybody, good competition and all. But S3 and EC2 have been the crown jewels. And building more services around those, and creating these abstraction layers, and new sets of service to make it easier, I know has been a top priority for AWS. So can you share your vision on how you're going to make EC2, and all these services easier for me? So if I'm a coder, I want literally no code, low code, infrastructure as code. I need to make Amazon more programmable and easier. Can you just share your vision on, as we talk about the virtual summits, as we cover the show, what's your take on making Amazon easier to consume and use? >> It's been something we thought a lot over the years, right? When we started out, we were very simple. The early days of EC2, it wasn't that rich feature set. And it's been an interesting journey for us. We've obviously become a lot more, we've written, launched local features, which narrative brings some more complexity to the platform. We have launched things like Lightsail over the years. Lightsail is a hosting environment that gives you that EC2 like experience, but it's a lot simpler. And it's also integrated with a number of other services like RDS and ELB as well, basic load balancing functionality. And we've seen some really good growth there. But what we've also learned is customers enjoy the richness of what ECU provides, and what the full ecosystem provides, and being able to use the pieces that they really need to build their application. From an S3 point of view, from a board ecosystem point of view. It's providing customers with the features and functionality that they really need to be successful. From the compute side of the house, we've done some things. Obviously, Containers have really taken off. And there's a lot of frameworks, whether it's EKS, or community service, or a Docker-based ECS, has made that a lot simpler for developers. And then obviously, in the serverless space, Landers, a great way of consuming EC2, right? I know it's serverless, but there's still an EC2 instance under the hood. And being able to bring a basic function and run those functions in serverless is, a lot of customers are enjoying that. The other complexity we're going after is on the networking side of the house, I find that a lot of developers out there, they're more than happy to write the code, they're more than happy to bring their reputation to AWS. But they struggle a little bit more on the networking side, they really do not want to have to worry about whether they have a route to an internet gateway, and if their subnets defined correctly to actually make the application work. And so, we have services like App Mesh, and the whole mesh server space is developing a lot. To really make that a lot simpler, where you can just bring your application, and call it on an application that just uses service discovery. And so those higher level services are definitely helping. In terms of no code, I think that App Mesh, sorry not App Mesh, AppFlow is one of the examples for already given organizations something at that level, that says I can do something with no code. I'm sure there's a lot of work happening in other areas. It's not something I'm actively thinking on right now , in my role in leading EC2, but I'm sure as the use cases come from customers, I'm sure you'll see more from us in those areas. They'll likely be more specific, though. 'Cause as soon as you take code out of the picture, you're going to have to get pretty specific in the use case. You already get the depth, the functionality the customers will need. >> Well, it's been super awesome to have your valuable time here on the virtual Cube for covering Amazon Summit, Virtual Digital Event that's going on. And we'll be going on throughout the year. Really appreciate the insight. And I think, it's right on the money. I think the world is going to have in six to 12 months, surge in reset, reinventing, and growing. So I think a lot of companies who are smart, are going to reset, reinvent, and set a new growth trajectory. Because it's a Cloud-native world, it's Cloud-computing, this is now a reality, and I think there's proof points now. So the whole world's experiencing it, not just the insiders, and the industry, and it's going to be an interesting time. So really appreciate that, they appreciate it. >> Great, >> Them coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's been good. >> I'm John Furrier, here inside theCUBE Virtual, our virtual Cube coverage of AWS Summit 2020. We're going to have ongoing Amazon Summit Virtual Cube. We can't be on the show floor, so we'll be on the virtual show floor, covering and talking to the people behind the stories, and of course, the most important stories in silicon angle, and thecube.net. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. We're here live in Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit. It's like re:Invent but also for public sector. But it's a global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Vincent Quah, who's the head of education, nonprofits, and healthcare in Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John, Stu. Great to be able to be here. >> You know, we constantly talk about cloud in the United States here, and people use the word GovCloud, and Teresa and I always kind of jokingly say, "No, it's bigger than GovCloud. It's global public sector." You bring an international perspective covering APAC for AWS? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Public sector, okay. Outside of China, which is a different division with Amazon, you got the whole world. So Teresa and the team are looking not just at the US, it's the entire world. What's different? How's that working? Give us an update. >> I think one of the key differences that we see is that the US has really led the way in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies. We had great examples of universities that have really gone all in. What we are seeing now is that universities and education institutions in Asia, they're beginning to pick up their pace. And it's exciting to see some of the universities really coming very strongly using AWS. And we're seeing this across not just in mature countries and developed countries, but also in developing countries. And so it is a very widespread adoption of the cloud. And we're very excited by that. Tell us about the AWS Educate. Teresa Carlson on stage yesterday very highlighted much in her keynote about education, as well as some of the that they're doing with retraining and educating young people and whatnot, but really education has been a real growth area, from interest with cloud. Because old IT (laughs) okay, you look at that, okay, there's never had a lot of IT guys. (Vincent laughs) But it's really changed both technology procurement and delivery, but also the impact. >> Right. >> Talk about the AWS Educate program. >> So the AWS Educate program is a free program that all institutions can join. It comes with content from AWS, it comes with content from some of the top computer science universities in the world, as well as Cloud Credits, where individual student members, or the educator's members, they can actually get access to using the real platform that AWS provide. Now, this is really game-changing for students and for the institution. And it's game-changing because they have exactly the same access to all the 125-plus technologies that AWS provide to enterprises and now they are in the hands of students. So can you imagine, if they have the experience using some of these services, building capabilities, building solutions and services, and bringing out to the market. So now, innovation is in the hands of every single individual. And Educate is such an important program to re-skill and skill graduates to be ready for the working world. >> I love that, Vincent. I think back, most of my career, when you talked about education, you talked about research and universities. So it was a certain top-tier and a very limited amount. You're really democratizing what's happening. Wonder if you have any examples, or what sort of innovations are coming out of some of these global initiatives? One of the great example is NOVA, right. So we've announced that NOVA is now building this cloud associate degree as part of their information systems technology. >> What's NOVA again? >> The Northern Virginia Community College. >> In the keynote yesterday, not to be confused with Villanova, the basketball champs. >> Northern Virginia, got it, sorry. >> So, there's a need there that the institutions see because there's so much that the industry would need in terms of skills and graduates graduating with the right skill set. If you look at the World Economic Forum that was published in 2016, more about Internet and cloud computing are the two key technological drivers that's creating all these change in the industry. And many, many organizations are now investing into skilling and re-skilling. Educate sits so nicely to this particular part of the agenda. Apart from what NOVA has done here in the US, there are two other examples I want to quickly highlight to you. The first is, in the first week of June, we actually did an event in the Philippines. It was a large-scale student event. We had more than hundreds of students in a single location, with probably close to 100 educators. We took them through a four-day event. Two days of skills and content learning with hands-on experience. A third day on a gamified challenge that we put the students through so that they can compete with one another in groups, and thereby achieving top-notch scores in the leaderboard. And at the end of the day, they actually get to also develop a curriculum vitae, a CV, that they can actually submit to companies. And on the fourth day, we brought more than 20 companies as part of this whole event, and we got the students to actually connect with the companies, and the companies to the students, so that where the companies are looking for jobs, these are the students that are ready with skills that they have learned over the past three days, that they can apply to jobs that these company are looking for. So that's a really strong case of what we see working. Connecting skills to companies that are looking for students with the right set of skills. >> Talk about the international global landscape for a minute. You have a unique perspective in your job. What are the key things going on out there? What's the progress look like? What are some of the successes? Can you share a little bit about what's going on in Asia, Pacific, and Japan? >> Sure. There'll be two examples that I'll be sharing. The first is, we know that AWS Educate started off at the tertiary level. But then, last re:Invent is now being extended to 14 years and above. So now children at that age can learn about the cloud and be made aware of what's the potential of the cloud and what they can learn and use the cloud for. We've also begun to extend that work into the adult working workforce. One very specific example that I can share with you. There is an organization in Singapore called the National Trade Unions Congress LearningHub. They're an education service provider and they provide education services to citizens of Singapore. We have worked with them. They're using the AWS Educate content, and they develop two courses. Fundamentals in Cloud Computing and Fundamentals in IoT. They bring this pilot courses for the Fundamentals in IoT to a group of individuals age 45 to 74 years old. And they came away, the course just simply blew their mind away. They were so excited about what they have learned. How to program, actually, I have with me, an Internet of Things button. Now they can actually come up with an idea, program an activity on this button, so that it trigger off a particular reaction. And that's the excitement that these individuals 45 to 74 years old. They have the domain expertise, now they need is just an idea and a platform. >> It's also entrepreneurial too. >> Absolutely. >> They can tinker with the software, learn about the cloud at a very young age, and they can grow into it and maybe start something compelling, have a unique idea, fresh perspective. >> Correct. >> Or, someone who's retraining, to get a new job. >> Correct. And innovation is, we keep thinking of innovation as something that's really big. But actually, innovation doesn't have to be that way. It can start very small and then scale up from there. And all you need is just an idea to apply. >> All right. So Vincent, one of the themes we've been talking a lot about at the show is cybersecurity. Can you speak how that discussion plays specifically in the education markets? >> What we want to do is really raise the awareness of every individual's understanding of cloud computing. And by that I mean from 14 years to 74 years old. We want to let them know, actually, they are already interacting with cloud technologies. For example, if you have a Samsung Smart TV at home, if you have made a hotel booking through Expedia or through Airbnb, or if you have called for home delivery from McDonald's, you've already interacted with the cloud. And so what we want to do is make sure that everybody actually understand that. And then through some of these courses that are being provided by our partners, then they can go and learn about the security part of it. And help them have a much better sense of idea of, look, the cloud is actually a lot more secure. And we've heard many examples of that today and yesterday. And we want to give them that assurance that what they are doing and consuming, they can be part of that entrepreneur process to create something new and very exciting. >> Vincent, I'll give you the last word on this interview by sharing the update from Asia Pacific AWS. How many people are out there's a growing, you're hiring. What are some of the priorities you guys have. They have a big event in Singapore, I know that. We've been watching it, thinking about bringing theCUBE there. Give us some idea of the growth around the AWS people. What's the head count look like, give us some estimations. John, you know I can't really talk too much about head count, but I can say that we are definitely growing our AWS head count very, very rapidly. The needs and requirements out there in the market is so tremendous, and we want to be able to serve the customer as best as we can. We are a customer-obsessed company, and so we want to be there with the customer, work with them to really meet the objective and the goals that they have. And help them achieve that vision. And so we are just the enabler. We empower the customer to make. >> You have events out there too, right? You have the re:Invent, Summit? >> We have the AWS Summit, and this coming October we have the Public Sector Summit here in Singapore, as well as in Canberra in September. >> Right. >> And there's an education event coming domestically, too. >> And there's an education, a global education event that is happening in Seattle in August. So we're very excited about that. >> Lot of action on the AWS ecosystem. Congratulations, you guys do a great job. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Vincent. Really appreciate it. We're here live in Washington, DC. It's theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got Dave Vellante here as well, coming and joining us for some interviews. We'll be right back, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. We are thrilled to welcome back to the program Sandy Carter, who's a vice president with Amazon Web Services. Been with the company about a year. We've had you on the program many times, but first time since you've been at AWS, so... >> That's right, I'm celebrating my year yesterday with Amazon Web Services. >> Stu: And no cake, all right. >> I had a cake yesterday, actually, cake and champagne, by the way. (laughing) >> Sandy, we always love to hear, you know, you talk to so many customers, you know, bring us back for a little bit. What brought you to AWS, what's exciting to your customers when you're talking to them today? >> Well, you know, I really love innovation, I love being innovative, and you know, bar none Amazon is the most innovative company out there today, but really what brought me to Amazon was their focus on the customer, really "obsession" on the customer. When they say obsession they really mean obsession. They work backwards from the customer. We really have this big, big thrust. In fact, one of my favorite stories is when I first came to Amazon we'd be in these meetings and people would say, "Well, what does Low Flying Hawk think about this," or "What does Low Flying Hawk think about that," and I was like, "Who is Low Flying Hawk?" Well, he's a person who would give comments on a forum and just a person who wasn't even spending millions of dollars with Amazon but just had a lot of big clout. We actually just opened a building named Low Flying Hawk, believe it or not. >> Jeff: Have you identified this person? >> They do know who he is, yes. (laughing) But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important. >> And Sandy, at re:Invent you actually, you spoke to the analyst, I was listening to the session. It's not just kind of, people think AWS they think public cloud. You work for Amazon, it's everything kind of across what you think of Amazon.com, AWS, everything from drones and using Kindles and everything like that. Can you give us a little bit of kind of that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. Amazon is very methodical in the way that we innovate, and what we do is we really try to understand the customer. We work backwards from the customer, so we do a press release first, we do frequently asked questions next, and then we do a narrative-- >> You're saying you do an internal press release, yes, yes. >> Yeah, internal press release. Internal frequently asked questions, and then we review a six-page document, no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us to debate and learn from each other and just iterate on the idea that makes it better and better and better so that when we come out with it it's a really powerful idea and powerful concept, something that the customers really want. >> So, we'll ask you what you're doing now, but one more kind of transition question, what was your biggest surprise? You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery from people on the outside looking in in terms of culture, and we know it's car driving and innovative growing like crazy company, not only in business but in terms of people. What was your biggest surprise once you kind of got on the inside door? >> My biggest surprise was just how incredibly encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS. My boss is Matt Garman, he's been supportive since day one, you know, Andy, they just cheer you on. They want you to do well and I've really never been at a company that everybody's really pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting but really pulling for you to be successful. So, that's really was the biggest surprise to me, and then that customer obsession. Like, it's not customer focus, it really is customer obsession. >> Right, I think it's so well illustrated by the, again not AWS, but Amazon with the store, right, with no cash register, no people. >> Sandy: Amazon Go. >> To think about that-- >> Sandy: Yeah. >> From the customer point of view is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store, so it's such a clean illustration of a customer centric way to attack the problem. >> And I love that because what we did is we opened up the beta first for employees, so we would go in and play with it and test it out, and then we opened it up in Seattle and we would give customer tours. Now it's open to the public in Seattle, so it just again shows you that iterative process that Amazon uses and it's super cool, have you guys been? >> Jeff: Have not been. >> Ugh, in fact, my daughter went in. She put on a mask, she was going to fool the system but it wasn't fooled. All the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly. >> I love how everyone loves to get so creative and try to, you know, get through the system, right, try to break the system. >> I know, but my daughter, that's what I would figure for sure. (laughing) >> So, what are you working on now? You've been there a year, what are you working on? >> So, we are innovating around the enterprise workload, so we know that a lot of startups and cloud native companies have moved to the cloud, but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises that are trying to figure out what their strategy is, and so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible. How can we innovate to get them migrated over as fast as possible? So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS. It's actually been running there longer than with any other vendor and we have amazing performance, amazing reliability. We just released an ML, machine learning OMI for Windows so that you can use and leverage all that great Windows support and applications that you have, and then you guys saw earlier I was talking to VMware. We know that a lot of customers want to do hybrid cloud on their journey to going all-in with the cloud, and so we formed this great partnership with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud on AWS and we're seeing great traction there. Like Scribd's network just talked about how they're using it for disaster recovery. Other customers are using it to migrate. One CIO migrated 143 workloads in a weekend using that solution. So, it just helps them to get to that hybrid state before they go all-in on the cloud. >> So, are they, I was going to say, are they building a mirror instance of what their on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version? Is that how they're kind of negotiating that transition or how does that work? >> So, with VMware they don't have to refactor, so they can just go straight over. With Microsoft workloads what we're seeing a lot of times is maybe they'll bring a sequel app over and they'll just do a lift and shift, and then once they feel comfortable with the cloud they'll go to Aurora, which as you've found was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had, and so we see a lot of that, you know, movement. Bring it over, lift and shift, learning and you know, if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise one of your big challenges is how do I get my people trained, how do I get them up to speed, and so we've done... Like, we've got a full dot net stack that runs on AWS, so their people don't even have to learn a new language. They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell but work on AWS and bring that over. >> You know, Sandy, bring us inside your customers because the challenge for most enterprises is they have so many applications. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> And you mentioned lift and shift. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> You know, I know some consultant's out there like, "Lift and shift is horrible, don't do it." It's like, well, there's some things you'll build new in the cloud, there's some things you'll do a little bit, and there's some stuff today lift and shift makes sense and then down the road I might, you know, move and I've seen, you know, it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has as to do you re-platform, refactor-- >> That's right. >> You know, all that and everything, so I mean, there's many paths to get there. What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers? How do they, how is it easier for them to kind of move forward and not get stuck? >> Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations, so those tend to be really fast movement and that's typically-- >> Jeff: Data center evacuation-- >> Yeah, that's what-- >> I haven't heard that one. >> Yeah, that's what, evacuation, they've got to get out of their data center buyer for a certain date for whatever reason, right? They had a flood or a corporate mandate or something going on, and so we are seeing those and those are, Stu, like lift and shift quickly. We are seeing a lot of customers who will create new applications using containers and serverless that we talked about today a lot, and that's really around the innovative, new stuff that they're doing, right. So, Just Eat, for instance, is a large... They do online food service out of the UK. I love their solution because what they're doing is they're using Alexa to now order food, so you can say, "Alexa, I want a pizza delivered "in 20 minutes, what's the best pizza place "that I can get in 20 minutes?" Or "I want sushi tonight," and Alexa will come back and say, "Well, it's going to take "an hour and a half, you had sushi two days ago. "Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight." (laughing) And so it's really incredible, and then they even innovated and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering. So, if there's a big football game or something going on they'll use Amazon Fire to do that group ordering. All that is coming in through Alexa, but the back end is still Windows on AWS. So, I love the fact that they're creating these new apps but they're using some of that lift and shift to get the data and the training and all that moving and grooving, too. >> Yeah, what do you, from the training standpoint, how, you know, ready are customers to retrain their people, you know, where are there shortages of skillsets, and how's Amazon, you know, helping in that whole movement? >> Well, training is essential because you've got so many great people at enterprises who have these great skills, so what we see a lot of people doing is leveraging things like dot net on AWS. So, they actually... They have something they know, dot net, but yet they're learning about the cloud, and so we're helping them do that training as they're going along but they still have something very familiar. Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort. They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud. They did deep dives with a Tiger Team on cloud to get them really into the architecture and really understanding what was going on, so they could leverage all those great skills that they had in IT. So, we're seeing everything from, "I got to use some of the current tools that I have," to "Let me completely move to something new." >> And how have you, you've been in the Bay Area also for about a year, right, if I recall? >> Actually, I just moved, I moved to Seattle. >> Jeff: Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say-- >> I did. (laughing) >> "So, are they going to make you move up north?" >> I did because I was-- >> You timed it in the spring, not in November? >> I did, there you go. (laughing) When it's nice and sunny, but it's great. >> Exactly. >> It's great to live in Seattle. Amazon has such a culture that is in person, you know, so many people work there. It's really exhilarating to go into the office and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there, and then our EBCs are there, so our executive briefing center is there, so customers come in all the time because they want to go see Amazon Go, and so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be. >> Yeah, I love the line that Warner used this morning is that AWS customers are builders and they have a bias for action. So, how do you help customers kind of translate some of the, you know, the culture that Amazon's living and kind of acting like a startup for such a large company into kind of the enterprise mindset? >> That's a great question, so we just proposed this digital innovation workshop. We are doing this now with customers. So, we're teaching them how to work backwards from the customer, how to really understand what a customer need is and how to make sure they're not biased when they're getting that customer need coming in. How to do, build an empathy map and how to write that press release, that internal press release and think differently. So, we're actually teaching customers to do it. It's one of our hottest areas today. When customers do that they commit to doing a proof of concept with us on AWS on one of the new, innovative ideas. So, we've seen a lot of great and exciting innovation coming out of that. >> All right, well, Sandy Carter, so glad we could catch up with you again. Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation, what's happening in the enterprise customers to our audience. For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back will lots more coverage here, you're watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from the Washington D.C. It's the CUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you be Amazon Web Services and it's partner Ecosystem. >> Welcome back here on the CUBE as we continue our coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls we're in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. For the sixth show, of almost 10,000 attending. somewhere in that ball park. It's come along way in a very short period of time. AWS has a lot to feel good about. >> It's a good reinvent for Public Sector. It's huge. >> And not just to think about government. We think about education as well. We had a couple of segments about that. We are going to talk about government with our next guest. If we get a name wrong on this segment shame on us, John Stephenson with John Walls and John Furrier. John's a senior manage at Public Policy at AWS. John nice to have you with us we appreciate that. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for your time. So your focus primarily state and local governments. What exactly as the conduit do you want to bring to their table from of AWS? >> Well I'm Senior Manager, of Public Policy for Amazon Web Services in the Eastern United States. I handle state and local government relations in the Eastern U.S. from Texas to Main and then South Florida. I help our business and also our partners in government to understand how public policy can enable cloud and modern technologies. It's a very exciting place to be because there's a lot going on in state and local government when it comes to IT modernization and cloud right now. >> I think about government too. There's that big umbrella we can put on (mumbles). It's public service. But federal government has a place and state and local. I think much more responsive, much more grass roots. So those applications are much more immediate. I would think. Does that come into play with you? That you need to be a little more nimble. Or you're helping your clients to be a litter more nimble or more agile? >> Absolutely, if you look at what state and local governments are doing. Essential services from delivering health care to taking out the trash, providing public safety, providing education it's handled at the state and local government. If you look at the number of times you touch government. It is state and local. Think about renewing a driver license. Think about paying a parking ticket. Think about getting a zoning permit for remodeling of your house. You're dealing with state and local government. The demands on state and local government are also higher. They're holding more data on citizens than the Federal government. They are undergoing massive population changes. It's either positive or negative. State and local governments which have budget constraints. Need to be more nimble, more innovative. They are natural early adopters and first movers of technology. If you look at some of the more exciting things about technology that are happening in the government space. I think it's happening at state and local government in the U.S. >> Smart cities by the way is the hottest trend. Intel one of the key sponsors of this show. We had two folks on here. AI is going to be a real nice gateway for some of these innovations on their side. They have 5G opportunities. They have transformation. Lot of technology going on under the covers, under the hood if you will. One of them is smart cities and that is something that is just mind blowing. Just from a technology stand point but even more mind blowing from a policy perspective. Who sets the rules? What side does the car run on? What digital services are the citizens going to get? Who pays for them? What does the government do? What does the private sector do? These are issues that need to be grappled with. Your thoughts on how you guys look at that? And how are your constituents engaging with that and thinking about it? >> I'm glad you mentioned smart cities because there's a lot of activity going on in that space. If you look at the internet of things technologies alone. One of the enablers of smart cities. As many as 53% of state and local government according to NASCIO are looking at these technologies or deploying them. It's great to see that because that will enable a lot of potential from smarter government services, better government services, improving service delivery and improving constituent fulfillment. Which resonates with us, as part of Amazon. We're all about our customer fulfillment and delighting our customer. >> Lower prices and ship things faster that's Bezos' ethos. That's Amazon's culture. >> Exactly. >> And you could deliver services any digital service. >> Everything we do starts with the customer and we work backwards. In the conversations I've had with policy makers in the state and local governments. They see smart cities as a way to do that. Everything from improving transportation in places like Columbus, Ohio. To improving connectivity and engagement with the internet in places Kansas City, Missouri. And new ways of delivering services in places like New York and Los Angeles. It's very exciting stuff. Policy makers are coming to us and others in the industry. What are the policies? What are the best practices that can enable these technologies? We've been working with them. Providing information on what we're seeing around the world. How open data can be made (mumbles). How security and compliance can be built into applications. And we're happy to provide that because we know from working in the cloud ourselves. The potential that's there for state and local government. >> You want to foster innovation but at the same time you don't want to create this restrictive environment. Or have legacy be the baggage that holds things back. In fact you look at some of the best smart cities implementation. It's Singapore. It's Dubai. It's areas all over the world. In some cases it didn't have real strong infrastructure. So now come back to your role. As you look at the U.S. which has great infrastructure. Except for broadband connectivity, we'd be faster. They have some pre-existing conditions. They're under pressure. The cloud is a prefect vehicle for them. Because they can come in with their existing stuff. Get apps and services online quicker. How are you dealing with the challenge of? OK, calm down we're not going to take over the world. No, skynet's not coming. You know terminator reference. That's a concern, privacy. Lot of in policy issues, to be dealt with. How do you handle those? >> I think with any policy issue. I've been in public policy for a while now. It really starts with education. Understanding in really simple layman's terms. What the cloud is. And what it is not. It is a very transformative technology. It is not an end all one size fits all technology. What we've done is help educate policy makers by understanding the potential of cloud. What it can do in terms of cost savings, improved security, and being more agile. And to tell that story, we don't use PowerPoints at Amazon. We're not coming in and giving PowerPoint presentations. >> Good ole flesh pounding, hand shakes, and hit the streets. >> We'll more importantly it's sharing the customer's stories We're talking with them about what's happening at the New York City Department of Transportation. We're talking with them about what's happening at the city of Los Angeles with their emergency operation center. About how cities are using cloud technologies to deliver far superior products and services faster. >> So what is New York doing and what is L.A. doing specifically? >> New York city they have their iRide application to help citizens get from one point to the other much more quickly and safely as part of their Vision Zero campaign. Anyone who's been in New York, and I've been in New York quite a few times. Knows that traffic and be a real pain getting from part of Manhattan to the other. So what iRide does, is it helps people navigate Manhattan and the other boroughs much more quickly and efficiently using all the modes of transportation available to them. The city of New York was able to deploy that much more quickly, to many more people. They're able to update it, keep it secure thanks to cloud technology offered by AWS. The city of Los Angeles. They face cyber attacks everyday. Then there are the huge cost of maintaining that security. But with cloud they're able to build out event management systems and integrate those with their Homeland Security technologies and practices. And to be able to do it for a fraction of the cost using traditional systems, traditional IT, and traditional practices. It's very exciting. Suddenly local government can move at the speed and agility of a startup. Which has made Amazon very innovative. Last year we launched over a thousand new services and features. Local governments are seeing that. They want to be more like us and others in the industry. That are using cloud to deliver new products and services. And be better at their job. >> And the education, I say it probably patience in the educational role. You think about just the civil liberties of the citizens. That's really job one. Because I think most people get spooked. Whoa all this surveillance. The thing about it, just watching Patriots Day with my family. You know the Boston bombing, Boston strong with Mark Wahlberg. These things actually happen all the time. And we take for granted the some of the things we have in the surveillance community for the kinds of data that's out there. The same time that's the balance. Can you bring me value with my liberties. It's the same compliance scheme. Same governance game. This is the public sector. >> Well, that's where I think cloud has a great story to tell With cloud you get the benefits of economies of scale. Of Amazon with security and also with privacy. We have multiple compliance frameworks. Everything from HIPPA, FERPA, CJIS, Criminal Justice Information Systems. We are zealous guardians of security and our customer's privacy. We don't look at data. We don't share data about with out our customer's permission. We have very strong safeguards. That's why if you look a the customer base of Amazon from banks to government agencies, health care companies. Even companies like Netflix and you would think they're a competitor of ours. They're running their IT in AWS. They trust us even though with Amazon video and Amazon prime. You would think they're a competitor. But they've put that level of trust in us and our systems and our practices that they can put their data there. And we're hearing it from customer after customer. That they feel more safer and more secure with their data in the cloud offered by AWS. And we've shared that with government officials. And they take great comfort in those statements. >> You hit on something earlier. When you said that state governments and local governments have more data at their disposal than the federal government has about their consumers. Because of that, how much higher do find their concerns to be, in terms of cyber security, in terms of hack proof secured networks and systems as opposed to what might happen at the federal level. Cause we think federal. We think big. About what happened with the U.S. government's payment systems last year OPM. State and local they've got a lot more data they're protecting >> I've had a great opportunity in my current job to talk with a lot of IT officials and policy makers in the state. And, often times a meeting will start. And they'll say I've read about this. I've heard about this. And we're often able to say that's not an issue with the cloud offered the AWS. Or that's something we've already addressed through our security and compliance frame works. For example, I was in one meeting and a state policy maker asked me, well what do you do about HIPPA compliance. We have HIPPA compliance in AWS. And then he tried to ask questions, well what about this, what about that. And each time our team was able to tell the state policy maker. We meet that. We exceed that. We actually help write the standard for that compliance frame work. What we've been able to show that policy maker and others. The cloud just offers a far superior security posture than what they can do on their own. It's taken some time because the cloud is new. And as we like to say, it's still day one in this field. But we are very confident as word gets out. More and more people will be trusting particularly in state government their data to the cloud. Because of the superiority it offers on so many different levels. >> Well certainly the words getting out. This event here is just as big as it's ever been (mumbles). Use to be a little summit, now it's grown. There's a lot of interest. >> It's very exciting for me. I've been to reinvent now twice. And this is just so delightful to see so many people from government from the U.S. from internationally here to learn about the cloud share their stories. It's really inspirational to see what's possible. >> That's a testament to Teresa Carlson. Who was just years ago knocking on doors. That was before cloud was cloud. Now it's just come a long way. Congratulations to the whole team. >> Thank you. It's really to delightful to see. And I can't wait to see what's in store for next year and after that. >> We still got a little bit here to go John Don't kick us out. John Stephenson, Public Policy at AWS. Thanks for being with us we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. With John Furrier, I'm John Walls and we'll be back with more here on the CUBE from Washington D.C. right after this. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, Cube coverage live on the floor in the Moscone center in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier host of the Cube. AWS summit 2022 is here in San Francisco, we're back in live events. Of course, Amazon summit in New York city is coming, Amazon summit this summer we'll be there as well. We've got a great guest Mike Miller, GN of AI devices at AWS always one of my favorite interviews. We've got a little prop here, we got the car, DeepRacer, very popular at the events. Mike, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Hey John, thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be back and chat with you a little bit about DeepRacer. >> Well I want to get into the prop in a second, not the prop, the product. >> Yeah. >> So DeepRacer program, you got the race track here. Just explain what it is real quick, we'll get that out of the way. >> Absolutely so, well, you know that AI, AWS is passionate about making AI and ML more accessible to developers of all skill levels. So DeepRacer is one of our tools to do that. So DeepRacer is a 3D cloud-based racing simulator, a 1/18th scale autonomously driven car and a league to add a little spicy competition into it. So developers can start with the cloud-based simulator where they're introduced to reinforcement learning which basically teaches the, our car to drive around a track through trial and error and of course you're in a virtual simulator so it's easy for it to make mistakes and restart. Then once that model is trained, it's downloaded to the car which then can drive around a track autonomously, kind of making its own way and of course we track lap time and your successful lap completions and all of that data feeds into our league to try to top the leaderboard and win prizes. >> This is the ultimate gamification tool. (chuckles) >> Absolutely >> Making it fun to learn about machine learning. All right, let's get into the car, let's get into the showcase of the car. show everyone what's going on. >> Absolutely. So this is our 1/18th scale autonomously driven car. It's built off of a monster truck chassis so you can see it's got four wheel drive, it's got steering in the front, we've got a camera on the front. So the camera is the, does the sensing to the compute board that's driven by an Intel atom a processor on the, on the vehicle, that allows it to make sense of the in front of it and then decide where it wants to drive. So you take the car, you download your trained model to it and then it races around the track. >> So the front is the camera. >> The front is the camera, that's correct. >> Okay, So... >> So it's a little bit awkward but we needed to give it plenty of room here so that I can actually see the track in front of it. >> John: It needs eyes. >> Yep. That's exactly right. >> Awesome. >> Yes. >> And so I got to buy that if I'm a developer. >> So, developers can start in two ways, they can use our virtual racing experience and so there's no hardware cost for that, but once you want the experience, the hands on racing, then the car is needed but if you come to one of our AWS summits, like here in San Francisco or anywhere else around the world we have one or more tracks set up and you can get hands on, you can bring the model that you trained at home download it to a car and see it race around the track. >> So use a car here. You guys are not renting cars, but you're letting people use the cars. >> Absolutely. >> Can I build my own car or does it have to be assembled by AWS? >> Yeah, we, we sell it as a, as a kit that's already assembled because we've got the specific compute board in there, that Intel processor and all of the software that's already built on there that knows how to drive around the track. >> That's awesome, so talk about the results. What's going on? What's the feedback from developers? Obviously it's a nerd dream, people like race cars, people love formula one now, all the racing there. IOT is always an IOT opportunity as well. >> Absolutely, and as you said, gamification, right? And so what we found and what we thought we would find was that adding in those sort of ease of learning so we make it the on-ramp to machine learning very easy. So developers of all skill levels can take advantage of this, but we also make it fun by kind of gamifying it. We have different challenges every month, we have a leader board so you can see how you rank against your peers and actually we have split our league into two, there's an open division which is more designed for novices so you'll get rewarded for just participating and then we have a pro league. So if you're one of the top performers in the open league each month, you graduate and you get to race against the big boys in the pro leagues. >> What's the purse? >> Oh, the, (John laughing) we definitely have cash and prizes that happen, both every month. We have prizes cause we do races every month and those winners of those races all get qualified to race at the championship, which of course happens in Las Vegas at re:Invent. So we bring all the winners to re:Invent and they all race against each other for the grand prize the big trophy and the, and the, and the cash prize. >> Well, you know, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing so I'm kind of obviously biased on this whole program but you got to look at trend of what's going on in eSports and the online engagement is off the charts, are there plans to kind of make this more official and bigger? Is there traction there or is this just all part of the Amazon goodness, love that you guys give back? I mean, obviously it's got traction. >> Yeah. I mean, the thing that's interesting about eSports is the number of young people who are getting into it and what we saw over the last couple years is that, there were a lot of students who were adopting DeepRacer but there were some hurdles, you know, it wasn't really designed for them. So what we did was we made some changes and at the beginning of this year we launched a student focused DeepRacer program. So they get both free training every month, they get free educational materials and their own private league so they know students can race against other students, as part of that league. >> John: Yeah. >> So that was really our first step in kind of thinking about those users and what do we need to do to cater to their kind of unique needs? >> Tell about some of the power dynamics or the, or not power dynamics, the group dynamics around teams and individuals, can I play as an individual? Do I, do I have to be on a team? Can I do teams? How does that look? How do you think about those things? >> Yeah, absolutely. Great, great question. The primary way to compete is individually. Now we do have an offering that allows companies to use DeepRacer to excite and engage their own employees and this is where operating as a team and collaborating with your coworkers comes into play so, if, if I may there's, you know, Accenture and JPMC are a couple big customers of ours, really strong partners. >> John: Yeah. >> Who've been able to take advantage of DeepRacer to educate their workforce. So Accenture ran a 24 hour round the, round the globe race a couple years ago, encouraging their employees to collaborate and form teams to race and then this past year JPMC, had over 3000 of their builders participate over a three month period where they ran a private league and they went on to win the top two spots, first place and second place. >> John: Yeah. >> At reinvent last year. >> It reminds me the NASCAR and all these like competitions, the owners have multiple cars on the race. Do you guys at re:Invent have to start cutting people like, only two submissions or is it free for all? >> Well, you have to qualify to get to the races at re:invent so it's very, it's very cutthroat leading up to that point. We've got winners of our monthly virtual contests, the winners like of the summit races will also get invited. So it's interesting, this dynamic, you'll have some people who won virtual races, some people who won physical races, all competing together. >> And do you guys have a name for the final cup or is it like what's the, what's the final, how do you guys talk about the prizes and the... >> It's, it's the DeepRacer Championship Cup of course. >> John: Of course. (laughter) >> Big silver cup, you get to hoist it and... >> Are the names inscribed in it, is it like the Stanley cup or is it just one. >> It's a unique one, so you get to hold onto it each year. The champion gets their own version of the cup. >> It's a lot of fun. I think it's really kind of cool. What's the benefits for a student? Talk about the student ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So I'm a student I'm learning machine learning, what's in it for me is a career path and the fund's obvious, I see that. >> Yeah absolutely. You know, the, for students, it's a hands on way that's a very easy on-ramp to machine learning and you know, one of the things, as I mentioned we're passionate about making it accessible to all. Well, when we mean all we were really do mean all. So, we've got a couple partners who are passionate about the same thing, right? Which is how do we, if, if AI and ML is going to transform our world and solve our most challenging problems, how can we get the right minds from all walks of life and all backgrounds to learn machine learning and get engaged? So with two of our partners, so with Udacity and with Intel we launched a $10 million AWS, AI and ML scholarship program and we built it around DeepRacer. So not only can students who are college and high school students, age 16 and over can use DeepRacer, can learn about machine learning and then get qualified to win one of several thousand scholarships. >> Any other promotions going on that people should know about? >> Yeah, one, one final one is, so we talked about enterprises like JPMC and Accenture, so we've got a promotion that we just started yesterday. So if you are an enterprise and you want to host a DeepRacer event at your company to excite your employees and get 'em collaborating more, if you have over 50 employees participating, we're going to give you up to a hundred thousand dollars in AWS credits, to offset the costs of running your DeepRacer event at your, at your company so >> That's real money. >> Yeah. Real, real, real exciting I think for companies now to pick up DeepRacer. >> So, I mean, honestly, I know Andy Jassy, I have many sports car conversations with him. He's a sports guy, he's now the CEO of Amazon, gets to go all the sporting events, NFL. I wish I could bring the Cube there but, we'll stick with with cloud for now. You got to look at the purse kind of thing. I'm interested in like the whole economic point of cause I mean, forget the learning for side for a second which is by the way awesome. This is great competition. You got leader boards, you got regional activities, you got a funneling system laddering up to the final output. >> And we've really done a decent job and, and of adding capabilities into that user experience to make it more engaging. You can see the countries that the different competitors are from, you can see how the lap times change over time, you know, we give awards as I mentioned, the two divisions now. So if you're not super competitive, we'll reward you for just participating in that open league but if you want to get competitive, we'll even better rewards monthly in the Pro League. >> Do you guys have any conversations internally like, this is getting too big, we might have to outsource it or you keep it in inside the fold? (laughter) >> We, we love DeepRacer and it's so much fun running this, >> You see where I'm going with this. You see where I'm going with this right? The Cube might want to take this over. >> Hey. >> And you know >> We're always looking for partners and sponsors who can help us make it bigger so, absolutely. >> It's a good business opportunity. I just love it. Congratulations, great stuff. What's the big learning in this, you know, as a as an executive, you look back you got GM, AI super important and, and I think it is great community, communal activity as well. What's the learning, what have you learned from this over the years besides that it's working but like what's the big takeaway? >> Yeah, I mean. We've got such a wide range of developers and builders who are customers that we need to provide a variety of opportunities for people to get hands on and there's no better way to learn a complex technology like AI and ML than getting hands on and seeing, you know, physically the result of the AI and I think that's been the biggest learning, is that just having the hands on and the sort of element of watching what it does, just light bulbs go off. When, when developers look at this and they start piecing the, the puzzle pieces together, how they can benefit. >> So I have to ask the question that might be on other peoples minds, maybe it's not, maybe I'm just thinking really dark here but gamers love to hack and they love cheat codes, they love to get, you know, get into the system, any attempts to do a little hacking to win the, the the game, have you guys, is there, you know? >> Well, well, you know, last year we, we we released an open source version of the vehicle so that people could start using it as a platform to explore and do that kind of hacking and give them an opportunity build on top of it. >> So using mods, mods modules, we can mod out on this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you go to deepracer.com, we have sort of extensions page there, and you can see, somebody mounted a Nerf cannon onto the top of this, somebody built a computer vision model that could recognize you know, rodents and this thing would kind of drive to scare 'em, all kinds of fun topics. >> So it's a feature, not a bug. >> Absolutely. >> Open it up. >> Yeah. >> And also on transparency, if you have the source code out there you guys can have some review. >> Yeah. The whole idea is like, let's see what developers, >> It's really not hackable. It's not hackable. >> Yeah, I mean, for the, if you think about it when we do the races, we bring the cars ourselves, the only way a developer interacts is by giving us their trained models so... >> And you, do you guys review the models? Nothing to review, right? >> Yeah. There's nothing really to review. It's all about, you know, there, there was a model that we saw one time where the car went backwards and then went forwards across the finish line but we, we, we gently told them, well that's really not a valid way to race. >> That was kind of a hack, not really a hack. That was a hack hack. (laughter) That was just a growth hack. >> Exactly, but everybody just has a lot of fun with it across the board. >> Mike, great, thanks for coming on. Love the prop. Thanks for bringing the car on, looks great. Success every year. I want to see the purse, you know, big up to $1,000,000 you know, the masters, you know, tournament. >> Someday. (John chuckles) >> You guys.. >> Thank you for having me John. >> DeepRacer again, Fun Start has a great way to train people on machine learning, IOT device, turns into a league of its own. Great stuff for people to learn, especially students and people in companies, but the competitive juices flowing. That's what it's all about, having fun, learning. It's the Cube here in San Francisco. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE interview. We are here at theCUBE Virtual covering AWS Summit Virtual Online. This is Amazon's Summits that they normally do all around the world. They're doing them now virtually. We are here in the Palo Alto COVID-19 quarantine crew getting all the interviews here with a special guest, Vice President of Machine Learning, we have Swami, CUBE Alumni, who's been involved in not only the machine learning, but all of the major activity around AWS around how machine learning's evolved, and all the services around machine learning workflows from transcribe, recognition, you name it. Swami, you've been at the helm for many years, and we've also chatted about that before. Welcome to the virtual CUBE covering AWS Summit. >> Hey, pleasure to be here, John. >> Great to see you. I know times are tough. Everything okay at Amazon? You guys are certainly cloud scaled, not too unfamiliar of working remotely. You do a lot of travel, but what's it like now for you guys right now? >> We're actually doing well. We have been I mean, this many of, we are working hard to make sure we continue to serve our customers. Even from their site, we have done, yeah, we had taken measures to prepare, and we are confident that we will be able to meet customer demands per capacity during this time. So we're also helping customers to react quickly and nimbly, current challenges, yeah. Various examples from amazing startups working in this area to reorganize themselves to serve customer. We can talk about that common layer. >> Large scale, you guys have done a great job and fun watching and chronicling the journey of AWS, as it now goes to a whole 'nother level with the post pandemic were expecting even more surge in everything from VPNs, workspaces, you name it, and all these workloads are going to be under a lot of pressure to do more and more value. You've been at the heart of one of the key areas, which is the tooling, and the scale around machine learning workflows. And this is where customers are really trying to figure out what are the adequate tools? How do my teams effectively deploy machine learning? Because now, more than ever, the data is going to start flowing in as virtualization, if you will, of life, is happening. We're going to be in a hybrid world with life. We're going to be online most of the time. And I think COVID-19 has proven that this new trajectory of virtualization, virtual work, applications are going to have to flex, and adjust, and scale, and be reinvented. This is a key thing. What's going on with machine learning, what's new? Tell us what are you guys doing right now. >> Yeah, I see now, in AWS, we offer broadest-- (poor audio capture obscures speech) All the way from like expert practitioners, we offer our frameworks and infrastructure layer support for all popular frameworks from like TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch, PowerShell, (poor audio capture obscures speech) custom chips like inference share. And then, for aspiring ML developers, who want to build their own custom machine learning models, we're actually building, we offer SageMaker, which is our end-to-end machine learning service that makes it easy for customers to be able to build, train, tune, and debug machine learning models, and it is one of our fastest growing machine learning services, and many startups and enterprises are starting to standardize their machine learning building on it. And then, the final tier is geared towards actually application developers, who did not want to go into model-building, just want an easy API to build capabilities to transcribe, run voice recognition, and so forth. And I wanted to talk about one of the new capabilities we are about to launch, enterprise search called Kendra, and-- >> So actually, so just from a news standpoint, that's GA now, that's being announced at the Summit. >> Yeah. >> That was a big hit at re:Invent, Kendra. >> Yeah. >> A lot of buzz! It's available. >> Yep, so I'm excited to say that Kendra is our new machine learning powered, highly accurate enterprise search service that has been made generally available. And if you look at what Kendra is, we have actually reimagined the traditional enterprise search service, which has historically been an underserved market segment, so to speak. If you look at it, on the public search, on the web search front, it is a relatively well-served area, whereas the enterprise search has been an area where data in enterprise, there are a huge amount of data silos, that is spread in file systems, SharePoint, or Salesforce, or various other areas. And deploying a traditional search index has always that even simple persons like when there's an ID desk open or when what is the security policy, or so forth. These kind of things have been historically, people have to find within an enterprise, let alone if I'm actually in a material science company or so forth like what 3M was trying to do. Enable collaboration of researchers spread across the world, to search their experiment archives and so forth. It has been super hard for them to be able to things, and this is one of those areas where Kendra has enabled the new, of course, where Kendra is a deep learning powered search service for enterprises, which breaks down data silos, and collects actually data across various things all the way from S3, or file system, or SharePoint, and various other data sources, and uses state-of-art NLP techniques to be able to actually index them, and then, you can query using natural language queries such as like when there's my ID desk-scoping, and the answer, it won't just give you a bunch of random, right? It'll tell you it opens at 8:30 a.m. in the morning. >> Yeah. >> Or what is the credit card cashback returns for my corporate credit card? It won't give you like a long list of links related to it. Instead it'll give you answer to be 2%. So it's that much highly accurate. (poor audio capture obscures speech) >> People who have been in the enterprise search or data business know how hard this is. And it is super, it's been a super hard problem, the old in the old guard models because databases were limiting to schemas and whatnot. Now, you have a data-driven world, and this becomes interesting. I think the big takeaway I took away from Kendra was not only the new kind of discovery navigation that's possible, in terms of low latency, getting relevant content, but it's really the under-the-covers impact, and I think I'd like to get your perspective on this because this has been an active conversation inside the community, in cloud scale, which is data silos have been a problem. People have had built these data silos, and they really talk about breaking them down but it's really again hard, there's legacy problems, and well, applications that are tied to them. How do I break my silos down? Or how do I leverage either silos? So I think you guys really solve a problem here around data silos and scale. >> Yeah. >> So talk about the data silos. And then, I'm going to follow up and get your take on the kind of size of of data, megabytes, petabytes, I mean, talk about data silos, and the scale behind it. >> Perfect, so if you look at actually how to set up something like a Kendra search cluster, even as simple as from your Management Console in the AWS, you'll be able to point Kendra to various data sources, such as Amazon S3, or SharePoint, and Salesforce, and various others. And say, these are kind of data I want to index. And Kendra automatically pulls in this data, index these using its deep learning and NLP models, and then, automatically builds a corpus. Then, I, as in user of the search index, can actually start querying it using natural language, and don't have to worry where it comes from, and Kendra takes care of things like access control, and it uses finely-tuned machine learning algorithms under the hood to understand the context of natural language query and return the most relevant. I'll give a real-world example of some of the field customers who are using Kendra. For instance, if you take a look at 3M, 3M is using Kendra to support search, support its material science R&D by enabling natural language search of their expansive repositories of past research documents that may be relevant to a new product. Imagine what this does to a company like 3M. Instead of researchers who are spread around the world, repeating the same experiments on material research over and over again, now, their engineers and researchers will allow everybody to quickly search through documents. And they can innovate faster instead of trying to literally reinvent the wheel all the time. So it is better acceleration to the market. Even we are in this situation, one of the interesting work that you might be interested in is the Semantic Scholar team at Allen Institute for AI, recently opened up what is a repository of scientific research called COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. These are expert research articles. (poor audio capture obscures speech) And now, the index is using Kendra, and it helps scientists, academics, and technologists to quickly find information in a sea of scientific literature. So you can even ask questions like, "Hey, how different is convalescent plasma "treatment compared to a vaccine?" And various in that question and Kendra automatically understand the context, and gets the summary answer to these questions for the customers, so. And this is one of the things where when we talk about breaking the data silos, it takes care of getting back the data, and putting it in a central location. Understanding the context behind each of these documents, and then, being able to also then, quickly answer the queries of customers using simple query natural language as well. >> So what's the scale? Talk about the scale behind this. What's the scale numbers? What are you guys seeing? I see you guys always do a good job, I've run a great announcement, and then following up with general availability, which means I know you've got some customers using it. What are we talking about in terms of scales? Petabytes, can you give some insight into the kind of data scale you're talking about here? >> So the nice thing about Kendra is it is easily linearly scalable. So I, as a developer, I can keep adding more and more data, and that is it linearly scales to whatever scale our customers want. So and that is one of the underpinnings of Kendra search engine. So this is where even if you see like customers like PricewaterhouseCoopers is using Kendra to power its regulatory application to help customers search through regulatory information quickly and easily. So instead of sifting through hundreds of pages of documents manually to answer certain questions, now, Kendra allows them to answer natural language question. I'll give another example, which is speaks to the scale. One is Baker Tilly, a leading advisory, tax, and assurance firm, is using Kendra to index documents. Compared to a traditional SharePoint-based full-text search, now, they are using Kendra to quickly search product manuals and so forth. And they're able to get answers up to 10x faster. Look at that kind of impact what Kendra has, being able to index vast amount of data, with in a linearly scalable fashion, keep adding in the order of terabytes, and keep going, and being able to search 10x faster than traditional, I mean traditional keyword search based algorithm is actually a big deal for these customers. They're very excited. >> So what is the main problem that you're solving with Kendra? What's the use case? If I'm the customer, what's my problem that you're solving? Is it just response to data, whether it's a call center, or support, or is it an app? I mean, what's the main focus that you guys came out? What was the vector of problem that you're solving here? >> So when we talked to customers before we started building Kendra, one of the things that constantly came back for us was that they wanted the same ease of use and the ability to search the world wide web, and customers like us to search within an enterprise. So it can be in the form of like an internal search to search within like the HR documents or internal wiki pages and so forth, or it can be to search like internal technical documentation or the public documentation to help the contact centers or is it the external search in terms of customer support and so forth, or to enable collaboration by sharing knowledge base and so forth. So each of these is really dissected. Why is this a problem? Why is it not being solved by traditional search techniques? One of the things that became obvious was that unlike the external world where the web pages are linked that easily with very well-defined structure, internal world is very messy within an enterprise. The documents are put in a SharePoint, or in a file system, or in a storage service like S3, or on naturally, tell-stores or Box, or various other things. And what really customers wanted was a system which knows how to actually pull the data from various these data silos, still understand the access control behind this, and enforce them in the search. And then, understand the real data behind it, and not just do simple keyword search, so that we can build remarkable search service that really answers queries in a natural language. And this has been the theme, premise of Kendra, and this is what had started to resonate with our customers. I talked with some of the other examples even in areas like contact centers. For instance, Magellan Health is using Kendra for its contact centers. So they are able to seamlessly tie like member, provider, or client specific information with other inside information about health care to its agents so that they can quickly resolve the call. Or it can be on internally to do things like external search as well. So very satisfied client. >> So you guys took the basic concept of discovery navigation, which is the consumer web, find what you're looking for as fast as possible, but also took advantage of building intelligence around understanding all the nuances and configuration, schemas, access, under the covers and allowing things to be discovered in a new way. So you basically makes data be discoverable, and then, provide an interface. >> Yeah. >> For discovery and navigation. So it's a broad use cat, then. >> Right, yeah that's sounds somewhat right except we did one thing more. We actually understood not just, we didn't just do discovery and also made it easy for people to find the information but they are sifting through like terabytes or hundreds of terabytes of internal documentation. Sometimes, one other things that happens is throwing a bunch of hundreds of links to these documents is not good enough. For instance, if I'm actually trying to find out for instance, what is the ALS marker in an health care setting, and for a particular research project, then, I don't want to actually sift through like thousands of links. Instead, I want to be able to correctly pinpoint which document contains answer to it. So that is the final element, which is to really understand the context behind each and every document using natural language processing techniques so that you not only find discover the information that is relevant but you also get like highly accurate possible precise answers to some of your questions. >> Well, that's great stuff, big fan. I was really liking the announcement of Kendra. Congratulations on the GA of that. We'll make some room on our CUBE Virtual site for your team to put more Kendra information up. I think it's fascinating. I think that's going to be the beginning of how the world changes, where this, this certainly with the voice activation and API-based applications integrating this in. I just see a ton of activity that this is going to have a lot of headroom. So appreciate that. The other thing I want to get to while I have you here is the news around the augmented artificial intelligence has been brought out as well. >> Yeah. >> So the GA of that is out. You guys are GA-ing everything, which is right on track with your cadence of AWS laws, I'd say. What is this about? Give us the headline story. What's the main thing to pay attention to of the GA? What have you learned? What's the learning curve, what's the results? >> So augmented artificial intelligence service, I called it A2I but Amazon A2I service, we made it generally available. And it is a very unique service that makes it easy for developers to augment human intelligence with machine learning predictions. And this is historically, has been a very challenging problem. We look at, so let me take a step back and explain the general idea behind it. You look at any developer building a machine learning application, there are use cases where even actually in 99% accuracy in machine learning is not going to be good enough to directly use that result as the response to back to the customer. Instead, you want to be able to augment that with human intelligence to make sure, hey, if my machine learning model is returning, saying hey, my confidence interval for this prediction is less than 70%, I would like it to be augmented with human intelligence. Then, A2I makes it super easy for customers to be, developers to use actually, a human reviewer workflow that comes in between. So then, I can actually send it either to the public pool using Mechanical Turk, where we have more than 500,000 Turkers, or I can use a private workflow as a vendor workflow. So now, A2I seamlessly integrates with our Textract, Rekognition, or SageMaker custom models. So now, for instance, NHS is integrated A2I with Textract, so that, and they are building these document processing workflows. The areas where the machine learning model confidence load is not as high, they will be able augment that with their human reviewer workflows so that they can actually build in highly accurate document processing workflow as well. So this, we think is a powerful capability. >> So this really kind of gets to what I've been feeling in some of the stuff we worked with you guys on our machine learning piece. It's hard for companies to hire machine learning people. This has been a real challenge. So I like this idea of human augmentation because humans and machines have to have that relationship, and if you build good abstraction layers, and you abstract away the complexity, which is what you guys do, and that's the vision of cloud, then, you're going to need to have that relationship solidified. So at what point do you think we're going to be ready for theCUBE team, or any customer that doesn't have the or can't find a machine learning person? Or may not want to pay the wages that's required? I mean it's hard to find a machine learning engineer, and when does the data science piece come in with visualization, the spectrum of pure computer science, math, machine learning guru to full end user productivity? Machine learning is where you guys are doing a lot of work. Can you just share your opinion on that evolution of where we are on that? Because people want to get to the point where they don't have to hire machine learning folks. >> Yeah. >> And have that kind support too. >> If you look at the history of technology, I actually always believe that many of these highly disruptive technology started as a way that it is available only to experts, and then, they quickly go through the cycles, where it becomes almost common place. I'll give an example with something totally outside the IT space. Let's take photography. I think more than probably 150 years ago, the first professional camera was invented, and built like three to four years still actually take a really good picture. And there were only very few expert photographers in the world. And then, fast forward to time where we are now, now, even my five-year-old daughter takes actually very good portraits, and actually gives it as a gift to her mom for Mother's Day. So now, if you look at Instagram, everyone is a professional photographer. I kind of think the same thing is about to, it will happen in machine learning too. Compared to 2012, where there were very few deep learning experts, who can really build these amazing applications, now, we are starting to see like tens of thousands of actually customers using machine learning in production in AWS, not just proof of concepts but in production. And this number is rapidly growing. I'll give one example. Internally, if you see Amazon, to aid our entire company to transform and make machine learning as a natural part of the business, six years ago, we started a Machine Learning University. And since then, we have been training all our engineers to take machine learning courses in this ML University, and a year ago, we actually made these coursework available through our Training and Certification platform in AWS, and within 48 hours, more than 100,000 people registered. Think about it, that's like a big all-time record. That's why I always like to believe that developers are always eager to learn, they're very hungry to pick up new technology, and I wouldn't be surprised if four or five years from now, machine learning is kind of becomes a normal feature of the app, the same with databases are, and that becomes less special. If that day happens, then, I would see it as my job is done, so. >> Well, you've got a lot more work to do because I know from the conversations I've been having around this COVID-19 pandemic is it's that there's general consensus and validation that the future got pulled forward, and what used to be an inside industry conversation that we used to have around machine learning and some of the visions that you're talking about has been accelerated on the pace of the new cloud scale, but now that people now recognize that virtual and experiencing it firsthand globally, everyone, there are now going to be an acceleration of applications. So we believe there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of new applications that got to reimagine and reinvent some of the plumbing or abstractions in cloud to deliver new experiences, because the expectations have changed. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that machine learning combined with cloud scale will create a whole new trajectory of a Cambrian explosion of applications. So this has kind of been validated. What's your reaction to that? I mean do you see something similar? What are some of the things that you're seeing as we come into this world, this virtualization of our lives, it's every vertical, it's not one vertical anymore that's maybe moving faster. I think everyone sees the impact. They see where the gaps are in this new reality here. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, if you see the history from machine learning specifically around deep learning, while the technology is really not new, especially because the early deep learning paper was probably written like almost 30 years ago. And why didn't we see deep learning take us sooner? It is because historically, deep learning technologies have been hungry for computer resources, and hungry for like huge amount of data. And then, the abstractions were not easy enough. As you rightfully pointed out that cloud has come in made it super easy to get like access to huge amount of compute and huge amount of data, and you can literally pay by the hour or by the minute. And with new tools being made available to developers like SageMaker and all the AI services, we are talking about now, there is an explosion of options available that are easy to use for developers that we are starting to see, almost like a huge amount of like innovations starting to pop up. And unlike traditional disruptive technologies, which you usually see crashing in like one or two industry segments, and then, it crosses the chasm, and then goes mainstream, but machine learning, we are starting to see traction almost in like every industry segment, all the way from like in financial sector, where fintech companies like Intuit is using it to forecast its call center volume and then, personalization. In the health care sector, companies like Aidoc are using computer vision to assist radiologists. And then, we are seeing in areas like public sector. NASA has partnered with AWS to use machine learning to do anomaly detection, algorithms to detect solar flares in the space. And yeah, examples are plenty. It is because now, machine learning has become such common place that and almost every industry segment and every CIO is actually already looking at how can they reimagine, and reinvent, and make their customer experience better covered by machine learning. In the same way, Amazon actually asked itself, like eight or 10 years ago, so very exciting. >> Well, you guys continue to do the work, and I agree it's not just machine learning by itself, it's the integration and the perfect storm of elements that have come together at this time. Although pretty disastrous, but I think ultimately, it's going to come out, we're going to come out of this on a whole 'nother trajectory. It's going to be creativity will be emerged. You're going to start seeing really those builders thinking, "Okay hey, I got to get out there. "I can deliver, solve the gaps we are exposed. "Solve the problems, "pre-create new expectations, new experience." I think it's going to be great for software developers. I think it's going to change the computer science field, and it's really bringing the lifestyle aspect of things. Applications have to have a recognition of this convergence, this virtualization of life. >> Yeah. >> The applications are going to have to have that. So and remember virtualization helped Amazon formed the cloud. Maybe, we'll get some new kinds of virtualization, Swami. (laughs) Thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. Always great to see you. Thanks for taking the time. >> Okay, great to see you, John, also. Thank you, thanks again. >> We're with Swami, the Vice President of Machine Learning at AWS. Been on before theCUBE Alumni. Really sharing his insights around what we see around this virtualization, this online event at the Amazon Summit, we're covering with the Virtual CUBE. But as we go forward, more important than ever, the data is going to be important, searching it, finding it, and more importantly, having the humans use it building an application. So theCUBE coverage continues, for AWS Summit Virtual Online, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (enlightening music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. Their virtual conference. I'm John Furrier here in the Cube studio for a conversation with Matt Garman, Vice president. Sales amount of AWS. We're here with our quarantine crew. Matt. Thanks for joining me. I know your remote as well. We're living in a virtualized world. Thanks for coming on. AWS Summit is now online. You're running sales and market for the company. This is really caught a lot of companies by surprise this this situation sheltering in place. It's highlighted a lot of scale problems. One of them is events. So we're here at the AWS Summit online, and you guys are still pulling it off A lot of content. Great to see you. >>Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>So before we get into some of the announcements in the customer focus things that you guys are doing, you and I both met. We did an interview when you were running the EEC to you've been with Amazon for a long time, Got a storied history. You were there from one E. C two launched saw Amazon grow. This really kind of ties into some reporting that we've been doing where cloud native a scale of what advice became it really was a game changer and that showed the at scale opportunity for startups. And now the enterprise. This covert 19 is really showing companies and individuals their living it, of being disrupted, where the Internet and large scale tools and technologies can help them, but also exposes gaps in their lives or in companies, cases, things like provisioning VP ends. Maybe they didn't figure out 100% would be at home, but then going forward, the applications are now thinking about this new virtualized world. Even when it comes back to normal, be somewhat of a hybrid, you know, integrated world. This will put pressure on you guys as Amazon to build more capacity like you did with the see too, but at a whole nother level. So I want to get into that and more. But this covert 19 really has changed the game for the world. What do you guys see in your customer base? This is a big part of the conversation. What's going on? >>Thanks, John, And you're right. This is an unprecedented time for us, and on day eight of us as well as our customers are all trying to figure it out. I think you know, part of part of what we've seen from our customers as we talk out there, whether they're public service or private customers is is really that that demands that they're seeing from their customer bases are rapidly changing. Some customers have their businesses have seen much fewer lower demands and others before. But others they're seeing 10 21 100 x more business than they were before. And what we're seeing is that those customers that have their business running in the cloud are able to handle that on quickly. Our ableto adapt and change and grow with their changing customer base, and sometimes that's internal. Sometimes you're like you said. That's because, um, they need to scale up their VPN or they need to scale up their virtual workstations. Other times, it's customers who maybe they run a large call center business. But their call center folks are no longer able to come into the office, and they quickly spin up a virtual call center. We've seen our Amazon connect business really, really take off as customers quickly united to figure out how they can manage the actually increased call Williams they're seeing, but in a virtual location. And finally, we're just seeing some customers, whether they're from entertainment from communication or online education. Many of these businesses they're scaling rapidly wouldn't have been able to do it if they're running in their own data center. But because they're in the cloud, they're able to quickly spin up more instances, spin up more storage and meet the demands of their customers. So I think it's been nice to see. Fortunately for us, we've had many years, as you mentioned, I used to run the C two team on, and we've been thinking for over a decade about how we really manage that supply chain. How do we ensure that we're able to handle rapidly scaling? So we've really optimized our supply chain Unfortunately, in a good position where we can continue to operate, continue to scale and continue to handle the demands are growing customer base even unprecedented times like this. >>You know, you mentioned that I want to get into that concept. You wrote a block post the other day on the Amazon Day one blawg keeping organizations running during Covad 19 and you kind of teased out this point about average connected time. And if you think about this crisis, this really is that the true test for scale and elasticity of having that cloud model and some of the clouds have not done as well as Amazon. There's been some stories out there. Google and Microsoft has had the up time you guys had, but this really has been the future pulled forward. So you guys have a lot of customers like Netflix like slack, that are really taken advantage of this. This is the true test of cloud and only the beginning again. Like I said, this is going to show a lot of gaps in most other traditional enterprises. But this highlights the tests that you guys were waiting for. I won't say that you're waiting for a crisis, but cloud, this is ultimately the test. Your thoughts on Netflix, who Lou Slack, A bunch of other names land and he throws the slide. But we have re invent. But the >>big I think if you look at, obviously we have a lot more time at home, right? I'm at home here in Seattle. A lot of us are spending more time at home. And so a lot of the streaming services like you said, the Netflix is the who lose that Disney Pluses of the world. Also games. Think about how many kids were playing fortnight or playing a or the video games. A lot of those businesses have really seen an increase in their demand on they have been able to just seamlessly scale along with eight of us on the work side. Think about everybody from slack that runs entirely on AWS Zoom, who runs the vast majority of their infrastructure and aws all of these communication on work from home capabilities. These are all running on AWS enabled many of the scale, and we think all of our kids, our kids are all trying to figure out what a school look like. You don't actually go to school. I was talking from the team at Blackboard. They've seen a 10 sometimes even 100 X increase in their business. America will just seamlessly scale up on demand. I mean, really overnight just exploded. >>I was on Twitter just the other day, talking with some folks because the whole jet, I think, is going down. I was gonna wing of my normal commentary. Um and this is the public sector challenge as well. You mentioned schools. These air traditionally? No, I t or enterprise like chops. They need scale now. They need it fast. They have to stand up. I imagine this is the kind of scenario that this is also gonna hit the small, medium sized enterprises as well as some of the big ones. So the big guys have legacy problems, data silos, whatever we've had, great. Comes with some of your team members there. But that's just one sector. You got small, medium size enterprises that don't have any I t public sector and education. They're gonna be in market in months, if not >>tomorrow. Public sector is a super interesting one. And, frankly, our public sector team I don't know that they have slept in the past three months working to try to help governments, both the United States and internationally, everything from me. If you think about it, our our unemployment systems in states across the United States have gone from something like 3% unemployment claims to 15% unemployment claims within a two month period. Those systems are not meant to scale like that, and they reached out to us pretty quickly to see how we could help them start to scale. You think about some of the the systems that are trying to send out checks to people, systems that are trying to send out small making loans to folks. We've been really working deeply with many of those government agencies to try to figure out how we can get the money in the hands of the individuals that need it as quickly as possible and really help those legacy systems. Sometimes they're built on, you know, legacy databases or Oracle's or Microsoft sequel systems. And those things just aren't scaling. And they're trying to figure out How can they get to a more modern architecture that can really keep scaling with the needs of the new demand that they're reaching? It's just something that didn't anticipate before. >>Yeah, and I think your customers, as you're now going to be overseeing the larger global organization, sales and marketing, um, it's not like you guys are preaching to the customers because you're living through the same crisis in an environment that they are. You certainly can align with their empathy and certainly help them solve problems. But now we're in a business climate where we're seeing unemployment numbers of massive numbers. Usually companies come out of these challenges, and we think it could be highly accelerated on an upward trajectory, flat or negative. In 2008. That crisis we saw the winners come out of that one. You guys rode that wave with AWS. Easy to can. You know that world now coming out of this next pandemic, it's going to be hybrid or virtualization of meat of life. >>How are >>you leading your team? How are you talking to customers? I'm out of this empathy, but you got to run an organization. You have to still sell services and market your products You got reinvent was a physical event. I mean, >>these air, >>huge challenges you're living them to. What's your >>take on >>all this? >>Yeah, part of I think you know, in my new role. And as you mentioned, I used to run the computing with AWS, including easy to many compute services for about 13 years before coming and running. Now the sales and marketing, or AWS >>and And in >>that role, you know, a lot of what I would think about is how we really help our customers understand how critical it >>is to the >>her hair. The cloud gives you just so much more flexibility, so much more agility. And we would you know, there's a bunch of the early adopters would lead into that and really got it. And once they got onto the cloud, they saw their innovation level went up, their agility goes up all those things. But, you know, there was still a lot of folks that were they're interested. I mean, we obviously have, ah, decent sized business today and many, many millions of customers that are using the cloud today. But some of them are have been slower to kind of fully adopt and really move all of their business critical workloads to the cloud. I firmly believe that coming out of this crisis, you're gonna have two types of of businesses. You're gonna have some that just go into their shell, right? They're just going to say I'm just gonna try to survive. I'm just gonna try that to get by, going to try to conserve every little bit of something. I can just protect what I have. You know, I don't think those are long term. I'm not optimistic of. Those are going to be the businesses that right. I think every time you see a crisis, you have businesses that lean into it. They're smart about it. They think about long term. What are the things that are going to help me compete in this new world? And I think Cloud is gonna be one of those things. We've talked to everybody from airlines to traditional Fortune 500 enterprises, and they see that like they're still leaning into the cloud, even even airlines. No one's been hit harder than the airlines. And even I've talked to several executives and airlines their saying Look, my cloud initiative, that's the thing I'm not cutting. I'm gonna cut everything else. But this is the thing that's gonna let me succeed when I really get into that new world. And so I really think you're going to see some of those folks that maybe you were hesitant before so again in the next 34 years. Maybe I'll get to the cloud. I really think that they're going to start to lead in because they're going to realize if my competitors or in the cloud and I'm not that is gonna be a significant disadvantage and, you know, knock on wood. Hopefully, there's no other global pandemic, but they have to deal with. But I think it just really highlights any uncertainty in the world. There's going to be differences and they just are unable to deal with to the flexibility and the scale that they want to go up and down, by the way that they're unable to really handle whatever the world throws up. But I think we're going to be living in a continually uncertain environment. >>Yeah, I definitely would agree with you, and I think it's going to get back to normal at some point, but even is gonna have an impact into 2021 as many people are kind of figuring out the window, people saying no spring 2021 Maybe, you know, there we started get some semblance of normality the way it was, but still that environment and this brings up the whole summit online that you guys are doing. Your summits have been a great set of events. We've covered many of them with the real key physical cube. Now we're doing the Virtual Cube. They've been a practitioner and user, the developer builder event. It's a free event. Nutrition had. Now you have them all over the world. They're going on virtual. People still need to build out these projects. There's still a demand, and some projects are being cut. Some are, as you guys look over the horizon with your customer base conversations around what to fund whatnot the fund. As you mentioned. What are some of the things that you're seeing and recommending to customers that they should continue to double down on? Because smart manager is going to step back and say, Hey, I can see some gaps. We're going to double down on that and we're gonna kill that. We're gonna move this over here. There's going to be a reinvention and growth strategy that they have to figure out quickly. There's no yet playbooks emerging, but it's clear out the video virtual interactions. But those projects get double down your thoughts on the customer builders out there. >>I think that's absolutely right in it and expands every industry you can think about. Think about, you know, I was talking Teoh several customers in the healthcare space. And how long has it been five years that people have been touting that telemedicine is really gonna be that thing that eventually comes and eventually becomes a big thing? This has really accelerated that, such that. Now I've talked to probably dozens and dozens of people who, for the very first time of talk to their doctors over being their cell phone because they don't want to go into the hospital for you're getting, you know, six or something like that. Then they just have a minor medical things you need to do. Telemedicine is one of those things that is really taking off, and there's been really enabling, frankly, that customers have been able to do telemedicine. That's really helps, knows that that wanted to stay safe but also get good medical advice. I think that's just one example where we're gonna continue to see this go. I think coming out of this the other thing, our custom, lot of our customers were thinking about, and anytime you really go into an uncertain economic world. You want to think about capital preservation. Now is not the time you want to go spend money to build your own data center or to buy your own servers. If ever there was a time where the cloud makes the most sense, capital preservation >>is E >>particularly we don't know if there's gonna be an economic recession. We don't know how long this is going to take. All businesses, whether they're severely impacted, should be really thinking about that capital preservation. But they've also got to be thinking about how they innovate. You know, I've talked to ah, popular ride sharing customer the other day, and they were talking about how ride sharing his way down. But they're still using this as a time to lean forward into innovation because they know coming out of this, they want to be ahead of where their competitors are going to be. And they really want to use this as an opportunity to take their own internal teams, focus them on where they think the biggest potential is gonna be. And then once the economy turns around people out and about again, they can hit the accelerator and really take off. So I think that's really how a lot of our customers were thinking about situation where they're right now. >>You know, you guys haven't had a steep learning curve over the years with cloud and cloud scale. I think as the world comes in, the human capital piece becomes interesting, too, not just on of spending with money, monetary, the human capital to work, how people are contributing. So this brings up the whole reinvention. It's funny to watch as people are forced with these first generation problems of how to make things digital, how to get scale going. You have people who have learned it, have a learning curve, and again there's no compression algorithm for experience, as you guys like to point out. So >>this is >>creating this kind of like, How do I change the roles of my company? And so I want to get your thoughts because we're looking for proof points because a lot of the answers are not yet evolved and usually things they're not understood before they become mainstream. But people have to react really fast. What are some examples? Can you give around how Cove in applications are rolling out because that's truly a indicator in my mind of what people are doing with the cloud. Because Covert was an instant response. We've already interviewed a few folks that are on Amazon around Covitz Solutions, where the standing of either analytics or doing some things Could you use the covert of example of how rapid deployment or reinvention of data or business models our rendering themselves? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of different what one is. But for the very first thing that most people look at is how do we get data like we just need to find data around this space. And so we've worked with a number of partners and customers on How do we really go, help build Data Lakes in the cloud and coming getting all that data in one place so that both governments as well as private enterprises, can really start to think of that Data slices in different ways on get to look at what is the actual data, whether it's one of the number of hospital that's available one of the number of tests that are happening, you know, one of the number of oh infections that we're seeing, where the rate of change, etcetera. We also work with a number of our analytics partners, and we have a wide range of analytics partners that are really taking this as an opportunity where they can rapidly then take that data and slice it a number of different ways to try to help understand how they respond. I think you know, the first part of that was on the healthcare side where folks were saying, Where do we need enough ventilators? Where we where do we need to go? Build hospitals? Are we start to identify hot spots right where I see if you can really look at kind of second order derivatives of kind of changes, and you can look at it close enough, you could say, Oh, there's a hot spot popping up in this particular area and eventually you know, if we can get some better data, contract tracing and things like that where you can open up the economy and still have, you know very quickly identify where a hot spot might be a merging. Those are the types of data pieces that you know what the right levels of of security and data privacy, but with but with access to that data, we can get a handle on how some of these things are happening. Then I think you go and you look at s So that's that's kind of some of the data analytics pieces. Right? Then you also go look at what are folks doing on the testing side? And I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion about how well testing is done. I think we all >>know that there >>are ways that we always thought maybe it was a little bit further along with it is, but there's a number of private places that are actually really speeding up. I think this is one of the big areas that Amazon best, right? And I don't I don't know. We'll see if we are able to get there faster than some of the other places, but we we see a real need for testing. Testing is one of those such a critical component if we could do rapid testing, frequent testing, both for our own employees. But frankly, for for all the industries that we all rely on, I have come to rely on, particularly in this virtual world. We know that the faster we can get testing and more reliable, we can get testing. The better we are able to then isolate, get people to self quarantine and really kind of control that mass spread >>of the >>disease. >>I know >>you know >>healthcare is interesting. One of the emerging things we're seeing coming out of the summit here and some of the conversations we had is how the enterprise has always been kind of a hard environment to find stuff. As people live at home and working at home, working remotely, working in remote teams, the idea of searching for stuff becomes interesting. So you guys announced the general availability, Kendra. The timing couldn't have been better for that, because that's really giving you a Google like vibe feel for funding information. But it's really an integration play under the covers, so I think that's the kind of trend that we're seeing. We're seeing also startups putting up APS out there so you see a lot of activity. That's kind of in line with this. That you guys are announcing anything >>at any >>update on the Kendra or >>Canada is fantastic, and it's it's really I think struck a nerve with folks where the traditional way of thinking about search, particularly internal for internal Internets just doesn't work. You know how many hits you get and how many millions of people across billions and billions of people on the Internet that that model works on the Internet. You might be looking for very specific things. Um, and with machine learning, we're able to tell what is the intent of the requests that people are looking for and take you to the right place so that if you say you know one of the hours of my help desk, there's a very specific page that you're looking for, which is this number. In fact, you're not looking for a job to go to. You're not looking for information about help desks. You're looking for the actual hours of my internal help desks, particularly probably from my building. And as we do build these ML models that can start to learn on how your Internet works and how people are thinking about it and what's helpful or not, we've been able to improve an Internet search orders of magnitude. I've used it internally for our own. I'm instrumented it. It's night and day compared to what we used before was kind of your keyword search type of thing. So I think applying ML, particularly when people remote and really relying on resource, is like that where they can't just, you know, lean over to a cube next to them and say, Hey, we're still you know what time is the help desk open? >>I think getting breaking down the silos to just we build that abstraction layer a data leak really kind of makes a big difference. >>That's right. >>So final question for you as companies settle into the new realities that are upon them, what's the outlook for the rest of 2020 for you guys? And what do you say? That customers that are here on the online trying to consume the virtual content that they should be building out because you've got not just customers. You've got commercial customers, you got public sector and you got an ecosystem. You got partners out there who are building on top of AWS. Um, rolling this together. What's your message to them? What's on the outlook? >>2020 Number one. I encourage everyone to take advantage. I think In many ways, some of these virtual summits are great opportunity, maybe, for those were unable to travel to the summit or to be able to actually physically get there. It's a great opportunity to learn, really dive in trying to do some virtual labs really get in and understand some of the new features and functionality that are out there from a partner perspective. Many of the things that we're building, whether it's our outflow service that we just launched a couple of weeks ago, that helps us to really connects to our various partners into a data lake. As John was mentioning those air, these were really some of the things that you know, if you think about our broad swath of our partner ecosystem, encourage our customers to really look at all of the partners that are running on AWS who have great solutions. Like the Cube. You're looking for virtual events. They have. They have an awesome product you should check out, but we have a wide set of partners that will help you. Yeah, put together the virtual world that you all are trying to work through right now and encourage you just to learn >>I really appreciate the plug, actually, one for the cube. A new event Cloud. What? We're trying to figure it out. I think this kind of reminds me of a famous quote I heard on the queue, which is a notable one, is that everything in the future that is going to be invented was on Star Trek or Star Wars. So I assume we're gonna have video cameras and everyone's office, and we'll be able to go and talk to folks. So looking forward to again, standing up content, getting the content and connecting people. Thanks for spending >>the >>time out of your day to come in and talk with me and share your insights. And, ah, Amazon Summit Web services Summit online Virtual cube Virtual. Thanks for your time. Appreciate your insights. >>Great. Thank you. >>OK, Cube here. Virtual in our studio covering remotely all the top content out there covering AWS summit online. There's a whole new reality rolling it together. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. (upbeat instrumental music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back everyone. theCUBE's Live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, VMworld 2019 coverage. Dave, 10 years of Cube coverage, Yip! we started out 10 years ago. VMworld is the last show standing. Our next guest is Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. Great to see you, first time on theCUBE. Thanks Todd. It is inaugural. (John laughs) Aafter 25 years in the industry, it's crazy. With your talent, I think we're going to have a good segment here. I'm sure we will. Very entertaining. No, seriously we've known each other, we were on an advisory board together. You're a prolific marketer, you do a lot of great things. You're progressive, you try new things with startups, but also you got to run a big operation. >> Todd: That's right. MarTech stacks, you like to look at platforms. This is a re-platforming of the internet we're seeing with Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because you got a unique perspective at Veritas, you know, an older brand modernized in real time. That's right. New products refresh in a massively changing growth, still growth market. It's a data business. Absolutely. That's right, a 100%. So what's your take on this? As you look at the landscape, you've got the modern brand, you got to take it out there, new products. You know it's interesting, I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a customer, and the customer said, "You know, I was walking through the expo hall, "and I saw Amazon, I saw Microsoft, "I saw IBM, I saw Dell Technologies, "I saw Kubernetes, I saw Pure, I saw Nutanix, "I thought I was in my own data center." And it's interesting, I think about our business, and in our business, data doesn't care. Like you know data doesn't care if you're running a modern architecture. Data doesn't care if you're running Legacy. So what we're really focused on is helping companies manage data in highly complex, and extremely demanding environments regardless of their infrastructure. And Cloud 2.0 speaks to the complexity of that, because you know, these, and we were talking earlier with VMware about these categories that used to exist, these Gartner Magic Quadrants. You know, you can't put something that's not a silo in a silo, you're horizontally disrupting. And data does that, data has to move around and it's got to move everywhere. So there's no more silo boxes of categories. A 100% agree, you know it's interesting, we launched Enterprise Data Services earlier this year, and that was the precise reason why, because we've relooked at what data protection is. Data protection is no longer backing up your data from a cloud to a cloud from your on Prime, it's a much broader category. It covers how your data becomes available, how resilient you are, understanding where your data is, how it's categorized so you can respond to ransomware attacks, manage regulations around the world. So our view of data protection is a platform that is horizontal and cuts across. Well you guys, I mean the heritage of Veritas is the original data management company, right? Yeah. With no hardware agenda, and so my question for you, Todd, is what attracted you to Veritas? Softball question, so the most amazing customers any company could possibly imagine, Global 2000, the top telecommunications companies, the top banks, top stock exchanges. Secondly a product strategy that's really zoned in, back to your point about this, a platform that cuts across all of these diverse technologies and solves problems for customers that abstracts them from the complex environments that they're in so they could focus on outcomes, and Greg has done an amazing job recruiting a top notch leadership team. So it was really great product, good leaders. Okay now, follow up is you guys, you know, number one, top anyway, right and with Gartner Magic Quadrant, everybody wants a piece of your hide, (chuckles) the whole industry is coming at you. So, what's the sort of messaging strategy to keep top spot from both outward facing and also product development? Sure, sure. So we look at two types of competitors. Competitors that are offering point solutions, predominately playing in the mid-market, and when you're a large financial institution, and you have a highly complex environment, you're in a multi-cloud world, and you can't afford to have a siloed backup data. So you need to understand how your data is classified, where it's stored. So if you're responding to ransomware, and that ransomware attack is targeted to a specific server, you need to know if you have PII there, or if you have cat pictures there. If you have cat pictures there, then, (chuckles). >> John: Let 'em have it. Let 'em have it, exactly. (John laughs) So our platform cuts across protection, availability, and insights, which categorizes your data. So the data gets categorized in NetBackup, extends to the analytics platform, so you know where your data is, and you could take action on your data. The hard question of the day, instead of a softball I'll give you a hard one, you got to refresh the brand of Veritas has got a lot of pros and cons. The pros are, you know, well-known, a lot of customers, I got a customer question later, but the brand is important, because you have the new modern platform products, platform and products. Yeah, yeah. You got to get the name, Veritas has old meaning. You have a lot of older customers, you have legacy customers. How are you going to go out there and refresh? Is there any new plans there? We have a ton of plans. You know, we have the product, we have the customers. The product, the platform product is amazing. We are a quiet company, so we need to be noisier in the marketplace, and we need to insert ourselves into relevant conversations that are top of mind with CEOs and CIOs, whether it's ransomware. If you look at all of the ransomware attacks, It's a huge opportunity I read like two weeks ago in the State of Texas there were 10, 15 municipalities that were attacked. At the same time. At the same time! and we have a solution that can help customers recover from ransomware, so we have to insert ourselves in those dialogues because we have a very, very specific point of view that can help customers. Well but to John's point, right? Everybody that you compete with will say, we have a solution that, you know, helps solve ransomware. So, how do you separate from the pack? Like I said, everybody's trying to take pick you off. You know, we want a piece of that install base, right? 'Cause you got to keep the install base, and you got to keep growing, right? I'll lay down the gauntlet. I would love any competitor to showcase how they can support 500 workloads, a 150 storage targets, 60 cloud providers, at enterprise scale with a high degree of reliability. Our differentiator is we can cut across these very complex, very demanding IT environments, at scale. I want to get your thoughts on the customer journey question, because I think, you know, you mentioned the customer base, we've been following what you guys do. I mean I ran, I was in Bahrain for a regional Amazon event I was covering in the Middle East, and in the exhibit was this Veritas, and they recognized, hey, there's theCUBE guy. I was like, hey, thanks for watching. But seriously, you guys are everywhere. You got huge customers, but you probably have a lot of customers that are trying to go from here to there, VMware was talking almost specifically around, you know, you got the enterprise scale world, and they want that cloud Nirvana, and then there's that missing middle in between. So, you probably have a lot of transformational stories. What is the patterns of customer profile that you see? Some of them making the journey? Some of them are having a hard time? What's the state of the mind of the customer that you guys have? Well, we are definitely seeing a hybrid, multi-cloud world as you've heard here this week. 52% Of our customers are running in a hybrid cloud environment, and we have a core relationship with their legacy infrastructure, and our customers are asking our help to extend their data protection, and their NetBackup environment into the cloud, to backup the cloud, and across new modern workloads. So our customers are pulling us into their environments to do more. And that's cloud and hybrid basically. Cloud and hybrid. Public cloud and on premises. And our customers are also realizing that they're responsible for backing up their own data in the cloud. There's this misperception in the industry that if I move to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will manage my data, when in actuality you are still responsible for your data. You know, Amazon with security has a shared responsibility model. They say, okay, we protect the EC2, the infrastructure for S3, et cetera. You're responsible for pretty much everything else. And I think that you could draft off that message. Yeah, yeah! You guys too, a couple of years ago, had a great event call Veritas Vision where everybody came in, and then you changed that. Now you sort of go to where the customers are, and I'm wondering, how's that working out? It predated you. Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! So I won't ask you why that decision was made, but you know, how's it working out? I mean, a company like yours, there was like four, 5,000 people there, it was a really good event. So, a great question, and a highly relevant question, because we're just about to launch our series. So, you know, having run large, large, large user conferences, and you look at distribution of your customers and, you know, you typically find that 80% of your customers are coming from the US. You look at our customer base, global international customers. We have a high percentage of customers that are outside of the U.S. So, our strategy is let's take our user conference, let's take our message, let's take our value proposition to the customer. So, we are kicking off next month an entire series around the world, Germany, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Bali, Singapore, Melbourne, our vision series, where it's our anti-user conference. We're taking content directly to our customers. Is this regional or are those cities based? How is that segment? City based. So it's like an Amazon Summit kind of thing you go to? Yeah, yep. Okay so as a follow-up. So, as a seasoned pro in this space, why either, or, why not do both? I mean there's a budget obviously is one thing, it's expensive to run these events, I get it, but. I would prefer to put more money to where the customer is at. The field, kind of. Yeah, into the fields, you know, one of the life lessons of being a marketer is go to where the customer is. Don't try to get the customer to come to you. Well, your head of sales will love that message, you're going well. (Todd laughs) So our strategy is to go where the customer is. Yeah, and that does help sales actually. So, while you're on that point, you're a very progressive marketer, for the folks that don't know you, I'll share with them that, you know, you like to try things, and you love start-ups, and you love to promote new things. The marketing stack, I've said on theCUBE, and we'd love to have you challenge us if you want, love to debate it, I said, the MarTech Stack just didn't pan out. I mean, it worked? No, no, it didn't, no! Did it work? Is it evolving? Is it siloed? Is the cloud changing the MarTech Stack? So again, pretty aggressive statement, but my point is, email marketing was great for that generation, still is. There's new organic flows, maybe I'm biased, but I'd love to get your thoughts. How is the marketing tech world evolving with cloud computing? So, I'm going to say something provocative. >> John: Okay, all right, here we go. I think the CRM industry has gotten B2B marketing wrong. What I mean by that is you look at most CRM capabilities in B2B and they're focused on an individual. They're focused on a lead, they're focused on nurturing an individual, but if you look at our customers and enterprise, individuals don't buy, buying groups, committees, and accounts buy. So where we're focused is looking at accounts, and understanding account company based behavior that shows buying intent and triggers, which then initiate our marketing. So it's not built around a lead, it's built around-- >> John: So account based marketing? Account based marketing, but account based insight and intelligence around, is there a project or buying opportunity? And you know our good friends at Manigo, that's what they do, which is AI driven, trigger-based marketing. And that's where I think the industry is going. And what's your thoughts on organic marketing, because one of the things that's hot, is we live this world with theCUBE, and we've been kind of pioneering this model where co-creating content together and pushing it out into these digital streams is an organic process. It's technically earned media and PR parlance, but we're seeing the evolution of the CMO-like action around storytelling, right? And so, like community based storytelling, it's an organic function, it's hard to control. You can't just buy it, it's got to be kind of nurtured or enabled. That's right. What's your view on that? Because this is an emerging trend we're seeing, VM were just reorganizing a whole storytelling integrated group of PR pros, that are acting like the marketing, in their marketing. Well you know, one of the most active, customer segments we have is our VOX Community, and if you think to your point about co-creation of content in collaboration, our VOX Community collaborates on solving problems that customers have, they call that-- >> John: Can you take a minute to explain, what is VOX Community to us? VOX is a community of our technical users, where they help each other share best practices and solve problems. >> Dave: A lot of how-to? A lot of how-to-- Not Vox Media. Not Vox Media, correct. Just need to make sure to get that out there. Forums, there's videos. Is this your community, or is it third-party? Veritas. Okay, Veritas. It's a Veritas community, yeah. And then to your other point, John, the marketing world has changed. We've quickly moved into a world where we now have an anonymous relationship with our customer, with email, with direct mail. Yeah, we're always driving to registration to capture a name, that world is long gone. A Facebook show that's been weaponized, so you know. Yeah, that's right. It's the data business, at the end of the day. The user experience is horrible, right? Everybody hates that, and so yeah, there are other ways now you can use data, you can infer. Yeah, that's right, exactly. You can read the tea leaves, and probably make a pretty high prediction, or highly accurate prediction. What is the most under reported trend that you think marketers should look at in terms of capabilities that are working out in the field for you? I would say the ability to leverage predicative analytics, call it AI or machine learning, understand what's happening at an account, and whether there's a buying trigger. I think accessing that information, learning from that information in terms of how should you initiate a selling motion, and then enabling the sales force with that intelligence, I think is a wide open territory. All right, we got a-- So a couple of other things. If I can? Yeah! Just to get it in. So you guys made a big platform enhancements a couple of years ago, and then a big eight dot, whatever it was, eight dot something, two, three, five. I think it was 8.2. Customer momentum, can you update us on that? Maybe even customer examples, and then I've got a partner question for you. Yeah, so I talked about the value of the platform, and we'll take Renault as an example. So Renault, a NetBackup customer, Renault wanted to make their virtualized SAP environment highly available, and they looked at a variety of different solutions, and they looked at some solutions that were homegrown and others, and they realized just extending the Veritas platform was faster time to market, 60% cost savings. So, there's a perfect example of a customer leveraging our platform play. And a couple partner questions. So, you know, we're here at VMworld, so your VMware partnership obviously pretty important, and then we're at Pure Accelerate next month, you guys are there, you got a big presence there, I know you got a tight partnership with them. That's right. Give us the partner update. Partner update, so we have very solid relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Google, Nutanix, Pure, and that's where we're really doubling down in terms of technology integration, joint go-to-market. >> Dave: Great. And the community site is vox.veritas.com, I just was checking it out. Thank you for the plug. There's a church one, there's a religious one, not to be confused with Vox Media, so just want to make sure everyone got that URL. We think community is super important. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Excellent! and sharing your insights. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you. Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. More live coverage of VMworld after this short break. (upbeat dance music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> 2010 was the first year we brought theCUBE to VMworld. At that time, VMware was a $2.5 billion company with former Microsoft exec Paul Maritz at the helm. Two years earlier, in a stunning development, VMware fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene, which sent the company's stock tumbling almost 25%. Under pressure from investors, Joe Tucci, the chairman of EMC, made the move after a rocky four-year relationship with Ms. Greene. EMC purchased VMware in 2004 for $635 million. The Maritz years were marked by a strategy to move the company beyond the hypervisor into new areas of growth, including desktop virtualization and applications, which were met with mixed market responses. To Maritz's credit, however, the company continued to expand its presence in the data center, and under his leadership remained highly competitive with Microsoft, who was seen at the time as VMware's main rival. In 2012, the company named long-time Intel and then recently EMC exec, Pat Gelsinger as its CEO. Gelsinger inherited a roughly $4.5 billion company, staring into the teeth of the oncoming cloud megatrend. Gelsinger quickly embarked on a strategy to refocus on the core business, buoyed by a restructuring of many of the VMware assets that EMC and VMware folded into a new company called Pivotal. Gelsinger made several attempts to maintain and expand VMware's total available market with a public cloud play called vCloud Air, which ultimately failed. On the plus side of the ledger, however, Gelsinger led VMware's software-defined data center strategy grabbing pieces of its value chain that were historically left for the ecosystem. Of course, the most notable being NSX, the company's software-defined networking product, and vSan, a software storage play. Fast forward to 2017, and add to these developments the momentum of VMware's cloud management and orchestration offerings, its security and other multi-cloud services, and you now have a nearly $8 billion revenue company growing at 10% per anum, with a $40 billion market cap, and a new owner, namely, Michael Dell and company. Hello, everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman, and this is our VMworld 2017 preview. Stu, thanks for joining me. >> Dave, can't believe it's bene eight years we've been doing theCUBE at VMworld. >> Right, and we have been tracking this, Stu, and now, as we were saying, we see new owners, Michael Dell, Dell buying EMC, and of course VMware maintaining the vast majority of the ownership. Stu, what has changed since Michael Dell purchased VMware? What's changed in terms of Dell, its ownership, and also in the past year? >> Yeah, so it's been one of the top questions. Last year, John Furrier and I interviewed Michael Dell, and there were still everybody trying to say after the acquisition happened, "Aren't you going to just sell of VMware because VMware "needs to be independent, "they need to be able to partner with everyone?" And Michael was basically like, just lit a fire underneath him, and he's like, "People that think I'm going to sell it "don't understand the business plan "and they don't understand math." Everybody thought, "Oh, you got to sell them off "to be able to pay down the debt," and he's like, "No. "VMware has been called the jewel of this acquisition "of EMC, the largest acquisition in tech history." And that relationship of VMware is something that's still playing out. One piece of it, you mentioned vSAN, one of the success stories, there was the failure of EVO:RAIL, which was kind of the first generation solution put together sold through a whole lot of partners. They took that whole product and marketing team and put them together with EMC and created the VxRail team, which now reports up to Chad Sakac. On the Dell/EMC side, VxRail doing quite well, vSAN doing phenomenally well. They claim to have the most number of customers for any product in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Lots of different solutions out there. So, some of that blending of how Dell/EMC and VMware, we see a little bit of that, but still, VMware partners with everyone. VMworld, still, Dave, is probably the largest infrastructure ecosystem out there, and even if we look at cloud, it's one of the more robust ecosystems out there. The only one probably rivals it these days is Amazon. >> Stu, isn't Dell's ownership of VMware somewhat more threatening to server vendors in particular than EMCs? Especially Cisco, IBM, HPE, large volume movers of VMware licenses, how has that affected the dynamic in the ecosystem? >> Yeah, Dave, we've talked in previous years. I was at EMC back at the beginning of the VMware relationship. EMC really didn't know what it was getting when it got VMware. It was less dollars were going to go into servers because we consolidate with virtualization, and less dollars to servers should mean more dollars to storage, good for EMC. Well, Dell, number one thing that Michael Dell wants to do is sell Dell servers. So, of course, if I'm someone else in that ecosystem, if I'm selling other servers, if I'm selling storage that doesn't run on Dell gear and not part of that Dell ecosystem, absolutely it could be a threat. Micheal has maintained the they're going to keep VMware, allow them to have their independence, and I haven't heard too many rumblings from the ecosystem that they've messed up the apple cart from VMware's standpoint. >> Okay, last year the talk was that Pat Gelsinger was on his way out. >> Stu Miniman: Yeah. >> You see Pat Gelsinger doesn't appear to be on his way out. There's earnings momentum, which we'll talk about, but thoughts on management? >> Yeah, so, right, Dave. Number one thing is we thought Pat would be out. Things are doing better from a stock market. You talked about the growth, 10% per anum right now is solid VMware. We've seen a number of moves and changes, people that, there have been a lot of people that have left. There's new people that have come in. There are areas that are doing quite well, and virtualization is still a mainstay of the data center. One of the things we'll talk about, I know, is that Amazon relationship, which we expect to hear a lot about at the show. Amazon's one of the Global Diamond partners, which, a year ago if you had said that Amazon was one of the top partners up there with the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OVH took over the vCloud Air business, which is, as you said, it failed from VMware's standpoint. They still have a number of partners. Companies like Rackspace, OVH that took over that vCloud Air business, and lots of service providers are doing quite well selling VMware lots of places. And virtualization still is the foundational layer for most infrastructure. >> So VMware pre-announced earnings to the upside and future growth ahead of expectations, so the stock got a nice pop out of that. What's driving that momentum? >> The two areas you talked about first. vSAN is doing quite well. It's driving a lot of adoption and trying to get VMware to be a little bit more sticky and really kind of slowly expand as opposed to big chunks. We talked about when Pat first went in as CEO, it was, VMware had to play a similar game to what Intel did, Dave, which is how do they expand what they're doing without really ostracizing their ecosystem. And, to their credit, they've done a pretty good job of that. They baked in some backup solutions, but lots of backup solutions, you and I were at the vMon conference earlier this year. VM's still doing a very solid business inside of VMware's ecosystem. Lots of other players that play well there. NSX is really starting to hit its stride, that networking piece, but where a few years ago we were talking about it was VMware versus Cisco, well, they seem to be kind of settling into their swim lanes. Cisco still has their core networking business. Cisco's trying to become more of a software company. Cisco actually recently bought Springpath, which was their hyper-converged product, but today that's far behind what vSAN's doing, revenue, users, and everything like that. AirWatch was another acquisition. Sanjay Poonen really helped drive that forward. So the mobility play, VMware's doing well. A lot of the emerging areas, we've been waiting to see where VMware goes with them. Things that I look at like containerization, server lists, open stack VMware had some plays there. They are really kind of nascent at this point and haven't really exploded. I always look at this show, are we seeing many developers there? Lots of the shows we go to have a big developer group. We'll have a little bit of developers, but it's really still a small piece of the overall picture. There's still lots of virtualization admins, people looking at where VMware fits into cloud, and that's kind of where it sits today. >> Let's talk about the competitive dynamic, which is totally different. I mean, back when we first started covering VMworld with theCUBE, 2010, it was really Citrix, Microsoft, Citrix with VDI. You mentioned AirWatch, which kind of flipped the dynamic a little bit. Quite a bit, actually. But Microsoft was the key virtualization competitor. Now it's like competitors, partners, you've got Google Cloud, now, of course, Diane Greene running Google Cloud, which is kind of ironic. We can talk about that. Microsoft with Azure, AWS, which is, we expect to hear a lot from VMware at VMworld 2017 about the AWS relationship. Certainly, IBM with its cloud. Nutanix, which launched at VMworld several years ago, is now more competitive. You mentioned Cisco. They're clearly more competitive with NSX. How do you describe the competitive landscape? What should we be watching at this year's show? >> Yeah, Dave, first of all, you talked about how VMware grew from kind of the $2.5 billion to more like an $8 billion, so of course they're bumping into, kind of going over some of their swim lanes a little bit, and the market has matured. Absolutely, hyper convergence for the last few years has been one of the hot spots, not only for VMware, first when they launched vSAN, it actually was the tide that rose for a lot of their competitors out there. Nutanix, SimpliVity, many of these companies said that they actually stopped a lot of their outbound marketing for about a year because all the people that called up looking at vSAN went to those solutions. Now vSAN's hitting its stride. It's doing really well. I highlighted how VxRail is doing great revenue on the Dell/EMC side, and there's still lots of partners that VMware has. So hyper converge, absolutely something that we'll see there. Cloud, big piece. I mentioned Rackspace, OVH, all the service providers. The vCloud Air network is still kind of there. So how VMware is getting into the service providers, how they're getting into the cloud, I know we'll talk a little bit more about the cloud piece. Last year it was the Cloud Foundation suite, which takes vSAN, and NSX, and vSphere, puts it all together with a management, and that's something that VMware wants to be able to put on prem in a service provider or in AWS. So really, wherever you go, VMware is going to be there and stretch that, but it's like a four-node star configuration. It doesn't natively go into Amazon. That's been a lot of the lift that's been happening over the last year to try to get that VMware on AWS working, and I hear it's not 100% baked yet by the time we get to the show, but working out a lot of those details. But cloud, hyper-converged, some of the new ones. VDI will still come up too, I'm sure. >> How about Docker? Where do they fit in the competitive landscape? >> Yeah, it's interest, remember, I remember the last year we had the show in San Francisco we had Ben Golub, a CEO at Docker, on the program there. Ben's no longer the CEO. They switched CEO's. We had theCUBE at DockerCon this year. Containers, absolutely very important. VMware has something called VMware Integrated Containers. I hear a little bit about it, but most people, if they're saying, "I'm doing virtualization," they're probably doing it on Linux. So Red Hat Summit this year, heard a lot about containers. We're going to have theCUBE at Kubecon, which is the Kubernetes show, later this year. So we know VMware plays a little bit with Docker. I'd love to see VMware saying how they fit into the Kubernetes piece a little bit more. We heard of the Cloud Foundry Summit earlier this year, how Pivotal kind of fits into that environment and they've got a way to be able to spread across multiple environments there. But VMware tends to play in a little bit more traditional applications. And, Dave, when you talk about a competitive standpoint, that's what I look at for VMware. The biggest threat to them is they don't own the application, so Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all those cloud-native apps that are getting put in the public cloud, like Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft, does that leave VMware behind? Does VMware, I heard it many times last year, become the new Legacy? >> Well, and, but they're clearly positioned as an infrastructure player, so let's talk about that. I mean, cloud has become the new, infrastructure and service, become the new big competitive threat to on-prem infrastructure. Wikibon has done some research on the true private cloud. Interestingly, I mean, true private cloud essentially is a moniker representation of public cloud-like attributes on prem, bringing cloud, cloud models, to the data, for example, and Wikibon has forecast that as the largest market. I think I've got some data here. It shows that true private cloud over time will be a $230 billion market, whereas infrastructures and service in the public cloud will be about 150 billion. So you expect that true private cloud is going to overtake that. It's growing faster. The CAG here is 33% versus public IAS at 15%, but the big thing is staff. >> Yeah. >> Staffing, getting taken out essentially, getting out of non-differentiated heavy lifting, but what is VMware's cloud strategy generally, but specifically with regard to bringing the cloud model to the data on prem? >> Yeah, so when we created the true private cloud definition, we said,"Vvirtualization alone is not cloud, "and therefore, what do we need? "We really need to have that automation, "that orchestration." And VMware had done a number of acquisitions, they're putting the suite of solutions together, and it's more than just saying, "Oh, I have six different software products; "here's a bundle." How do we fully integrate that? And that's what the Cloud Foundation suite's what VMware put together so that I can have it in a virtual private cloud in Amazon. And it's something basically VMware manages it, but it's Amazon's data center, and that's plugged into the public clouds. I can do the similar sort of thing in the service providers and that's why, with our forecast, Dave, we show in about five years, true private cloud should have more revenue than public cloud. Big reason is because there's a whole lot of Legacy out there and moving from all of my, most companies hundreds if not thousands of applications, getting all of them to the public cloud is tough. Having them in a virtualized environment and being able to slide them over to this kind of environment makes a lot of sense. I can do that. And the shift of my workloads and my applications going to microservices really starting to break apart some of the the pieces is something that a lot of times that's going to take five to 10 years. So, in the meantime, we're going to shift kind of Legacy to private cloud while we're picking off the things that we can with the public cloud. And VMware with their Cloud Foundation suite and their solutions that they're putting together, networking as, really, the inter fabric with NSX, vSAN making it easy to make those applications a little bit more portable between different types of infrastructure, but that's really, VMware is they put their cloud play, and they have a very large set of partners that they're working with in this space. >> So, Stu, how should we look at the VMware AWS deal? Is it AWS's attempt to get a piece of the true private cloud action on prem? Is it VMware's initiative to try to actually get a cloud strategy that has teeth, and works, and has longevity? How should we think about that? >> Yeah, it's, of course, a little bit of both. At its core, I think it's Amazon looks at 500,000 VMware customers that have data center deployments and they're going to stick a straw into that environment and say, "Come try out the first taste of our services," and once you get on the Amazon services which, by the way, they're launching, what, three new features every week, I think. I was at the Amazon Summit in New York City recently and it was like, "Oh, it's a regional summit," there were like three main announcements. No, I got the email. There were like 12 announcements and each one of them were kind of cool and things like that. So it absolutely is how do I get customers comfortable with moving to this new model. I think one of the things that Microsoft did really well is when they pushed everybody to Office 365, they said, "SaaS is the way you should always think "about buying your applications going forward, not, "I'm going to deploy a server for my Outlook, "I'm going to deploy infrastructure for my SharePoint." It's, "I'm going to buy Office 365 and that's just "the way it's done." So they made it the okay. Now VMware, it's really dangerous, in a way, saying, working with Amazon, now we're saying, "Hey, playing on Amazon's safe. "The water's nice." And once they get in that water and you have access to all of those cool things that Amazon keeps putting out, which, by the way, Dave, the week after they announced the partnership of VMware and AWS, what Amazon announced was, "There's a really easy "migration service that, if you have "a VMware Ware environment, "you just kind of click this button." And I'm pretty sure it's for free. "You can now be completely on AWS "and you don't have to pay for VMware licensing anymore. "Wouldn't that be nice?" >> So, okay, so the way you've phrased it or framed it, is it sounds like that VMware, with its half a million customers, has more to lose than AWS in this deal. Is that the right way to think about it or is this not a zero-sum game? >> I don't think it's a zero-sum game when, you brought up the true private cloud. The data center still, there's room for some growth with VMware, even if people are 90% virtualized now, there's some room for growth there. Public cloud, though, has a strong growth engine, so now VMware has a play there. Rather than saying, "It's the book seller, don't go there," they want to have a play. Michael Dell, Dave, I'm sure we're going to ask him, say, "Hey, what do you think the world's going to look like "in five years? "You've got your Azure Stack partnership "that you're lining up with your server division "and with EMC, you've got Amazon that VMware's playing with, "you've got your data center; "how does that go?" And, of course, Michael being the smart businessman that he is, is going to say, "Uh, yeah, you're going to buy Dell "no matter what solution you go with, "and I'm going to have a strong position "in all of them." but it definitely is, we're in a bit of a transitional phase as to how this is going to look. We've, for years, been arguing how big does public cloud get, what applications go where. I do think that this has the potential to accelerate a little bit from VMware's standpoint. VMware customers getting in this environment, trying out some of the new things. I know lots of people that were in the virtualization community that are now playing in the public cloud, getting certified, doing the same things that they did a decade ago to get on public cloud. So, as those armies of certified people kind of move over in the skillset, we have a generational shift going on and lots of people are going to be like, "Hey, I don't want to spend 12 to 18 months "building a temple for my data anymore. "I can just spin this up really fast and move." It's interesting, Dave, Cycle Computing, one of the earliest customers that we interviewed at Amazon, was just acquired by one of the other cloud guys, not Amazon. So companies that know, that was an HPC company that was, rather than spend 18 months and $10 million, we can do the same thing in, like, a few weeks and $10,000. >> They're super computing in the cloud. All right, let's wrap with what to expect at VMworld 2017. Obviously it's going to be a lot of people there. They're your peeps. A lot of partying going on. It's like, it used to be Labor Day kicked off the fall selling season, and for years it's been VMworld. What should we look for this year? >> Yeah, so, I'm excited, Dave. It's always, this community, they spend like the whole summer getting ready for it. I'm actually going to be sitting on a panel at Opening Acts, which is, the VMunderground group does on Sunday. So the event really, it doesn't start Monday, Dave, it actually, a lot of people are already flying in by the time this video goes up. They're doing things Saturday. On Sunday there's three panels. I'm sitting on one on buzz words in IT, so to things like cloud and server lists. Are those meaningful or are those a total waste of our time? So that kind of gets us started. You mentioned lot of good parties at the show always. There's the vExpert community. I was a vExpert for a number of years back when it was, you know, hundred, couple hundred people. I think there's now 1,500 vExperts worldwide. We've got a bunch of hosts coming in to help us, including John Troyer who created the vExpert program, Keith Townsend, Justin Warren, excited to have them. Lisa Martin's going to be co-hosting, along with you, me, John Furrier and Peter Burris. So we've got a big team. We've got two sets. We've got a great lineup at theCUBE. Two sets, three days in the VMvillage, which this year is on the first floor right outside of the Expo Hall. So it's one of those things I don't expect to sleep a lot. I expect to see a lot of people, bump into 'em on the show floor, stop by theCUBE, see the parties, and definitely see 'em in the after parties. >> Great. Well, as Stu says, we have two sets going on, so please stop by and see us. Stu, thanks very much for helping me with this VMworld preview. We'll see you in Vegas next week. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)