(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)

(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)

>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>> From Bahrain, it's theCUBE covering AWS' Public Sector Bahrain, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE coverage. We are here for the Amazon Web Services Summit in Bahrain in the Middle East where cloud computing is changing the game for start-ups, businesses, and the government, and society Amazon announcing their new read, it's up and running. We've got two great guests to talk about all the integration and opportunities. We have Hassaini who is the CEO of ACME and we have Cherian Abraham, who is the general manager of Computer World. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, John. I'm so excited to be here. (laughter) >> Thank you John. It's a pleasure to be here. >> It's a great day, it's a bigger venue than last year. It's our second time here, but what's striking from this event is the explosion of innovation, not just start-ups. You're seeing the businesses, large, global ISV's are here. Seeing new ISV's, new software environments, and the demand for cloud computing is off the charts. So, there's a real need, thirst, for cloud computing. >> Absolutely. >> What's your assessment? >> I believe that most customers have started to look into digital transformation and customers have started buying into a new experience, of moving from Imperium into Cloud. And I think that's a great story because customers are looking to move from CapEx to OpEx and driving innovation and driving more for their businesses. >> And the cloud's first message here in Bahrain has been mandated from the top. >> Absolutely. >> And that's been forcing all the ministries to do it, that's changing the citizen relationship to society, which includes entrepreneurs and business, and now they got to integrate it in the banking systems behind it, so good business for you guys. What's the business impact? >> The new diplomacy in business, I think we are on the right track with the cloud business, with interviews in particular. Just to add to all Abraham's mentioned, you know, I think it's an entire eco system which is working well for the whole cloud objective. I was just speaking to one of, a gentleman who was from one of the news cities, he was teaching there, and what he mentioned to me, you know, that we have been giving students, good students, who were like on the verge of getting certified, now we are going to make them certified and hand them over to you. So we'll have limited people available to us. I think the policies right from the cloud-first policy, you know the banking policies, you know. As the last awareness that AWS has got to the market, it's been a game-changer all of a sudden. >> And it's causing a pipe-lining for talent, that's going to allow people to participate. >> Yup. >> Yes. >> Has there been a business driver behind all this? What's been the big business benefit, besides the mandates? Have you seen from customers, is it software development? What's the business driver? >> The key driver has been, you know, every entity would like to have an edge in the business, you know. It's no more of the old days, where you have the set in a competitors. You all of a sudden see new faces, new companies, who become big challengers. I think the very need to face this challenge as well as the desire to grow more and do more, which is driving the whole cloud momentum. >> You know, one of the things as Agility, we've heard that message here, and we go to all the other cloud events. Agility, agility, agility. Data, data, data. Compute, storage networking. Less about storage networking, because that's become elastic, that's available. That's what Amazon brings to the table. >> True. >> Data and agility now drive a lot of the business conversation because now they got to go hire software developers, who need to build on top of something, that's going to be Amazon or something else. This is a big part of the business architecture. >> Mmhmm, true. >> What are some of the things that you guys have done? Can you talk in generalities about some of the projects? >> We have looked at the elasticity of the platform. We looked at the scalability of the platform. What it brings to our customers? And how do we build innovation, bringing in new technology that helps customers' insight from their existing data, and build onto it. >> What are some of the challenges that you guys have seen that are now available to be overcome, that weren't maybe a few years ago. >> I think that the overall resistance to adapting to Cloud. I think that was one of the major challenges that we've seen a couple of years back, because people felt that going to Cloud is going to hinder the way they do the job, the work. In addition to that, the Cloud brought in a lot of security-related issues where people were not aware. But today, people are embracing it. Customers have started to embrace technology because they see value in cloud data >> The culture fear of change- >> Yes. >> And then the security are being addressed. The banks are going cloud. That's a good tell-sign. >> Absolutely. And there are a lot of ISB's that brings in resilient solutions that addresses customer requirements. >> What's the number one conversation you have with customers? >> Thank you. How do we build further on the cloud? How do we take good applications into cloud and take it into modernizing them? How do we take our digital transformation strategy, moving forward? >> Your conversations? >> I think we talk about longevity in terms of how the business can move forward and stay in the game for a longer time. That's so the discussion starts okay, then we start talking about you know, what it means to modernize the applications, so that you know you have the agility to address newer opportunities, you know, to have the growth that you always wanted to have. And, of course you know, the awareness and education that has happened in this country in particular, in the recent times, that has helped us a lot. Okay, we are no more talking about, you know, the challenges of security, whether it's going to be secure in Cloud or not. We are talking about how the business is going to behave once they make the move. >> I got to put you guys both on the spot with a question, I'd like you both to answer it because I think, any conference you go to that's always the hallway conversations that are interesting, because what happens in the hallways, you see someone you know. You mentioned before we came on camera you see people here. Everyone knows each other, it's growing. What are some of the hallway conversations that you guys have had here that you could share with folks watching. >> We need to adopt the Cloud. We need to build a strategy on Cloud. We need to look at innovations. >> If it is a comment, it is about, you know more services that they can offer. It's an ongoing sector, the new revenue streams that they can generate, these are the conversations that I have most of the time . >> It gets business deals done. Come on, come on. You've got some deals happening. >> Yes. We're getting a lot of good traction with people showing a lot of interest in new areas of business. >> I've found there's three types of companies in digital transformation. One's that know they got to do it, people that are doing it and they get stuck a little bit, and folks that are done it and are like "Wow, maybe I can do it over again" or are successful. So, three kind of phases. How would you categorize the market here in terms of progress, more phase one, two or three? What do you guys see the distribution? >> I think it's phase one and two. We haven't reached phase three yet. There are some customers who have started looking at phase three, but it's all centered around phase one, phase two. >> Understand the playbook? >> Yes. >> Yup. >> What systems to start with, those kinds of things? >> Absolutely. >> Fixing the culture, making more buy into it. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, other question I wanted to get your thoughts on, I think it's important that we're reporting here, is that cultural shift, this new generation of workers, we alluded to it about the young people coming to the university, there's a generational shift happening. >> Absolutely. >> It's almost pride. You see the sparkle in the entrepreneurs eyes that like, there's a whole 'nother thinking out there. >> (Husseini) Sure. >> How do you guys relate to that? What's your observations, being that we're the older, mature generation, kind of looking back at the young guns coming up. >> I think it works very well for us, innovating the event for a combined strategy, you know. We come from a strong lineal system integration and application delivery, and we have a lot of people who are very much tuned to offering turnkey solutions. So, I work first on them okay, because I wanted to have those mindsets with huge amount of experience, ready you know, in the new era of big business. At the same time, we started getting the new team from whom we started learning and know many things in Cloud, many things in DownSoft, you know, acclimation via learning more from them. So this way I think, you know, we had the initial success. I think that you continue that strategy. >> You bring in, combine them on teams... >> Yep. >> They can learn from each other. The key is learning two ways. >> I think the younger generation does not carry baggages, unlike the older generation. >> (chuckling) Yeah. >> They are more open, they are more agile to learning new technology and they want to be entrepreneurs. They've lived new applications that create opportunity for the community, for businesses, and for themselves. >> Yeah, I mean, we had a start-up on here, a thirteen year old company, doing API's >> True >> Billions of transactions, API calls... >> Yeah >> That wasn't even possible in the old days. Remember, you had security perimeter, firewalls, everything's locked down. Not anymore, it's all open. The surface area is completely- >> Entirely new dimension. >> Yeah, security's huge. Thanks so much guys for coming on theCUBE. Take a quick minute, each of you, to give a plug for your companies, what you guys are working on, key initiatives you'd like to share. We'll start over here. >> Thank you, John. My company, Computer World, focuses on digital transformation. We help businesses thrive on new areas by building innovations. >> My company, Almoayyed Computers Middle East, we are a four decade old company and we have taken a reboot recently in Cloud data, focusing more on Cloud now, whatever we do it's all focused on Cloud and we are on to many services. We are on to the emerging technologies, RTA, AIA, machine loading... >> Yeah, the bots are coming. This is going to help humans. >> True. >> The big debate about automating jobs away kind of, I always laugh at that, because there's so many job openings. It's like (chuckling) some go away but more are born. This is the dynamic. >> Yep, yep. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights, appreciate it. CUBE coverage here in Bahrain for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more CUBE coverage, after this short break.

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q recovery AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Welcome back. Everyone's Cube coverage here in my reign Middle East, part of A W s Amazon Web services Summit, sir. Second year covering the evolution and the Revolution to cloud computing. This year, the big news is a Davis has a region spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in the Middle East region or next gases. Ahmad Hamadan, CEO and CO. Front of Uniform Nick, a super hot company. Congratulations on your success. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you, Joe. So we just talked before we came on camera. This ap I economy that we've been covering in death you been living? This is your world. You have a really big business. Not a lot of employees. Less than 200 employees, billions of transactions. Ap I transactions. This is This is the successful man we've been seeing in the public companies truly, among others. Messaging application integration. This is cloud now, right? This is happening. What's your story? >> Okay, so >> you know, these times I would say it's a golden age for the technology in the region on for the cloud specifically when we started back in 2006. Uh, you know, we're very lonely. We're we're not even in that time in the club. So we started just tow, solve the issue off bulk messaging through writing a script or software that allow us to broadcast a message to a group of people. But along the journey, we realized that businesses need tools, especially a B I's that will allow them tow, tow each toe a wider, I would say audience with a seamless integration. And this is how the cloud communication industry emerged. So we avoid our baby eyes for businesses from all around TV region, especially with segments or sectors that have a mass communication need, like banks in government retailers on the E businesses, >> the data is the data in this business is a fascinating. Before we get into some of those questions about the origination story, how did it all start? >> Okay, so I wasn't at the university a teenage off 22 probably on I leave the one of the student clubs. Andi. I wanted to communicate a message Tau 400 people on, you know, the limitation of the mobile. Back then, I couldn't do it. It's terrible experience. You cannot send two more than 10 people. The text is not full. You know all these complications. So being a software engineer on Dhe, you know, I had an idea. There should be a solution that you can write code, publish it online, and then it will do the magic for you. For months later, I apartment with my brother was a software, you know, geek more than I on dhe. You know, already >> older or younger, brother. >> Younger brother. Okay. Yeah. Hey, was at high school on then four months later, we're life sending thousands of messages over the Internet. It was like magic friends and family like it. It's really making money on, you know, for us, you know, You know, it's like when you have 4005 thousand's a big money for us. That way, any each month, Andre, Like moving forward 2008. I decided this is the dream we need to scale this and, ah, venture out of this small, you know, experiment on. Then I left the job and dedicated my time to scale that business. And I moved the business toward the business and the cloud and communication. Our first move to the cloud was, Ah, 2010. We used aws toe move most of our infrastructure to the cloud on By 2013 we completely divert it into the cloud communication business where the focus is into the FBI. The integration with the applications at the customer systems on Ben allow them tow, communicate to, you know, 100 of millions off >> and then mobile phones, obviously GPS built in application. Tsunamis happened. Exactly. People want to interface with the companies. The other phone? >> Exactly. I will give you an example. You know, you come to my mind while you're talking. We used to have customers back in 2010 descend on Lee along the year like maximum one million transaction the same customers nowadays, like nine years later, they send at least 200 million transactions, so you can imagine the growth in the use cases on the adoption from the customers. Use it now for engagement for notification, for awareness for security and authentication for personalized marketing content, like hundreds of fuse cases like we do some analysis in the behavior of the customers and the consumer on. We realised that in a modern society on individual interact digitally with at least 50 grands and a day. This is huge. You can do the math if you multiply this by 100 million population than there is a massively huge number of transaction and data's being >> percent. What are you guys doing now? Is mainly targeted application developers or businesses as a turnkey solution? What's the What's the value proposition? >> So, >> UH, >> two years like nature, we realized that we cannot target or the market and serve, or the customers we need to focus into the sick man that has hypertension. Then we identified five segment where we tell her our solution, our value proposition toward those segments on it's aligned with the trends in the region. Maybe it's not applicable to other regions. Eso number one for us is the online banking segment. I would see the financial industry with all the, you know, evolution off the authentic and the online and mobile banking. So those are number one. We do integrate our system with their current systems out off the shelf. We don't do much of a cast immunization. We usually provide really integral components toe toward their system, and then they hook up their system two hours, and then they have the dashboard and blood form to orchestrate the communication. The number one is the M government. It's also a, you know, an industry that is evolving in the region. The number three for us is the businesses, and they're very hot, very high potential growth. I would say the number one in terms of growth a business include the e commerce on demand delivery, the food delivery applications you name it on then. The fourth industry for us is the retailer who are moving now toward the reality and the engagement. More to them prison share themselves in this stuff word for them. And the last one is the I would say the hospitality and the, you know, the, you know, hotels and, you know, travel agents. >> I think anyone building an app would want this of their mobile. So what's what's your take of the ecosystem? Entrepreneurship now much different in one year. You have an Amazon region here. What do you think's gonna happen? It's gonna be like you and your brother all over again with other entrepreneur. >> Exactly. You know, when I you know, see, photo interpreters usually approach me for, you know, kind of mentorship and coaching. You know, we're at the stage little bit, you know, being fruit difficult. You know, >> the situation's got the scar >> tissue. Yeah, So I usually told them guys, it's like being so easy for you. You know, at this time, I know that with all the luck, I would say support the barrier to entry had become much less. But at least there are many things you don't need to think how you figure out. It's already there. Just need to have the badge and dedication, and then you'll find many people to support you. Especially, I would say there is only one areas not yet will, you know, covered in the region, which is the access to the talents. I think this is a worldwide problem, even for Forks in the Silicon Valley. But in terms of funding thes of doing business, sitting up ventures, access to the technology platforms like the cloud infrastructure in terms, off advice, mentorship and coaching there is, I would say, an abundant off that available today for for interpreters. And I can tell the next five years you will see a huge value being created out of this. >> Yeah, instead of riding, waves will be running s curves. So it's easier now, Still hard to build a company. But you're right. I mean, go back 10 years ago. You to put it all together, >> Takes us six months to set up the company. You know, legally, back in 2006 >> to get the infrastructure legally, get servers, get some funding, prototype it, get it launched its customers. Now they have a partner network. These kids are spoiled. >> But you know, it's difficult >> today to differentiate yourself because you will find tons of people are either doing or planning to do the same. >> They gotta build some smart intellectual property. This one machine learning is gonna be a great opportunity. That's gonna be a domain expertise kind of thing. You guys have a nice niche, and broad market is growing good. Calm, surround it. Got all kinds of systems out there that need this >> Exactly. You know, the question today is not if the tools and support is available or not. The question is, how you gonna use those tools to create something unique? >> I'm a great to See you. Thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences. You're an inspiration to the other entrepreneurs out there again. Remember Entrepreneurship like a family. Took a team, sport. Pay it forward. The other generations coming online. Absolutely. Congratulations on your success Cube coverage here by rain talking to start ups. This is going to be a hot market for entrepreneurship If the capital markets conform around it. The Cube is here covering it here and by rain. Stay with us for more at a debate summit. If this trip

>> Live, from Bahrain it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the theCUBE's coverage here, in Bahrain, in the Middle East, for our coverage of AWS Summit and the announcement, and now soon to be up-and-running in 2019 in Q1, Amazon Web Services, full region here in the Middle East. Should have a massive impact to the ecosystem, and companies and entrepreneurs from around the borders. We've got great conversations all day. And today we've got to great guests here, Emilio Valdes, VP of EMEA South and Latin America for Informatica. Thank you for theCUBE sponsorships over the years. We've covered Informatica shows all over the world. Mathew Joseph, business head of Data Analytics for Wipro. Good to see you, thanks for joining us. >> It's a pleasure. >> Same >> Great to be here. >> So, Informatica, we know a lot about you. We cover all of your big events in North America, I interviewed your CEO, I've been following the value proposition, growing really well, you've got a good product offering. But we're in the Middle East, okay? And what I've learned here is that there's a thirst for entrepreneurship. There's a thirst for cloud. But everyone's talking about data. And if data's the new oil, no better place to be than in the Middle East. They know the value of oil. What's going on in town here? What's happening in the Middle East? >> Right, so, as I cover a pretty big area within Informatica, I used to travel the world and meet many customers, in many places, many customers and many industries here in the Middle East. And I can tell you that, you know, the story, the messages are very consistent, you know? Every company, every industry, is going through a massive period of change, and companies are reacting to this change very differently. What we've seen is that the disrupters are going to be the ones that will, you know, implement digital transformation consistently, and we believe that data is the key driver for intelligent digital transformation. Here in the Middle East is no different. We've been seeing this across the different countries, in Dubai, in Bahrain, in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, exactly the same as everywhere else in the world. >> And cloud's now coming in full throttle at Amazon, You guys are not new to Amazon. I know you guys do a ton of work with Amazon integrating and putting all this together, what do you think is going to happen, here? Now Amazon gets up and running, they're already using a cloud now, so Bahrain's clear, cloud first. Saudi's got the cloud bug too, they're doing great things. So when an actual region comes here, what do you think is going to happen? An explosion of innovation and more business? What's going to be the impact? >> Well I think, I think the market knows what the benefits they can get out of the AWS platform, and I believe the challenges are related to get the most out of this AWS platform. At Informatica, we are going to help customers to move their data to the cloud in a consistent manner that is connected, articulated, properly governed, and not only this, but also we believe that the key value is in the hybrid world. The world hasn't moved to the cloud yet, entirely, so most companies continue to have some on-premise applications, as well as their cloud applications. So I believe that Informatica can help customers here in the Middle East, by connecting the on-premise world with the cloud world. And at the same time, the value they can get from our platform is by making AWS easy to operate, and, you know, move data to the cloud in a consistent, quick, and sustainable manner. >> So Matthew Joseph, you're with Wipro, why are you guys together, what's the relationship? Obviously we know what you guys do, you guys do great work, global, around the world. We see you at all the events. From SAP Sapphire, EMC World, now Dell World, Reinvent, you guys are everywhere. So here, what's going on here? I mean, analytics, you need analytics. You're good at analytics >> First of all, John, thanks a lot. A couple of thoughts. One, Wipro has been a global partner of AWS. Wipro's a global partner of Informatica. And the region is going through massive change of innovation, of using, consuming data. And at this point we really feel that both the expertises should come together to manage the change. And that's the simple reason why Informatica and Wipro are together, along with AWS and this, I would say a historical movement of this part of the world, to actually consume this rate and transfer the data for all of us. >> So if I asked you a question that said, hey, tell me about your relationship with Informatica. What's in it for me? What do you do for me? Are you, are you bringing it together? Are you guys going to market together? How do you, how do I win with you and Informatica? >> So what we have done is, as I told, the global partnership, across the globe, the best practices we're bringing back to this part of the world, to make sure that we have a similar set of stories across the global sphere. This certainly means more repeatability, less risk, and for the entire government to go through a small transition of going to the cloud. >> And data disruption is huge. You guys have Informatica 3.0, and you guys have your practice. When you put that together, what's the go to market? What's the value proposition? What's the pitch to the customer? >> So the key part is the IPaas method, the platform as a service message, right? With the platform as a service, it's a market that Gartner has identified as a $12.5 billion market. And it's growing very rapidly. Just to give you an idea, we process three trillion transactions per month, and this number is being multiplied by three every three to four months, right? So the iPaaS platform is what is going to help customers to move from the on-premise world, to the cloud. And this is where the key value Informatica, and Wipro, can put together to facilitate and to help enable customers in their journey to the cloud. >> So talk about the Amazon impact, obviously you guys do work with Amazon. What, specifically, does Amazon have that you guys like? That you work with the most with customers? Obviously they want to know, obviously you know, I got data, a ton of data. I've got to manage it. I mean, analytics are pretty good. You've got Sagemakers, Hotrock, on fire. Redshift everyone knows is doing well. Kinesis, with streaming. What's some of the Amazon tools you guys are working with around some of these day-to-day opportunities? >> Yeah, so there are multiple of them. In fact today's the day when the big data is pouring in, for example, right? So how do I really bring in all the data into a common platform? And today the customer is also talking about how do they really consume it? So consumption is a major attraction for AWS and how they really consume this data. The extraction, making sure the data is available, furthers decision making in the second part. The way Wipro and Informatica positions this entire journey is not just about putting the data into a common place and building up a transformation, right? What you're looking at is how do I really change the way the business works? And elements of design principal come in on it. And what Wipro has literally done is, we've done a lot of investments around how to I really make this transformation from a design-thinking point of view? How do I make sure the best practices of data science, and governance comes into it? How do I make sure that the press points for the customer are so clear and so vivid that decisions are made based on that? And I feel AWS, out in the region, is doing a great work on that. And that's the simple reason why all of us are together with that. >> That's great. And cloud, you guys are no stranger to Amazon. >> We are partner of Amazon. And we've been a partner of Amazon AWS for awhile. As well as Wipro is a partner of Amazon. And Informatica and Wipro are global partners as well. We're quite excited about bringing this partnership to the region. >> What sort of things that you guys have done together, can you share some examples of some awesome implementation and use cases? >> A few of them. So to me, what is happening, as I was earlier telling is that most of the government entities are talking about how do I really consume this data. How do I really think of it as an experience? So what we have really done is pull up this data, look at various models on how I can do revenue generation for the customer. How can I bring in more customers' recommendation? How do I make impactful decisions based on those data? And the ample amount of programs use cases that you have already implemented in this part of the world, and certainly Informatica has been a great help in this journey of ours. So the teams around which we look out, is data monetization, customizability, researching degree of the customer, operating efficiency, and this is true across industries. Government is doing a fabulous job of going on this journey but certainly we do a lot of work in the oil and gas sector, in the healthcare, and similar things like that. >> Awesome, and what's core value proposition that you guys are offering customers out here? >> I believe it's the messages we discussed earlier. It's having a consistent platform where data gets together and can be used across different applications, business units, et cetera. At the end of the day, end users will need to use data and they don't care where this data is stored. It could be in the cloud, it could on premise, it could be in a big data application, it doesn't really matter, you know? >> It could be addressable. >> Exactly >> In real time too in low latency. It can't be some data warehousing thing that takes, you know, real time application like a car needs data. IoT, a huge growth area. I mean these are new cloud architectural opportunities. You can't be having the old way. >> The data has to be connected, and secure, and clean, and available, and consistent. This is what we do for a business. >> Yeah you guys have got some good story there. Good luck with everything. I want to get your final questions as we kind of round down the day here. The day's kind of cleaning out here behind us. You can see it's getting quieter. What do you think about what's happening here? Amazon Web Services Summit, mix a little public sector, you've got some commercial, but this region pulsing with cloud demand. What do you think, guys? What's your thoughts? >> I think we're going to help the government to move to the cloud. We're very excited about the announcement that we heard this morning. The cloud-first policy. I think that Wipro and Informatica are uniquely positioned to give the government what they need to be successful in their cloud-first policy >> Thoughts? >> Same here, I think the last 24 months we have seen a lot of initiative from the government. Both across the artificial and then about data being the center of all things. And cloud is going to be a very pivotal role in this. And I think we are geared very well to take care of it. >> I think you guys are well positioned enough, you know. My translation is you see their cloud-first policy, they want to be involved in FinTech in the future, you got to have a data strategy to center the value proposition everything's got to be built around how that data's going to move, how it's going to be addressed, how it's going to be consumed, shared, connected. Across the board, IoT, on premises, real-time mobile, everything. >> And John, one more point, to close, would be what we see is the hybrid architecture coming up, alright? So cloud being one of them, the customers still want data inside the premises as well, so how do you really look at the hybrid architecture, and the challenges around it. I don't think there are many companies in this part of the world who are geared up to that. Wipro has done it multiple times, Informatica has been a leader in that. And I think that is going to be a game changer for all of us. >> You know Mathew you made me smile because, thank you for making me smile, because we always joke, and I always talk on theCUBE, and usually Dave Vellante's here and we kind of argue about it, because I say data is the new oil, he says it's not the new oil because oil can only be used in the car I guess, we can always go back and forth. But I've been saying that cloud is the future, I've been saying it for many years. Amazon certainly is more hardcore, Andy Jassy, all data systems moved to the cloud, What does that mean? Just announced RDS on VMware on premises, so it kind of like, takes that window, but I say that the cloud, operationally, is what's going on. People are moving to operations that are cloud-linked. So if everything is running cloud operations, DevOps, infrastructure as code, AI, all the things that you guys are working on, that means that the data center and on-premises, is an edge device. Or is it? It's a big fat edge. Or what's the difference between a windmill and an on-premise campus? I mean, edges? So, this is the debate we've been having. What is an edge? >> The way we see it is customers having a journey, in a journey to the cloud. And the state of the art is very different. We're happy to help customers to go through this journey efficiently, quickly, and in a consistent manner. >> And all serious, putting the fun kind of comment aside about the argument we had about the edge, is that the architecture that we see people are going to is, don't let some pre-defined thing define where the data has to go. So this data out there, it's got to move around. And if you don't want it to move around, then you put Compute to it. So there's all kinds of things going on where you don't have to get dogmatic about it. >> Absolutely >> What the definition is. It's all running cloud operations, then it's cloud, right? I mean it's not on-premises operations, no one says that. Anyway thanks for coming on theCUBE, thanks for sharing. Great to see Informatica here, great to see Wipro. We've got to get more of these use cases, if we had more time we would. This is theCUBE coverage, here, in Bahrain for Amazon Web Services Summit. Stay with us for more coverage after this break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Bahrain in the Middle East. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here for the first time, covering Amazon Web Services, AWS' Public Sector, and the breaking news around their new region that they announced a while ago, going to be deployed here in the early 2019 time frame. An Amazon region really is the power source of digital. It has a track record of creating so much value and innovation. And I'm here with Teresa Carlson, who's the head-- she's the chief of public sectors, she's the head of Amazon Web Services' Public Sector globally, except for China but that's a different territory. Teresa Carlson, it's great to see you. >> It's so great to have you here with us, oh my goodness. >> So I got to say, you told me a few years ago we're going to really go international, we're doubling down outside North America, we're going to have regions, Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, said the same. This is the strategy of Amazon. But the Middle East was your baby. This was something that you did spend a lot of time on, and a lot of decisions. Everyone wants to know why Bahrain? Why did you choose this region? And what do you see happening? And how's it going? >> Well, you know, it's interesting because, well I have had a lot of people say why Bahrain as the first region that you've put in the Middle East? Because it doesn't seem like the first place somebody would choose. And the thing that kept coming back to me is Jeff has always said we're willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. And I think this is probably one of those times where people just didn't quite understand why Bahrain. Well, here's why. I met the Crown Prince, we talked about digital innovation and the economy here and he immediately got that they needed to go through a digital transformation. They are not a country that has a lot of oil. They are a smaller country and they really are a working class country that is looking for how do they have sustainment? And they've done things in the past around financial services that really got them going. They would spear head things. And I think he saw the opportunity that this could help them jump-start the economy and they could kind of be a hub for innovation. So they created the right policies around Cloud First. They created the right telecommunications policy. They were one of the first to deregulate. They had good pricing for utilities. They were friendly toward businesses. And they had a culture that we felt could fit well with us, as well as our partner community. >> Couple of observations, being the first time here, so thank you for inviting us and allowing us to cover you here. One, they're a learning culture, they speak multiple languages, why not add programming to it, software? Two, they like to move fast. They just built a track in 14 months, they're not afraid to go faster. >> They go fast. >> That's Amazon. Amazon, you guys move at a speed of a whole 'nother cadence. And then, my observation again, compared to other areas as I look around is that the percentage of the population of Bahrainians is large, is a lot of people live here, that are native, and they're talented. >> Well, one of the things you said that I think is key is that they move fast, they're used to being frugal on how they do things and they're very scrappy. And that really fits with their culture because, again, they have to do things different than some of the other minimalist countries who are-- they're not quite as rich. But they have this culture of really moving fast and they took down blockers like crazy. I mean, as we came in and were making a decision on-- >> What were some of those blockers? Like, stumbling blocks, are they more hurdles? What were they? >> They were stumbling blocks but they were-- we had to really come in and talk about why telecommunications, policies and pricing had to change because in an old-school model of Telco, there's a lot of big charges. And when you have a digital economy coming in, if you think about, you have a few transactions for a lot of money in an old-school. In a new-school world, you have millions of transactions for a little bit, 'cause you've got to be able to transact a lot, and that's why your telecommunications industry's got to be set up as well as you want it deregulated. They'd already deregulated it so they worked with us to open it up, to set the policies, and now Batelco, who is one of our major telecommunications partners here, is doing manage services on AWS, they've gotten all kinds of people trained. And it's just an example of how they look at an opportunity and say we have got to innovate and make changes if we want to have a sustainment in the 21st century economy. >> And you guys are bringing a lot of goodness to the table, they're quick learners, they're smart, they've got their entrepreneurial vibe. They're not afraid to put some funds of funds together and get some professional investment going on. So that's going to level up the entrepreneurship base. The question is when will the region be ready? How's that going? It's under construction. We've been hearing it's been impacting and, frankly, bringing in to this country an agenda item of sustainability and sustainable energy. Well, why would they need sustainable energy if they've got oil? >> Well they-- (laughs) [John] - Why burn it if you can sell it? That's what the British Prime Minister-- >> Well they do and they've had a new find but I think they have to get to the new oil that they've found but they're not-- I think, what I understand, they're not banking on that, they're going to bank on a digital economy. So they know this is kind of a guaranteed way to really grow what they're doing and bringing out outside others. There's two big elements they're doing. One is they're creating policies for data that allows other countries to put their data here safely and with the right laws. That is game changing. So that's one big thing they're doing. The second thing is they have the spirit of teaching and training so they're getting other countries to come in and talk to them about what they're doing. And remember, John, they're already moving the government to the Cloud and they don't even have their Cloud here yet. So they've done all their homework and they're already moving more work loads into the Cloud that they don't feel need to be here. But they've looked at security design, compliance practices, and they're like, we're moving, we're not waiting. >> They're Cloud First. >> They're Cloud First. >> Okay, so when do you expect the construction to be ready? Ballpark, I know you can't probably give an exact date but when-- >> We expect it'll be ready by Q1 of 2019 and we're excited. It's going to be one of the most innovative regions. And by the way, I dunno if you saw, I had a big star on the map today in my presentation. We have literally, at AWS, had a big hole in the world with no region in the Middle East or Africa, and now we are going to have this region so it is exciting, and I know that the region itself is really anxious to get going. >> Well not only are you an amazing executive, I've seen you work, I've seen what you've done, checking the boxes, doing the hard work, getting down and dirty and doing hustling and scrapping, but you also made some good strategic bets. This one really is successful because I think, two things, you bring a region to the area for AWS but you guys are doing it in a way that's partnering with the government, you're actually-- as industry contributing. I think that's a case there that's going to probably be recognized down the road when people figure that out. But that's going to be a great one. But the cultural win, for you, is pretty amazing and I have to say, yesterday I went to the women breakfast that you hosted and I've never been at a women breakfast, and I've been to a lot of them because I like to be involved, where I got kicked out of a table because they need the space, so it was so crowded. Sorry guys, you're out, I got booted. I didn't leave the room, I had to just move, because they had workshops. Take a minute to explain the women breakfast you had because I think that was extraordinary and a proof point that the narrative of the region, women don't go to school, all this nonsense that's out there, take a minute to clarify this, this is a cultural shift. There might be some cultural things going on. >> Well, the women are here, #SmartIsBeautiful. They are amazing. And they are very educated and in fact, 53% of the government work force here are females at high level jobs too, they're not just low level. And I actually met with the King this week who told me that he was able-- he has the first Supreme Court Justice, that's a female, in the Middle East. And he said it was against culture but he did it because he said this woman was so amazing and she was so talented and she fit the role, she had the job description down. And he said it's gone great, so the women here are smart, they're talented, they're educated, and they actually get degrees in Computer Science. Here in Bahrain, 60% of the Computer Science students are females. Now, what is not happening, is their not always getting out and getting these jobs. And the second thing is, right now, we're still working with them to teach the right skills. A lot of skills are actually outdated tech skills and I know, John, you see this too, even in the US. You have universities that are still teaching the wrong skills for Cloud, so we are working with them at the university and the high school level that actually teach and certify on the right skills. But the women are talented, they're amazing. There are some cultural things that we're going to work together on but there's really no reason we can't have an amazing and talented workforce of women here in the Middle East. >> We had Mohammed on, who's the chief executive of the IGA, the Information e-Government Authority. He told me that any citizen can get a certification for free in this country. >> Yes! Oh my gosh, so I've never seen this. So our partner here, Tamkeen, who's like The Labour Fund, about a year and a half ago, agreed that any citizen that got a certification on AWS, it would be 100% paid for. And then we just announced today that they're actually also going to pay 100% of Bahraini companies that want to move to the Cloud. They're serious about this, they are serious. And they are being a role model and, again John, why are they doing it? They are doing it because they realize that they want to be a true digital economy and grow their businesses here and create new. They got to move faster because they're smaller. They've got to be scrappier, they got to move faster, they got to do things a little bit different. >> The other thing I want to point out, you can't really see it on the camera, but behind us you have, essentially, a mix of commercial and public sector. The show here is so, so crowded, couldn't get into the keynote speech, overflow of room was packed, this is attracting everyone from the Gulf region here. Not just public sector, but commercial businesses. This is not a one time thing, this is a-- the pent-up demand is here. What do you expect is going to happen when the region gets here built out? >> Well, if you look at all the partners around, I mean you have Trend Micro over here, and others, many of them have come because they're excited about us putting a region here. And Andy Jassy and I both have had many of our partners say when are you going to have a region in the Middle East? So we expect a lot more partners are going to come. Just like you they're going to see the value of being here. But, additionally, I don't know what we're going to do for our conference, our summit, because we've already out-grown this space and you're right, we have delegates here from Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, of course Bahrain, Kuwait, the US. So many different groups are being represented here and I think also South Africa, we have some folks from South Africa. >> Well theCUBE is here, we're making great observations and great commentary. I got to say that you're even attracting amazing talent from the US, besides theCUBE. General Keith Alexander was here. >> Yes he was. >> John Wood from Telos, and all these partners, all visionaries who see the opportunity. This is important, you're not being misunderstood by the people who know Amazon. >> No, I agree. And you made a point earlier that I think is important. Even though I'm kind of here for this conference, leading it, this is not a public sector conference, it's a AWS Summit. It has tons of commercial, tons of public sector. The thing that's a little bit different when you get to some of these countries is they are more government lead, so that is the reason it's important to have this relationship with government if you really want to, but you don't want to surprise them. And you want to work with them to help make sure that they and the country are successful. >> Well Teresa, it's been fun to observe and watch your successes continue to raise the bar here in your job. This is a whole 'nother level when you talk about really filling a hole, you see a hole, you fill it. >> Yep, find a whole, fill it (laughs). >> I heard someone say that once in a motivation speech. Oh, that was you, "You see a hole you fill it. "Oh, we got to hole in the Middle East, fill it!" You have a region here, you've got great success in Washington, DC, CIA, other governments. Congratulations, and thanks for all your support-- >> Thank you John for being here, thank you. >> Thank you, live coverage here. We are here in Bahrain in the Middle East of CUBE's first time. I'm John Furrier, your host here, covering the exclusive Amazon Web Services Summit, and covering the historic launch of the new region in the Middle East. This should change the game, this is going to be a digital hub. It's going to have impact to entrepreneurship, economics and society. We'll be covering it at theCUBE. Stay with us for more after this short break. (jubilant music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Bahrain. It's the CUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live at Bahrain. This is the CUBE's exclusive coverage of the Amazon Web Services Summit here. Where Amazon, AWS, is launching a region in early 2019. It's been announced. This is going to change the game. And also, it's creating a lot of gravity. A lot of people coming together. Of course, the CUBE's first time here. We have lots of observations, lots of commentary, an amazing new guest on the CUBE. We're super excited. Our next guest is Samer Aljishi. Who is the group president of BFG. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you John. Nice to be here >> So, what is BFG? Take a minute to explain. What is BFG? >> Big friendly giant, no. So BFG is an industrial firm where one of the first industries in Bahrain was set up in 1975 as a composites manufacturer. It has grown over the years. So it's been 43 years and it has grown to become a small multinational concentrated in about let's say, quite diversified but broadly covering four different product centers. So, we are working in the architectural area as a supplier of facets and complete building envelopes. Utilizing composites plus other types of innovative building materials. If you look at the building's design for the likes of Saja Hadid where you got parametric architecture and its got unrepeatable shapes. Architects are looking for different types of materials. That are able to achieve those visions, which are quite grand and inspirational. And achieve them cost effectively and efficiently. So we are one of the top players in this area. A second key area for the BFG today, we are recognized as one of the largest suppliers of components to the real industry. So, we serve most of the real industry in Australia, in the Asia, in Europe, and the Americas. Some of the parts are structural, some of them are decorative. Structural parts, we make the front ends, for example, we make the front ends of the TGV. We build the toilet cabins for the majority of trains. A highly sophisticated, integrated product and all of the interior linings. Sol transportation is a big area for us. We also work in renewable energy. We work with BE, cements, and others. It's a supply generator housings for winter months. And then, we have a very strong program on waste treatment management. It's quite a lot of different sectors. They're quite varied. It's quite interesting. I think ,in a way, we'll be talking about industry 4.0. The variety that we have in types of client and the products for those... >> So, what is industry 4.0? Explain that. What is industry? >> Now that's a great question. And it's actually a hard one to answer simply. Industry 4.0 is, I think just to begin with, let's talk about the industry 3.0. >> So, industry 3.0 was a time when you had relational data bases like SAP or Oracle or any other product. Or Microsoft and others come in. In order to put some structure into manufacturing organization and to provide information and visibility. And we have ,also, robotics. A substantial amount of robotics coming in. Industry 4.0 goes a step further from this. In that, what we are now doing with industry four, we have the capability today through the cloud and through machine learning, deep learning, and other tools. We'll able today, to do real time optimization. And that's a big difference between industry three and industry four. I will say ,simply, industry four ,in short, is bringing out real time optimization out of a disordered environment. When you look at manufacturing, manufacturing is not a very ordered system. You've got suppliers that have different delivery schedules that are never matching. It's either ahead or behind. Different quality levels, different capacity levels. You have the supplier of your suppliers if you go one step up. Then you've got operators so I will do something in a different way and speed than you would do it. Even though, it's the same process. So you've got variations in people, variation people skill, variation people's quality. And then you've got machines that could ,perhaps, do a certain process a little bit faster than they do in other process. But ,also, they could fail. They could sometimes fail unpredictably. And if you take all of that and you look at one failure, it could affect a complete program that you had for... >> You get a great software for this. You can program this. Is that what four is? >> Yeah, basically. >> It's much more programmable. >> Basically. It's taking the... >> Not the old static, you know. >> Absolutely. >> Known process. >> Absolutely. >> Or known technology, not very flexible. >> Absolutely so like, the all of the ERP systems of industry three will give you a program for a day. But they wouldn't really recalculate what happens in the middle of a day. And they're not learning. So, they're based on data that is input statically. With industry 4.0, we're putting real time data acquisition on the factory floor. We are putting in tons of IOT sensors, imaging sensors, cameras, operator, measurement systems... >> So flexibility is pretty critical. So, I talk to a lot of people who use cloud and I've met many manufacturing gurus like you. But, the ones that are kind of in operational management roles, they say. The old days we had processes, they were locked in and we kind of did tech and we kind of managed it. Looked at the dashboards, looked at the data, had meetings, tried to fix it. Now, we have kind of new technology but the processes are changing in real time so that at any given time, we might want to deploy a new process. >> Absolutely. Not only this but if I take it forward, a few years forward with artificial intelligence. Now that you're breaking up all of this data and a computer looks at it. It will be able to enter some suggest optimization processes. You no longer need people to do so. The computer will actually see that a particular operator has done something in a different way. It resulted in improvement. It in itself can go and change that operating procedure. >> Well, okay I've got to ask you the question. My mind is going into operating system mode here. I'm writing the kernel in my head. Okay so let's do that. We just built this cool system but now, where's the data? The data really is the key here. If you have good data, you're going to have a real good flexible AI. Bad data is bad AI. >> Exactly. >> How do you view that? How do you set up the architecture? How are you thinking of architectural frame works for managing great data quality? >> Well , you've got to have. First of all, you have to have a good and reliable sensor suite and good sensors for it's captured environment or parameters venture. Other types of vibration. Other types of either motion or sensing or different types of temperature, humidity. And then, you have actually the operators themselves become connected. So you have to find how to connect that operator and extract data of what they're doing into the cloud. You could go as far as actually measuring their exact motion in the future. We don't yet have the hardware or the tech to do so. But, imagine if you can actually measure their motion or you could have very intelligent imaging. Where you got a camera that actually looks like an operator, understands what it does. >> Still coming in. >> That's a lot of data and so the challenge is not just the data centers like Amazon. But it's also creating that bandwidth to feed data from the factory into the cloud. And that's going to be very important. >> Well, I want to ask you about your biggest challenges that you guys are doing right now. But I want to get, 'cause I want to jump quickly into something different . I want to get your opinion since you're an expert. The number one question I had coming over here on this trip was, Amazon, why do they put their region over there for? It's hot as hell. Cooling is the biggest problem. Why would they go to the hot place? So weird with the data center. So , again, the question is since someone who has been involved with sustainable building materials. What do they do? I mean, that's the number one question I get. How do you make it work? It's to cut cooling challenges off season solar. Sun's a friend. Sustainable, renewable energy is going to be a key piece of this data center. What's your opinion? Are you working on it or do you have an opinion on it? >> Well, I just think from like a data center perspective. Yes, it is a hot area in the world and cooling is an issue. But, you know, this region supplies fuel for a large part of the world... >> They've got plenty of oil. >> So we do have energy in plenty. And we certainly have sunshine in plenty in this area. And with solar energy becoming so cross competitive today, we believe that it can very quickly return the additional cost of infrastructural cooling or even the operating part. >> So you see solar, no problem, supporting what they need in cooling and power. >> For sure. For sure. >> Okay so let's get back to your challenges as you go into industry four. Which, by the way, I think it's a whole new management practice. I don't think, you know, the Peter Truckers of the world wrote those books. I think that was industry one, wasn't it? I'll give him some credit. We'll call 'em 2.5 maybe three. >> I think three. >> Okay give him three. 4.0 is a new paridine ship. You're in the cutting edge of it. What are some of the challenges that you're facing that are opportunities? How are you thinking about them? Your thoughts. >> They're a lot of challenges. Technology is still developing so they're a lot of things we would like to do but are not yet available. Certainly, let's just talk from our implementation brain. The skill gap is still one of the key areas. So , in my team and the FTI, taking in about 12 young engineers. Fresh graduates. And we're getting them acquainted with the process because we want to develop homegrown talent. We believe, industry for out of Bahrainians is going to be big. But it's important to have the local skills. >> Need the young guns. Young talent. >> Absolutely and they have to get involved quite early. So that's from the local angle. We have a lot of support coming in from government and other bodies of Bahrain Everybody is fully aligned with this. When we look ,however, at the actual implementation of the development. There's certainly still a certain gap. For example, they're a lot of things that we believe require a higher degree of image recognition and image analysis. I'll give you an example. You got a robot. If you have a robot, you've got to position. Robots are dumb machines. >> Yeah. >> Unless something is placed exactly in the right place. >> I know a lot of people are building more robots more than ever. So there's more robots out there. >> And you know what's surprising, we're discovering that the robots aren't very connected and they're not yet to day. The programing of the robot doesn't enable you to develop them or to connect them or to implement industry four on this. Just seeing that announcement, recently. Microsoft, for example, is ruling out robot programming languages. Which would be a great start and that's what you need. So, we find that they're quite a lot of missing technologies to make industry four really, really operational. Related to our robotics imaging and date acquisition. >> The phase we're in now is connect and then being intelligent. So IOT and robotics is like "Let's get connected." "Let's get power to it." And then make it more intelligent. >> Absolutely. So today I think we're at the stage where we can collect data. We can analyze it. We can project what's optimized. And I hope that we're yet at the stage where we can take that optimization and actually implement into very quickly real time on the software because of certain interface issues. >> Interfaces are data bases. Are they technical or business challenges? >> They're both technical. >> Okay, okay. >> But the technology is developing so quickly that I think a lot of these challenges will disappear in a couple of years. >> What are you most excited about? Assume that the connecting and the power parts happening that's easy to do. On the making more intelligent, what are you excited about? What are you looking at? What are some of things you're really investing your time on? >> Well, I think this technology is very interesting and can be applied to. When industry four rolled out, it was mainly the large processing industries that adopted this. Or maybe even large mass, production type industries which adopted this. I think there's tremendous, tremendous potential for this with the medium and small enterprises. Particularly those that are doing what we call discreet manufacturing. Which is producing limited series or limited amounts of parts. And where you have a high amount of human interaction and labor and know how. With the ability to do this, you'll be able to create something that's equivalent of factoring a box. So you can actually box that know how and you'll be able to transport it anywhere in the world. And be able to localize or become international very quickly. >> That was un-gettable in the old model because of the cost and the size of the equipment and the requirements to do it. >> And the fact that know how was really still even if it's written. It was mainly in somebody's head. >> Yeah. And this is going to impact everyone from street vendors to... >> Absolutely. >> All kinds of businesses. >> Absolutely. >> And this is going to make, hopefully, create more efficiencies. >> Hopefully, yes. >> Around smart energy maybe. >> Absolutely. Like industry two to three and three to four. It has its own number because it will create such a large transformation of business as we see. >> Well, I really appreciate Samer coming on the CUBE this year and your insights. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> I like your talk about processes improvement. It's one of my dark, little secret hobbies. Manufacturing, although, I'm not a big operational guru. I'm not a detailed person but I love the operating system concept around manufacturing and system. >> We love to have a conversation a few months from now and show you how the demonstrator has gone ahead. >> I'd love to keep in touch. Final question before you break. I know we got to go. Just quick thoughts on the impact of having a region of Amazon here in Bahrain. >> Well, I think having Amazon here is a huge, huge thing. For the country and for the region. So just the presence of Amazon, not only is it an enabler but it by itself would create such a great support for the developing ecosystem here of star clubs. The Bahrainians , we as Bahrainians, I often tell people. Innovation, entrepreneurship is built into the Bahrainians since thousands of years ago. >> It's a learning culture. >> It's a learning culture. I'm always surprised by the level of skill, the level of enthusiasm for know how, for innovation that happened. Having Amazon come here, I think reinforces this. With the people in Bahrain and in the region. And I think it's going to leap for all that development. >> It's a free economic new energy. >> Absolutely. >> One thing, I'll just, I know we have to go. But , I wanted to comment, I've seen Amazon do this before. It's not just big businesses, developers are going to scale up. And this whole skill gaps thing, we've seen it now for nine years. I've witnessed it and talked about it. Here's the common strength, the pattern. It doesn't matter if you're 15 or 50, you can level up and be the next guru in months. I know people who went from eight weeks are doing serious employments. Gripto, these new AIs. You can literally come from any point. >> Absolutely. >> And level up and be one of the best. Versus the old linear. >> Absolutely. >> Education. So if your culture's got that mojo learning. >> This could transform and we no longer are limited by just capital. Now we're just limited by creativity. And you could have that any place. You can find some global links rising out of Bahrain very quickly. >> I was really bullish of you guys. My advice when I was at the crown table yesterday was, you guys got a good community. They're active, they're vibrant, they complained a lot which is a good sign. Because they should be. You have capital, then you have a power source coming in here with Amazon and resources. Let the ecosystem organically develop. The soil's been planted. Let it grow. >> Absolutely. >> Don't try to make any forced decisions. Feed it. Get out of the way when you have to. Help it when you need it. Nurture it. Don't worry about it, it'll figure itself out. I think that is a good pattern. It's hard to get the community. You can't like buy a community. >> You can't forced innovation. You can't go and tell somebody "Please be creative, be innovative today." >> You can't buy a community. You can't buy the advancements. Thanks so much Samer. And we're at the CUBE. We went a little bit over but , you know, we like getting all the action and getting all the smart people. Creating some great insights and we're going to continue all day. So stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Live from Bahrain. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here Bahrain. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage, our first time here in the Middle East. This is exclusive coverage of Amazon Web Services Summit. I'm John Furrier your co-host of theCUBE. Our next guest is Dalal Buhejji, who is the Chair Person for the Women in FinTech Initiative, a big growing organization here and the role of technology is about to change in a big way as Amazon Web Services Region comes online in 2019. It should spawn massive amounts of innovation, education, connections, networks. Thanks for joining us, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure. >> So, what a great opportunity you have. FinTech's is a strategic initiative for this country. It's one of their core competencies. They see FinTech. >> Absolutely. I mean, FinTech is definitely growing in Bahrain. There's definitely a shift towards Financial Services moving towards innovation and digitalization. And, you know, we've seen women participate quite heavily when it comes to FinTech in Bahrain. And that's not something that's new to Bahrain. We've seen women that are a part of the Financial Services Sector for many decades. >> Yeah. >> So naturally, if the Financial Services Sector will innovate. >> Yeah. >> Then women will be part of this move. >> And the women movement is phenomenal. We had a breakfast we attended with Teresa Carlson. >> Yeah. >> Yesterday morning. >> Yes. >> It was absolutely a packed house. I even got kicked out of my table because, >> I wanted to participate >> (laughing) but I'm happy to give my chair up. There's so many women there. >> Yeah. >> And some Coders mostly new to tech. But this professionalization of digital >> (agrees) >> is going to impact FinTech more than ever. Take a minute to explain about the group. >> Yeah. >> The mission, what you guys are trying to do. How many people are in? What's your aspiration? >> Sure, it's a very recent and new initiative. It's a Women in FinTech Bahrain. It's a network of Professional women that are in the Financial Services Sector or that have impacted or worked in the FinTech Ecosystem. So, it's anywhere from a woman that work in the Central Bank of Bahrain, Founders of FinTech companies, people such as me, who attract inward investment and try to attract companies to set up in Bahrain. But also accelerators and incubators. >> Yeah. >> And we gather together. >> Yeah. >> And we're like, you know what? There's a lot of women in this FinTech Ecosystem and I'm sure a lot of them want to also be part of it. So, why don't we build awareness, empower more women, invite more women to come and be part of the growth of the FinTech Ecosystem in Bahrain. >> And Teresa Carlson was sharing some of her personal experience yesterday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately we didn't have a camera. I got audio, I'm going to put it as a podcast cause I thought it was so compelling. She said you know there's different ways to connect in and the most important thing is to be networked. >> Yes. >> And have each other's back. >> Absolutely. >> And amplify and support each other. This is normal. This is what people do. >> Absolutely. >> This is important as the growth comes. >> Yes. >> There's going to be a massive amount of opportunity coming into Bahrain. >> Absolutely. >> Big time. >> Yes, I mean, you nailed it. Like the network is actually how it's started. So we used to attend a number of events. Like the AWS Summit that we are here in today. And you know it's a bunch of women that just, you know, just happen to be part of the FinTech Ecosystem. >> Yeah. And we're like hang on, we might, there be might more women that are part of this that we're not aware of. >> Yeah. >> So why don't we make it formal in a way and call it a network where we attend more events. >> Yeah. >> Promote it more. >> Try to invite more people to attend and be part of it. So you know, not to shy away as being a women to be part of the FinTech revolution in Bahrain. >> You now one of the thing is wanted to ask you because this is a big trend that we're seeing in the United States. >> Yeah. >> And around the world. And OpenSource Software set the trend for this, is that co-creation, makes you feel part of a shared experience. >> Absolutely. >> And content and creation together makes people feel part of something. >> Yes. >> But is also creates a network effect. >> Yes. >> Network effects are some of the most important dynamics of bringing people together. >> Yes. >> But also extracting value and creating value. >> Yes. I mean, you know, once we initiated this Women in FinTech. It was two months ago, and what we did, we did this amazing picture. We took all this picture of us together and we got so much publicity out of it. So one of my colleagues visited Innovate Finance in UK, which is headed by a woman, and she also have women in FinTech a group. And we're exploring what can we do to collaborate. >> Yeah. >> I got a phone call a week ago from a VC, a Venture Capitalist who happens to be run by a woman and it's all about women entrepreneurs that seed money into FinTech companies or Startup companies that are funded by women. So it's all about the network as you said. >> Yeah and what's beautiful is that when you have this collaboration. >> Yeah. >> The people who create the value are going to shepard the extraction and sharing of that value in a community way. >> Absolutely. >> It's a community. The community is critical. Not over playing the hand or over driving. You know what I'm saying? It's like. >> Yes. >> It's a balance between community formation. >> Which is very crucial for a sector that's in it's initial stages and growing quite significantly. So you know, Bahrain has always been a Financial Services Hub. What we've seen that the sector has been digitalizing and innovating. >> Yeah. >> The last two years. So it's quite new. And you know, you need to gain as much knowledge as you want and the only way to do it is to create a network. >> Well I'm so impressed with what you're doing. >> Thank you. >> I really think Dalal of course our door is always open in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, we'll amplify your message. >> Thank you. >> It's super important. So what is your goals and objectives? Share to the folks out there who're watching who might want to get involved. What are your goals? What are some of your objectives that you're trying to achieve. >> Right now it's initial stages. We are there just to create more awareness of women involvement in Bahrain, when it comes to FinTech, and to invite more women to participate in the growth of the FinTech Ecosystem in Bahrain. >> But you are also not limiting it to Bahrain, it's also externally. >> Of course not. >> You mentioned UK. >> Correct. Correct. Ultimately we will grow even further and have Bahrain as a FinTech hub for the region so we welcome any collaboration across borders. >> You know we were just talking about John Wood, who's a Senior Entrepreneur. Been around the block, very successful. Partnering with Teresa and Amazon at a high level. And he said, you know, what you read in the paper in the news and the media and then you come to Bahrain it's different. The ground truth here, when you look at, when you're on the ground. >> Yeah. >> Meeting people, and seeing all of this action, it's a different truth. >> Yes. >> What would you say to the folks watching here, who might watch it now live or on demand, what is the ground truth here in Bahrain? What's happening? How are women becoming the power engine? What's in general and the over all ecosystem at large? What's the story? How would you explain the phenomenon that is Bahrain? >> If you look at it beyond FinTech and look at it beyond Financial services. The involvement of women in the Private Sector is quite phenomenal in Bahrain. >> Yeah. And it goes way beyond just a few years ago. It's decades of the women involvement. We have women at Cabinet. We have women in, leading good you know, financial institutions or corporates. So the involvement of women has always been prominent in Bahrain. And we welcome and want to see more of women go towards digitalization now. >> Yeah. >> And give them the right means to be able to achieve that. >> And one of the things that's interesting is that when you're not here on the ground, you might have some old history of what the role of women here. >> Yeah. >> My 21 year old daughter Jacqueline asked me and my 17 year old daughter Caroline said. They were curios, they just don't know. They're like: "What's it like to be a woman there?" What's it like to be a woman in Bahrain? It's a very comfortable and liberal place to live in. You know, education was introduced first for women in the GCC. You see a lot of woman participate in any cross-sectors within the Private Sector. It's a very friendly place to live in. You know, and it's a great to see how knowledgeable those women are. They are hungry for knowledge. >> Yeah. >> And very impressive characters, I must say. So, you know, it's something to be, definitely to monitor and to watch very closely. Tala Fahkro came on earlier. >> Yes. >> She's the Executive Director of the EDB, Economic Development Board here in Bahrain. >> Correct. >> She said it's a learning culture. >> It is, it is. >> And it's always been a learning culture. >> Absolutely. >> And always been open and liberal, if you will. But open minded. >> Exactly. I mean, see Bahrain has always been in a very unique position, that it was a trade-hub for many years. So it's welcomed people of different cultures. >> Yeah. >> Which opened that learning culture. We're very much receptive to understanding what people from India or China or the US have to do. So it's a very as, I totally agree with Tala Fahkro and I think it is definitely a learning culture. >> Well certainly our door's open in Silicon Valley. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> And good luck with your opportunity. And how do people engage with you? Just give the plug, talk about. Is there a site? Is there a Facebook page? >> Is there? What are you? How do you guys engage? How should someone engage and join? >> So your main. >> The Women in FinTech network? >> So yeah, we're working on a, you know, a page for people to reach out to us. But in the meantime you can reach out to me on my LinkedIn page or Twitter page. And you know, please watch this space cause it's growing. And I look forward to, you know, showcasing more of the events during. Well co-create, share content with us, we're open to seeing what you do. Thanks for coming on tehCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We are here in Bahrain. This is theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier. You can reach me at on Twitter @Furrier, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram. I'm all over the place. Easy to find. theCUBE of course here for the first time here in Bahrain in the Middle East. Exploring the creativity, the entrepreneurship and the impact of the Amazon Web Services new Region. Coming online in early 2019. Should be a tsunami of innovation activity. New networks. New people. We're meeting new people. Stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

live from New York it's the cube covering AWS summit New York 2018 hot GUI Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back here live cube coverage in New York City for AWS Amazon Web Services summit 2018 I'm John Fourier with Jeff Rick here at the cube our next guest is dr. Matt wood general manager of artificial intelligence with Amazon Web Services keep alumnae been so busy for the past year and been on the cubanía thanks for coming back appreciate you spending the time so promotions keep on going on you got now general manager of the AI group AI operations ai automation machine learning offices a lot of big category of new things developing and a you guys have really taken AI and machine learning to a whole new level it's one of the key value propositions that you guys now have for not just a large enterprise but down to startups and developers so you know congratulations and what's the update oh well the update is this morning in the keynote I was lucky enough to introduce some new capabilities across our platform when it comes to machine learning our mission is that we want to be able to take machine learning and make it available to all developers we joke internally that we just want to we want to make machine learning boring we wanted to make it vanilla it's just it's another tool in the tool chest of any developer and any any data data scientist and we've done that this idea of taking technology that is traditionally only within reached a very very small number of well-funded organizations and making it as broadly distributed as possible we've done that pretty successfully with compute storage and databases and analytics and data warehousing and we want to do the exact same thing for the machine learning and to do that we have to kind of build an entirely new stack and we think of that stack in in three different tiers the bottom tier really for academics and researchers and data scientists we provide a wide range of frameworks open source programming libraries the developers and data scientists use to build neural networks and intelligence they're things like tend to flow and Apache mx9 and by torch and they're really they're very technical you can build you know arbitrarily sophisticated says most she open source to write mostly open source that's right we contribute a lot of our work back to MX net but we also contribute to buy torch and to tend to flow and there's big healthy open source projects growing up around you know all these popular frameworks plus more like chaos and gluon and horror boredom so that's a very very it's a key area for for researchers and academics the next level up we have machine learning platforms this is for developers and data scientists who have data they see in the clout although they want to move to the cloud quickly but they want to be able to use for modeling they want to be able to use it to build custom machine learning models and so here we try and remove as much of the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with doing that as possible and this is really where sage maker fits in Cersei's maker allows developers to quickly fill train optimize and host their machine learning models and then at the top tier we have a set of AI services which are for application developers that don't want to get into the weeds they just want to get up and running really really quickly and so today we announced four new services really across those their middle tier in that top tier so for Sage maker we're very pleased to introduce a new streaming data protocol which allows you to take data straight from s3 and pump it straight into your algorithm and straight onto the computer infrastructure and what that means is you no longer have to copy data from s3 onto your computer infrastructure in order to be able to start training you just take away that step and just stream it right on there and it's an approach that we use inside sage maker for a lot of our built-in algorithms and it significantly increases the the speed of the algorithm and significantly of course decreases the cost of running the training because you pay by the second so any second you can save off it's a coffin for the customer and they also it helps the machine learn more that's right yeah you can put more data through it absolutely so you're no longer constrained by the amount of disk space you're not even constrained by the amount of memory on the instance you can just pump terabyte after terabyte after terabyte and we actually had another thing like talked about in the keynote this morning a new customer of ours snap who are routinely training on over 100 terabytes of image data using sage maker so you know the ability to be able to pump in lots of data is one of the keys to building successful machine learning applications so we brought that capability to everybody that's using tensorflow now you can just have your tensor flow model bring it to Sage maker do a little bit of wiring click a button and you were just start streaming your data to your tents upload what's the impact of the developer time speed I think it is it is the ability to be able to pump more data it is the decrease in time it takes to start the training but most importantly it decreases the training time all up so you'll see between a 10 and 25 percent decrease in training time some ways you can train more models or you can train more models per in the same unit time or you can just decrease the cost so it's a completely different way of thinking about how to train over large amounts of data we were doing it internally and now we're making it available for everybody through tej matrix that's the first thing the second thing that we're adding is the ability to be able to batch process and stage make them so stage maker used to be great at real-time predictions but there's a lot of use cases where you don't want to just make a one-off prediction you want to predict hundreds or thousands or even millions of things all at once so let's say you've got all of your sales information at the end of the month you want to use that to make a forecast for the next month you don't need to do that in real-time you need to do it once and then place the order and so we added batch transforms to Sage maker so you can pull in all of that data large amounts of data batch process it within a fully automated environment and then spin down the infrastructure and you're done it's a very very simple API anyone that uses a lambda function it's can take advantage of this again just dramatically decreasing the overhead and making it so much easier for everybody to take advantage of machine load and then at the top layer we had new capabilities for our AI services so we announced 12 new language pairs for our translation service and we announced new transcription so capability which allows us to take multi-channel audio such as might be recorded here but more commonly on contact centers just like you have a left channel on the right channel for stereo context centers often record the agent and the customer on the same track and today you can now pass that through our transcribed service long-form speech will split it up into the channels or automatically transcribe it will analyze all the timestamps and create just a single script and from there you can see what was being talked about you can check the topics automatically using comprehend or you can check the compliance did the agents say the words that they have to say for compliance reasons at some point during the conversation that's a material new capability for what's the top surface is being used obviously comprehend transcribe and barri of others you guys have put a lot of stuff out there all kinds of stuff what's the top sellers top use usage as a proxy for uptake you know I think I think we see a ton of we see a ton of adoption across all of these areas but where a lot of the momentum is growing right now is sage maker so if you look at a formula one they just chose Formula One racing they just chose AWS and sage maker as their machine learning platform the National Football League Major League Baseball today announcer they're you know re offering their relationship and their strategic partnership with AWS cream machine learning so all of these groups are using the data which just streams out of these these races all these games yeah and that can be the video or it can be the telemetry of the cars or the telemetry of the players and they're pumping that through Sage maker to drive more engaging experiences for their viewers so guys ok streaming this data is key this is a stage maker quickly this can do video yeah just get it all in all of it well you know we'd love data I would love to follow up on that so the question is is that when will sage maker overtake Aurora as the fastest growing product in history of Amazon because I predicted that reinvent that sage maker would go on err is it looking good right now I mean I sorta still on paper you guys are seeing is growing but see no eager give us an indicator well I mean I don't women breakout revenue per service but even the same excitement I'll say this the same excitement that I see Perseids maker now and the same opportunity and the same momentum it really really reminds me of AWS ten years ago it's the same sort of transformative democratizing approach to which really engages builders and I see the same level of the excitement as levels are super super high as well no super high in general reader pipe out there but I see the same level of enthusiasm and movement and the middle are building with it basically absolutely so what's this toy you have here I know we don't have a lot of time but this isn't you've got a little problem this is the world's first deep learning in April were on wireless video camera we thought it D blends we announced it and launched it at reinvent 2017 and actually hold that but they can hold it up to the camera it's a cute little device we modeled it after wall-e the Pixar movie and it is a HD video camera on the front here and in the base here we have a incredibly powerful custom piece of machine learning hardware so this can process over a billion machine learning operations per second you can take the video in real time you send it to the GPU on board and we'll just start processing the stream in real time so that's kind of interesting but the real value of this and why we designed it was we wanted to try and find a way for developers to get literally hands-on with machine learning so the way that build is a lifelong learners right they they love to learn they have an insatiable appetite for new information and new technologies and the way that they learn that is they experiment they start working and they kind of spin this flywheel where you try something out it works you fiddle with it it stops working you learn a little bit more and you want to go around around around that's been tried and tested for developers for four decades the challenge with machine learning is doing that is still very very difficult you need a label data you need to understand the algorithms it's just it's hard to do but with deep lens you can get up and running in ten minutes so it's connected back to the cloud it's good at about two stage makeup you can deploy a pre-built model down onto the device in ten minutes to do object detection we do some wacky visual effects with neural style transfer we do hot dog and no hot dog detection of course but the real value comes in that you can take any of those models tear them apart so sage maker start fiddling around with them and then immediately deploy them back down onto the camera and every developer on their desk has things that they can detect there are pens and cups and people whatever it is so they can very very quickly spin this flywheel where they're experimenting changing succeeding failing and just going round around a row that's for developers your target audience yes right okay and what are some of the things that have come out of it have you seen any cool yes evolutionary it has been incredibly gratifying and really humbling to see developers that have no machine learning experience take this out of the box and build some really wonderful projects one in really good example is exercise detection so you know when you're doing a workout they build a model which detects the exerciser there and then detects the reps of the weights that you're lifting now we saw skeletal mapping so you could map a person in 3d space using a simple camera we saw security features where you could put this on your door and then it would send you a text message if it didn't recognize who was in front of the door we saw one which was amazing which would read books aloud to kids so you would hold up the book and they would detect the text extract the text send the text to paly and then speak aloud for the kids so there's games as educational tools as little security gizmos one group even trained a dog detection model which detected individual species plug this into an enormous power pack and took it to the local dog park so they could test it out so it's all of this from from a cold start with know machine learning experience you having fun yes absolutely one of the great things about machine learning is you don't just get to work in one area you get to work in you get to work in Formula One and sports and you get to work in healthcare and you get to work in retail and and develop a tool in CTO is gonna love this chief toy officers chief toy officers I love it so I got to ask you so what's new in your world GM of AI audition intelligence what does that mean just quickly explain it for our our audience is that all the software I mean what specifically are you overseeing what's your purview within the realm of AWS yeah that's that's a totally fair question so my purview is I run the products for deep learning machine learning and artificial intelligence really across the AWS machine learning team so I get I have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies I get involved in the new products we're gonna go build out I get involved in helping grow usage of existing products I get it to do a lot of invention it spent a ton of time with customers but overall work with the rest of the team on setting the technical and pronto strategy for machine learning at AWS when what's your top priorities this year adoption uptake new product introductions and you guys don't stop it well we do sync we don't need to keep on introducing more and more things any high ground that you want to take what's what's the vision I didn't the vision is to is genuinely to continue to make it as easy as possible for developers to use Ruggiero my icon overstate the importance or the challenge so we're not at the point where you can just pull down some Python code and figure it out we're not even we don't have a JVM for machine learning where there's no there's no developer tools or debuggers there's very few visualizers so it's still very hard if you kind of think of it in computing terms we're still working in assembly language and you're seen learning so there's this wealth of opportunity ahead of us and the responsibility that I feel very strongly is to be able to continually in crew on the staff to continually bring new capabilities to mortar but well cloud has been disrupting IT operations AI ops with a calling in Silicon Valley and the venture circuit Auto ml as a term has been kicked around Auto automatic machine learning you got to train the machines with something data seems to be it strikes me about this compared to storage or compared to compute or compared to some of the core Amazon foundational products those are just better ways to do something they already existed this is not a better way to do something that are exists this is a way to get the democratization at the start of the process of the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to a plethora of applications in these cases that is fundamentally yeah different in it just a step up in terms of totally agree the power to the hands of the people it's something which is very far as an area which is very fast moving and very fast growing but what's funny is it totally builds on top of the cloud and you really can't do machine learning in any meaningful production way unless you have a way that is cheap and easy to collect large amounts of data in a way which allows you to pull down high-performance computation at any scale that you need it and so through the cloud we've actually laid the foundations for machine learning going forwards and other things too coming oh yes that's a search as you guys announced the cloud highlights the power yet that it brings to these new capabilities solutely yeah and we get to build on them at AWS and at Amazon just like our customers do so osage make the runs on ec2 we wouldn't we won't be able to do sage maker without ec2 and you know in the fullness of time we see that you know the usage of machine learning could be as big if not bigger than the whole of the rest of AWS combined that's our aspiration dr. Matt would I wish we had more time to Chad loved shopping with you I'd love to do a whole nother segment on what you're doing with customers I know you guys are great customer focus as Andy always mentions when on the cube you guys listen to customers want to hear that maybe a reinvent will circle back sounds good congratulations on your success great to see you he showed it thanks off dr. Matt would here in the cube was dreaming all this data out to the Amazon Cloud is whether they be hosts all of our stuff of course it's the cube bringing you live action here in New York City for cube coverage of AWS summit 2018 in Manhattan we'll be back with more after this short break

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick here for wall-to-wall coverage here for the one day event. Our next guest is TK Keanini, distinguished engineer at Cisco. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> We had some chat on before they came on camera about protocols, deep-packet inspection, networking. I see Cisco now, moving up the stack. I'm sure, back in the day when you were there and recently, that's been the big debate for Sysco of the stack but the cloud has created a whole new stack, right, so a lot of action. Seems like the same movie from a couple generations ago happening out in real time at a much more accelerated rate, welcome to theCube, what's your toughs? >> Thank you so much, yeah, you know, anybody who's been in this business for the last 20-25 years, I always joke and say, you know, same circus, different clowns. You know, it's the same thing again and it's exciting because I mean, you saw the keynote, the people here, everybody's excited about doing develop on this new thing. It's got new economics, new scale, it's definitely got more security, I think, and yeah, we're just really moving aggressively with our customers towards the future. >> You know, TK, I want to get your thoughts 'cause one of the thing we've been saying on theCube, we've been covering Amazon reinvent since 2012, 2013 timeframe and so we've seen the growth but it's always been a developer haven, you know, cloud native, you were born in the cloud, like most startups were back in the day, you had great goodness and then you could become a drop box and be so big you had to do your own data so I get that but for the most part developers check small, medium sized businesses, check now large enterprises, great developers. Now, you're getting clear visibility on operators. So the confluence between operators of networks and infrastructure and IT operations merging together and having some synergy and cohesiveness with developers for applications, new work loads. What's your thoughts on that because this is really becoming the big ah-ha moment where I can now operate now at a level and have a developer haven going on, your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, so I think you heard it in the keynote today, security is everybody's problem, right? And it certainly is the developer's problem, it maybe even starts with the developer. You know, threat actors are clever, you could say that threat actors were the first to go cloud first and they're not ashamed of what they use, they're going to get what they want and so you know, the idea of providing security as a service to those developers is a new thing I will say. Usually I'm building product and service for the security expert. Now, it's this web app developer, right? And their first question to me is "where's the API?", right? "Where's my libraries", right? How can I treat you like I treat storage, like I treat networking? They don't want to grow up and become a networking expert, they just want to have their application scale and so that's the real focus is, understanding the customer and building that service at the highest quality. Much of the expertise, I have to mechanize inside of my algorithms and my machine learning but again, delivering them a service so that they can protect and become incredibly expensive for those threat actors to pursue. >> And the alternative in the old days was provision a lot of hardware, do a lot of configuration management, security audits, meeting, put up a perimeter, now you can create sets of services. >> Yeah, and a lot of automation, right? That's key. Like, you don't have enough people to test. You have to automate your tests. You don't have enough people to read over documents, you have to automate that acquisition. Everything's about augmentation and automation. Security, all aspects of security are following suit. >> Yeah. >> TK, I wonder, you talk a lot about the threat-act revolution, through some other interviews and that's really an recurring theme because it's kind of your way of saying how you have this kind of have this arms race but the other big thing that's happened in the threat act is that it's gone the hacker, maybe trying to cause a disruption to nation states and much more organize. Is that as evolved in the amount of resources that they now have to deploy versus just some stand alone hacker? Have have you seen that evolve, what are some of the responses? >> Yeah, I still get goosebumps thinking about it. 'Cause back when we started it was more like, you know, we were just sharing a craft, you know. It was a lot like amateur radio, you know? You broke into something, you shared that skill, not anymore. I mean these are real, a nation state, threat actors, criminals and they're running a real business, okay? >> Right. And if you do really good security, you're essentially adding to their cost of operation and they don't like that. So it is really a business against a business. And they think like a business. They're well resourced like a business, they're patient and sometimes you know, in certain cases going after the weak, in some cases they're incredibly targeted, they're coming after you because you are a center of excellence for that sector and it doesn't matter, you know, how high you build the wall. They're going to find a way to go under it (laughs) or go around it or find a way to declare no wall but yeah, it's fun because like I said, instead of waiting for something to fail, like a hard drive or you're just building IT systems for resiliency, in my world, these threat actors are talented. >> Right. Right? So everyday if intervene, I force them to intervene. If they intervene, they force me to intervene. That's funny you say they're running a business, so is that part of your defense is just increasing their cost of goods to hold in a major, major way? >> It really is, you know, we've seen a lot of trends shift. For instance, you know, Ransomware a little while ago, that was a big deal because you know, they'd hold your machine hostage, it'd cost you $200 maybe $300 to get out of it, okay? The problem with that is tomorrow their gig's up, okay? Now the shift has been to cryptomining or cryptojacking. If they compromise your machine and can get a quarter out of that machine just by doing Bitcoin mining, they will essentially make 25 cents tomorrow, so they've shifted to a recurring revenue stream, okay? This is important, okay? >> Right, right. >> Because tomorrow and the next day and the next day, they're still undetected, okay? And when I say about raising their cost of operations if you can find that cryptomining on your network, no matter where your network is and shut them down, you've just taken a little bit away from their recurring revenue stream, right? And that's the dynamics we're facing daily. >> Disruption is key. Making it complex and keeping disruption. >> Having more visibility than they do, having more detection than they do and basically knowing yourself better than they do. >> Right. >> Is absolutely critical. >> I want to hear your thoughts, TK, on a couple things. One observation is you know, during the Snowden era, you know, the mainstream population and world whether it's capital markets or IT, didn't talk much about "metadata", but then after Snowden, "metadata" became a big thing and we now know what metadata is and now obviously with the Russian involvement in the election, spearfishing is now, I mean its been out there, but you're seeing specifically what was done there with spearfishing, so easy to pull off. >> Yeah. >> How are we getting better at detecting, preventing, against the humans who just think oh hey, a job offer for you, or a real elegant bait and certainly with mobile, doesn't have that DNS visibility, mobile makes it easier to do some spearfishing. Spearfishing is a big deal. >> Yeah. >> Your thoughts on it? >> Yeah, and that's again, that big trend in shift is a long time ago, you know, we built security systems to watch for people breaking into networks. Today, the threat actors are logging into your network 'cause they've already gotten your credentials through some means, okay? So how do you detect somebody who's actually impersonating you on the network? The same sort of security bells are not going to ring. And this applies for a cloud or on pram, or anything. >> Right, right. >> It's the same game and really, you know, being able to do that detection from the telemetry that comes native from then environment is critical. >> And so really just more analytics, more telemetry, more instrumentation? >> It's not about the data, it really is about the analytics. I mean, yes the telemetry has to be necessary and sufficient but the analytical outcome has to be pointed at exactly that, you are trying to detect fraud, you are trying to detect. You know, it's like in the old days, if I gave you my general ledger, right, and you were an accountant, you would just be looking for errors. Okay, that's fine for operation but say you're trying to cath a crook. I hand you that same general ledger, you're going to come at it with a different pair of eyes. >> Right. >> A different mental model. You're trying to find the crook. >> Right. >> Who is actively hiding from you. That's the type of analytics we're focused on. >> So this is interesting, talk about machine learning, and AI could be assist you mention, automation, Stealthwatch Cloud is something that you've mentioned. What is that, what's going on around there, how do you get that lens to be turned on quickly in context? 'Cause real time is about contextual relevance. >> That's right. >> At any given moment you've got to be ready alert and looking for things. >> So the beauty of AWS is they can deploy in any one way. You can have your virtual servers, you can have the containerized, or you can be serverless. That's the thing, the cool kids are doing serverless, okay? >> Right, right. >> You have to provide the same level of threat analytics for all three, no matter what. The good news is, it's not about not having the data. AWS gives you a rich set of telemetry from many, many sources. What we do is first synthesize all that together, run our analytics on it and point out where you may be exposed or there are threat activities that's either, maybe even from the inside, not necessarily from the outside, you know, in your Snowden account but there's anonymous activity that requires attention. All of those things, all that developer wants to do is make sure that they you know, delivered to their customers. Business continuity. >> Right, right, yeah. >> They're not interested in security. >> TK, I've got to ask you the question around security around you know, can you see the papers, so you know, Pat Gelsinger, Cube alumni, now CEO of VMware, said on theCube, Dave Vellante co-host theCube, asked him years ago "is security a do-over with the cloud?". This was back when the cloud was being poo-pood as a security mod, oh it's not secure in the cloud, now it's looking damn good, right, so. >> And now it's more secure, I think, yeah. >> Now it's more secure, and yeah, that's pretty clear. >> Yeah. >> So there's a chance for people to get a mulligan, get a re-do, to rethink security. How do you engage conversations and how do you advise friends, colleagues, customers around if there's a chance to do security over, with a no-perimeter model, with a API microservices centric view. Whats the strategy, what's the architecture, what's the approach? >> Yeah, you know, I don't know, there's a couple of cases, it's not a one size fits all. We have a lot of successful businesses transitioning and they really can't turn their back on yesterday, you know, they have to bring that transition forward. >> Right. >> So there's that one crowd and they're going to have a different playbook because they have a set of skills and a set of things that are different. On the other end of the extreme, you have businesses that don't know on print, I mean, honestly, they were born in the cloud and their cloud made it. >> Yeah. >> And then you have most of everybody who is in between, you know, hybrid, multi-cloud, they're just doing, but functionally they're all trying to achieve the same thing which is, you're trying to get the elastic economics, you're tying to get parts of their business that elastic to that elastic compute, right? But all-in-all, the treat actor doesn't care whether they come in through your mobile device or through that cloud workload, they're after something very specific, which is, there's something in your organization, in your digital business that they want. >> So a couple of thing I want to follow up with. One is kind of the changing world of identity and security because of firewalls and you know, the walls have got to come down, they've got a lot of holes in them. You know, so much more focus on who are you? But to your point, oftentimes they're coming in as you, so the identity maybe not necessarily is a great way. >> That's right. >> Then you've got this other thing which is basically pattern detection, right, and online detection, right and we hear over and over that the average time to know that you've been breached is months and many, many days. So, how are you kind of factoring in those two things to do a better job? >> Yeah, and it is accretive, meaning there are net new ways of establishing identity. For instance, you know, if this thing is acting like a printer and its acted like a printer for the last ten years and one day that device gets up and starts checking out source code, that's a problem, (laughs) right? Okay, so there's all these sort of things around novelty and around the dimensions of novelty. It may be a volumetric novelty, it might be a protocol novelty, in serverless, I'll give you an example with serverless. We treat serverless as a first-class object, as if it actually was persistent and if it makes a very novel API call that it never did before, I think you should probably know about that. >> Yeah. >> If it starts to exfiltrate 20 gigs of data and never did that before, you probably should take a look at that, right? And these are all things from a DevOps standpoint, they want to know first, certainly. You know, there really is no excuse in cloud for you to be like "oh, I wouldn't have been able to know that", no, you can, 'cause it's all there. >> Right, right. >> And microservices in containers provide great value here. >> Incredible value, incredible value. And just again, that dynamic nature of that orchestration, you know, that orchestration brought us to basically a way where, you know, me as a developer, I used to know exactly where I was going to run and how long I was going to run and everything. I have no idea where my code runs anymore, right? And that's the case here and so security takes a completely different turn there because a lot of things that in your analytics were things that you needed to persist, those things are gone, everything's ephemeral now. So what if I wanted to run a report for ten years? Like what in that ten years stayed the same? Probably nothing, okay? So you actually have to use a lot of algorithms to say that heres a composite type of set of data features and if these things persist over time, it's kind of like the way humans work. >> Right, right. >> TK, great to have you on theCube, thanks for joining us, thanks for sharing your insight. Real quick, you're giving a talk for Cisco here? >> Yep. >> Which you're doing in a, working the hallway, give an update. >> Come join me at five o'clock, I think, it's going to be on self-launched clouds, so it will be a great talk. >> Self-launched cloud, again, thanks for coming out to Cisco Systems. >> Alright, thanks. >> And of course we're covering all the Cisco action at DevNet and Cisco Live just recently and DevNet create the cloud native portions of Cisco, and we're going to dissect TK here on theCube. Breaking it down, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, stay with us, we'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hello there and welcome to a special Cube conversation here at The Cube's Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Join with me for this special Cube Conference, Stu Miniman with Wikibon and The Cube co-host as well just up at Amazon Web Services Summit. Stu, great to see you again. Our next guest is Ben Golub, who's the executive chairman and interim CEO of Storj, pronounced storage. So it's a really hot cryptocurrency, blockchain based storage solution. I should say decentralized storage, not necessarily cryptocurrency, but tokens are involved, encryption. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's good to be back. >> Formerly Docker CEO and now advising at Mayfield Fund as a venture partner and also interim CEO of a hot-- >> Yeah really exciting company. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. >> So let's just jump into it. So obviously the ICO craze is awesome and we've always speculated that the blockchain and the decentralized applications are coming is going to be the real action. But yet it's going to create efficiencies where there's inefficiencies. >> Sure. >> Venture capital is one of them and that's why the ICO craze is going. People are raising a boatload of money that they probably wouldn't have gotten that amount. >> Wouldn't have gotten, yeah no dilution, things like that. It's interesting yeah. >> So give us an update on Storj or storage. How much in ICO did they raised, whitepapers out there? It's peer to peer, give a quick, take a minute to explain what the company's doing. >> Yeah well I guess that I should probably start by saying that I think that blockchain is bigger than just cryptocurrency, and decentralized is bigger than blockchain, and Storj is primarily a decentralized storage company. So we're about decentralized apps and the whole thing would absolutely work even if we were just using dollars. But I think it does make it a whole lot more exciting. And so the company, kind of unique in the crypto space in that we actually had a running service that was providing real value, before we did the large token sale. And the token sale raised about $30 million. Fortunately they took about 10 of that in Ethereum and Bitcoin which rose up. So there's a good deal more than that in the bank account right now. >> John: Hopefully they converted to fiat currency. >> And then they converted to fiat along the way. >> It's at an all-time high of $20,000 right now. It's like $7,000, something like that. >> Yeah, so you know, didn't sell everything at the peak, but didn't sell at the-- >> Yeah, so we've been having many blockchain and crypto or token-based economic kind of things. But the real question is what's happening? Now we know the action's been on the infrastructure side. We look at all the top hedge funds, Polychain, amongst others. They love these deals because it's infrastructure. Is that where the action is and how are you guys looking at that because at the same time, there's a wave of decentralized applications also known as Dapps coming on. So there's a relationship going on between how fast the infrastructure can go, and then how applications are going to work with either on chain or off chain dynamics. >> Sure, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to give you a sense of what it is that we do. 'Cause I think that if you do that, then I think it makes sense in the context of decentralized infrastructure, decentralized apps, but also actually traditional infrastructure as well. I've always been searching for a company that I could describe at Thanksgiving. I've never succeeded, so I always end up saying that I'm in computers, and fixing somebody's printer. (laughing) But I guess if I were to describe Storj at Thanksgiving, I'd say it's basically the Airbnb of storage, or the Airbnb of disc drives. So Airbnb, people have lots of condos or vacation properties that aren't being used all the time, and so Airbnb brings them together with people who want to rent those, and they're the largest hotel company in the world, without owning a single property. And we're kind of doing the same thing with Storj, in that there is, first of all, this explosion in the amount of data that's getting created. It would fill a stack of CD-ROMs to Mars and back this year. Yet the price of cloud storage hasn't come down. And 90% of all the disc drives that are out there are only about 10% utilized. So seems like a problem that needs a solution. And that's what we've done. We've basically brought together a very large network of individuals and companies that have spare storage capacity and matched them up with people who need storage. The really cool aspect, there are many cool aspects about it, but one of them is that basically if you want to store on the Storj network, we take your file, you encrypt it, so we never hold the keys. You encrypt it, it's all scrambled up, we break it up into between 20 and 80 pieces, and we spread those out across 150,000 or so nodes that we have in our network. So it's super cheap, but it's also super secure. Great performance because the data's way out at the edge. And super available because there's no storm or power outage or idiot tripping over a power cord that can take out your storage. >> So, Ben, you touched on, first question I was going to ask, of course, trust and security. Storage I absolutely have to worry about, so it sounds like that's at the core, but there's a number of dynamics going on in the industry. Object storage was great, let's spread it out, let's make it more decentralized, but most of the core storage industry is speeds and feeds and latency's super important, and even when you start getting to distributed architecture, I worry about that latency. So what are kind of the use cases, what are some of the key customer issues? Is price a big piece of it? Or what solutions does Storj solve that others can't? >> I always said when I was at Cluster, which was a storage company that there were four things that mattered in storage. There's certainly price; there was security; as in I don't want anybody to be able to access it; there's availability, I never want to drop or lose files; and finally there's performance, how fast I can get it. And so for a huge range of use cases that involve files, basically everything that object storage is kind of used for today, the design of our system is actually much better because we've encrypted it locally and then spread it out, you really can't attack it. First of all, you'd have to figure out... So a would-be attacker who wanted to find one of your files in the storage network would have to figure out which of the 80 or the 20 nodes out of 150,000 it's located on. If they found one of those, and they got the small portion of the file that's there, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it 'cause it's encrypted. Even if they were somehow able to decrypt it by stealing the key from you, not from us... >> So encryption and immutability... >> And immutability, right. So you get all of that. So for the security piece, it's great. For the availability piece, I never lose a file. It's really, really good, because if you just look at the math, the chances that somehow... You can basically lose 10 out of 20 nodes and still be able to recover your files. And all of our nodes are run by different people, different power supply. >> So let's take a step back. How many nodes are on the network now, you said? >> 150,000 now, run by 70,000 farmers, is what we call them. They're not miners, 'cause they're not just solving that problem, they're just producing something of value. 70,000 farmers, and then we have on the network right now, over 50 petabytes of data, which is a really large amount, and yet, we don't run a single data center. >> Have you guys raised any venture at all, or is it all ICO proceeds? >> There was a small seed round that was done, before the ICO craze. But other than that, it's all-- >> And how many people are working on the company? >> 25. >> So you guys are a classic startup. The working product, how does that look now? Is it on the blockchain, is it off the chain, how's it working, Bitcoin? >> So I've described to you what the product does. So far nothing I've described to you involves blockchain. The way the economics work is that as a user, somebody who wants to store on our network, we quote a price in dollars. You can either pay us in dollars or in the Storj token, and as a farmer, you get compensated with a Storj token. And that's done, of course, using blockchain we're actually part of Ethereum. >> Is that ERC-20 token? >> ERC-20 token, yeah. There are also interesting things that we are working on using blockchain for things like you just mentioned, data integrity, so I can make sure that if I'm doing a snapshot of a database, and I want to make sure that it's exactly what it is, nobody can tamper with it, et cetera, then that's a perfect use of blockchain. But using blockchain for the stuff I was talking about before, like figuring out where the shards are and making sure that they're uptime and reliable, that's actually stuff where blockchain isn't the best answer. >> Ben, tell us a little bit about the customers that you find there, 'cause storage administrators, that role's been changing a lot, but the typical storage administrator, if you tell them, "Oh yeah, I'm doing some distributed thing, "somewhere else, and paying in crypto-currency," they'd be like, are you kidding me? I want this thing that I can lock and hold and guard with a gun. >> This is like anything else, there's an adoption curve, and right now it's clearly very much early adopters. And actually similarly to Docker and similar to the cloud in general, it's developers who are leading the way. Developers are saying, oh, wow, I can write to the storage network in the same way that I would have written to S3, only it's cheaper, for many use cases, more performing, and not centralized, so I'm not trusting one cloud provider. So for certain use cases, this is fantastic. >> Are there certain cloud native apps that you're finding have strong affinity here? >> Yeah, so basically what we have affinity with right now, and let's be clear, this is early days. I wouldn't recommend that people store their most sensitive data on this, but-- >> Not Oracle certified yet, is what you're saying? >> We're not Oracle certified, no. (laughing) Basically anything involving a large file that you're not writing to very frequently, but you're reading a lot, or that's getting read by lots of people around the world, we're a really good solution. It's one of the things I think I mentioned to you. So we've got 150,000 nodes. They're located in I think it's now 180 countries, and all over the U.S. So if you want to get your data close to the edge, the people who are consuming your data are really close to the edge, this is actually really good. And because it's spread across so many, you get the benefit of parallelism, so it's super fast, in addition to being super safe and super secure. >> How does it work for the farmers? Because we have video files, so we would love to spread our video files on the Storj network. So let's just say... >> I'd do a special deal for you, too, you know. >> Of course, yeah, get a little token action going on both sides, Cube coins. But the availability thing is concerning. Whose computers is it being stored on? Is it extra capacity? Is it servers? Is it people's home computers? What's the, is it that kind of model? >> Sure, so basically yeah, we, just as Airbnb measures reputation, we measure reputation, too. And so if you don't have a good reputation, certain characteristics, we won't send data to you. What it basically means is you've got to have dedicated hardware and a dedicated connection. So we do have people who are running things in their home, but it's not a laptop, it's not on your phone. But if you have a disc drive that's connected with reasonably high capacity and reasonably well connected, then you'll establish good reputation. But what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of universities, a lot of small businesses, some data center operators who have spare capacity or just want to use us as like, be both a farmer and a user. So backup and get stuff on their capacity as a good idea. And interestingly enough, we also are getting a lot of people who were Bitcoin miners and bought equipment, which is good quality equipment, but there's such an arms race in doing that. >> So they abandoned, because it was too hard for them to get coins. >> It's too hard to make money, right, and very expensive, specialized equipment, and in our case, basically general high quality equipment works well. >> What's the profit model? How do the farmers make money? Take our Cube videos, as an example, so I'm paying you guys, and you're distributing those tokens? >> You're paying us and you're paying us either in dollars or tokens. And then farmers get compensated in tokens. Right now, about 60 cents on every dollar goes to farmers. And farmers get more storage based off of their reputation. We charge people based on both how much you're storing as well as how much bandwidth egress that you're doing, and we compensate farmers exactly the same way. >> It's handled through a consensus protocol that you guys have? >> Yeah, yeah, so the payment and assessing reputation we actually use good distributed blockchain as well there, right, so you're not counting on Storj to be in the middle there. Now, with the remaining 40 cents, which I think is actually the really interesting part, we keep some of that, we put some back into the network, but what I'm really excited about is that this is now a way for us to economically empower demand partners as well. The first thing we announced was FileZilla, but we have lots of other open source projects waiting in the wings, and we're happy to share with them. So as opposed to centralized cloud, where it's really hard to make money as an open source company, we're not an open source project in our case, right? We're happy if you're sending us users and data, to give you a really meaningful percentage. >> Any kind of freemium model you guys are playing with? I can imagine this being pretty interesting, because S3 democratized and lowered the cost barrier, obviously with cloud. >> S3 has been great for many things. >> How low are you in terms of the disruption? You guys are probably going to have to come in and undercut S3, is that the strategy? Or is that the price value? >> I think what I learned from my time in storage, is price is important but you have to be really safe and available and reliable, 'cause people's data is really important. But we looked across a pretty broad set of use cases, in comparing us to the traditional cloud providers we're probably a third. And we could go lower. What I think is really interesting in our case is that the economics just work really well. So from our perspective, if you're a farmer, you've already got, it's spare capacity, you don't need any more electricity to run this thing, you've got bandwidth, right? You don't need to hire any more people. So it's almost pure margin for a farmer, which is great for them. And so we can give economic value to farmers, we can give economic value to our customers, we can give economic value to partners. >> Any kind of economic models you can share in terms of what someone would make? Let's just say that I had this big music library that's not being used anymore, and I had a-- >> Well, as a customer of course, if you've got data that you want to store on our network, you'll save a lot of money, and it's probably a third of what you might pay. >> But is there any kind of, if I'm a farmer, I want to join the network? >> But if you're a farmer. >> How much am I going to make? >> It really depends on how much you're storing and how good your connection is, but as a farmer, I think you can make decent money. This could probably be I don't know off the top of my head, $20, $30 a month per drive, which isn't bad, and certainly much easier than making money-- >> So it kind of depends like the Airbnb model, depends how well you're using-- >> How well you're used. So some people earn less, some people earn more. And again, for most of the farmers, this is pure margin. >> Great, we got a couple back to back rooms, Stu. We should get some drives up there and get on board. We could pay for the cameras. >> And look, I think for videos, you guys would actually be a perfect use case with a lot of the stuff that's going to be coming out later this year. You get both storage and CDN like things for free, in the sense that because-- >> I'm really glad you brought that up, 'cause I want to ask you about Videocoin, 'cause Halsey Minor has Videocoin, another ICO, he raised $50 million. We covered that on Silicon Angle. But he's trying to democratize Acromi. Is that similar to what you guys are doing? >> I guess you could say yeah, we're further democratizing object storage, democratizing S3, but I think we can also democratize Acromi, we can democratize Isilon, there's certain other really exciting things that are-- >> What other services, you mentioned CDN, so it's not just storing the information, but that global dispersion, what does that enable? >> It used to be that people had a really big difference between archival which is slow, hard to get at, and CDN, right? And but actually, given the way that we're doing this thing, we can be pretty seamless. Pay archival for stuff that's staying in archival, but go up market if you're going to be having a lot of people read it. >> So I got to ask you about the, obviously, security. You're looking at it for additional services around redundancy, I can see that being a nice headroom for you. On a personal note, you've been involved in a lot of industry companies that have done very well, entrepreneurial success. >> Ben: Why am I doing this? (laughing) >> I can tell you're having fun. How could you not have fun, it's a whole 'nother generation of innovation, disruption coming, a whole 'nother price point. So what's it like, are you having fun? And if you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now, 'cause I wish I was 22 right now in this market-- >> Are you saying I'm not 22? >> How do you explain this? And when you go to parties, even in the Valley, and people say, "Man, you're crazy, it's a fricken' "scam out there," how do you explain to 'em this revolution? Because this is like a special, unique wave. How would you talk about that? >> Actually I describe it the same way to people in the Valley the same way that I described at the beginning, which is that blockchain is bigger than cryptocurrency, and decentralized is much bigger than blockchain. And Storj is first and foremost decentralized. It's about decentralized computing, decentralized storage, supporting decentralized apps, keeping the internet from ending up in the hands of just three people, three companies, which I think is really important. But also I feel very good that, to the extent that Storj does touch on cryptocurrency, that we've done it the right way. We had the service working first before we did the token sale. We raised what now appears to be a modest amount in the token sale, tried to be very transparent and at the forefront. >> You probably could've gotten more if you wanted to. >> Probably, right? But we were trying to be forefront in terms of governance and transparency, and I think that it'll probably be a good thing, just as it was kind of a good thing that the bubble burst in the late '90s and you got rid of a lot of such not great companies and not such great operators. I think that the current corrections, or whatever, in the crypto market I think will-- >> Like pets.com is gone, but DogeCoin still exists. (laughing) >> So I'm sure that somebody has a crypto base pets.com or webvan lurking in the wings somewhere. Kodak just did it. >> I got to ask you, you're super smart. You went to some really good schools, I think Princeton, Harvard Business School. So you got a good education, so I got to get your take on the whole token economics vision. 'Cause this is, if you look at outside the tech trends, there's actually new economic models that are coming out. Have you looked at token economics? New liquidity on the one side, you've got sovereignty, you've got consensus. These are not just tech issues, these are society issues. What's your vision around that? How are you viewing it? What's the upside? How is this shaping the future? >> Yeah, I think if you're a token network, you sort of have to have some central bank chops as well, right? And we actually have a central banker. >> John: So you have a chief economic officer? >> So we don't, no, we have an advisor-- >> John: Public policy. >> I actually had a degree in public policy at one point. But we need to think about the token supply in the same way you'd think about the money supply. We're backed by something real, so it's sort of like having currencies backed by gold. We need to make sure that the market grows and the network grows. And my fundamental belief is that the more the network grows, the more people use it, the more value that we're able to provide, that'll be good for token economics in the long run. In the short run, though, what we've done, is again, we price based off of dollars, and we compensate farmers based off the token based off of the spot price. So for farmers, we've tried to remove any need to worry about volatility or things like that. >> So I want your reaction-- >> Or the price. >> I've said on The Cube multiple times that in the old days of venture startups, the CTO was everything. You had to have a great CTO or VP of engineering and great senior executive team on the entrepreneurial team. Now it's almost like the chief economic officer is a critical piece, 'cause you've got public policy intersecting with economics. You've got new kinds of math that's not technical algorithm but it's kind of business algorithms. >> It is, business algorithms. Just like any economy, the money supply matters. And people's trust in that money matters. And the supply matters. All that stuff like that, and stability matters. So I think absolutely this new breed of network based token companies will have to worry about that, and probably should think about a chief economics officer, but it doesn't mean that you don't also have to have a great CTO and great technology, 'cause that's how you make the network valuable and grow. And one of the reasons that gave me both excitement and comfort about going to Storj is that the economic model works, fundamentally, even if the crypto's not there. >> John: 'Cause technology is decentralized. >> Decentralized storage makes sense even if you're buying and selling it with dollars or pounds or rubles, or whatever. >> Ben, great to see you, thanks for coming in and sharing the Ben Golub School of Economics, Public Policy for Tokens. You can give a class at Stanford on that soon, although that's the competition's school. >> Maybe, yes. Slightly different. We still like them. >> Great to see you, congratulations. Storj, pronounced storage. Great, successful ICO, hot startup, really, an example of the infrastructure opportunities of a new decentralized infrastructure that can be and will soon, we think, it will be critical infrastructure in a whole new way. Great to see you. >> Ben: Really good to see you, great to be back with you. >> It's the Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Summit 2018 with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have two great guests. Hot startup from SingleFx, the CEO, Karthik Rau, and the CTO, Arijit Mukherji. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Karthik: Yeah, great to see you again. Thanks for having us. >> So, we've been following you guys. You've been out five years. Two years in stealth, three years ago you launched on theCUBE. >> Karthik: Right here on theCUBE. >> We see you at AWS and VMware. Cloud's changed a lot. So, let's get an update. Karthik, take a minute to explain where you guys are at now company-wise, employees, traction momentum, product. Where are you guys at now? >> Karthik: Yeah, absolutely. So, SignalFx, first of all, let me tell you what we do. SignalFx is a realtime streaming operational intelligence solution. Basically, what that means is we collect monitoring data, operational data across the entire cloud environment, from the infrastructure all the way up to the applications. And we apply realtime analytics on that data to help people be a lot more proactive in their monitoring of these distributed environments. We launched the company in 2015. We come ... I'll let Arijit talk about our origins. We came out of Facebook. And we had a lot of experience building this to Facebook. In the past three years, we've been building up our company aggressively. We've now got hundreds of customers including several large Fortune 500 accounts, large web scale accounts like Acquia and HubSpot and Yelp and KAYAK. And we're over 100 employees now, about 120 employees. And yeah, doing great. >> So, Werner Vogels, the CTO, laid out on stage plus a great Matt Wood conversation about machine learning but the real thing that Werner laid out was the old way, the web server, multi-tier architecture stack kind of thing going on there to a more cloud DevOps horizontally scalable where sets of servers that could be spawned in parallel creates a new kind of operating model but also creates challenges around what to instrument. You know, as we would joke, someone left the lights on, implying EC2s been running. And all these kinds of things are going on. And you mentioned some of the Facebook kind of challenges. People were building their own scale. What have you guys learned and how does that apply today's modern infrastructure? What are some of the threshold challenges that companies are facing when they say, one, already there or I want to get there? How do you guys look at the main issues? >> Karthik: Do you want to take that? >> Yeah, so monitoring modern environments and infrastructure is actually quite a challenge. There's obviously a few things going around. One, as you mentioned, is the variety, the sheer variety of things. No longer just the three-tier architecture I have cloud services. I have containers. I have lambdas. I have my own applications. I have the cloud infrastructure itself that all needs to be monitored. And things are also becoming far more numerous. So, there's just many more of everything, right? And so, making sense of that space is becoming a big challenge. And our company was founded on the idea that monitoring is becoming an analytics problem. So, it's no longer about looking at individual servers or applications instances. It's more about making sense holistically over what's going on and being able to combine different types of data from different systems together to provide you with that high level view and that's the kind of functionality that we at SignalFx have been trying to provide. >> What are some of the data flows volumes look like. Cause I've heard multiple people talk about either Facebook or in open compute environments where there's just so much data coming in from the instrumentation that no human could actually get their arms around it. And you need to supplement it with machine learning and intelligence. I mean, is that something that you're seeing? What are some of the -- >> Yes, so actually what we see is different prospects or customers will be in different stages of a spectrum where maybe they were in a stage one where they're sort of using traditional architectures and then moving to these more modern systems. And as they get more modernized themselves, their use cases or the ways they wanted to do monitoring also gets more advanced. And so, we see the whole spectrum of it, as you mentioned. And so, understanding analytically how what we're is doing is great. But then you also want to take the human out of things as much as possible, right? >> Yeah. >> And make things more automated. And you want to look at the data and how things are behaving to learn from existing patterns to find outlines. So, that's really a very interesting challenge. And what I look at what we can do as a company going forward, like all the technological stuff that we can invest in, it's quite interesting. >> Yeah, Karthik, take us inside your customers. How does this modern monitoring, how does it change their business? How does it impact things like feedback loops and DevOps and everything that customers are having to deal in this kind of ever changing environment? >> Yeah, well I'll give you an example. There's a Fortune 500 company. They do product launches. And this is one of our customers and their product launches drive so much traffic that they do 80% of their business in the first two minutes of a product launch. And this is not at all uncommon in today's economy. And they're leveraging a lot of modern technologies, container architectures, serverless function architectures to spin up a bunch of capacity during these launches. And they were effectively flying blind most of the time. Because most of the traditional systems management monitoring solutions are not designed, A, to handle that volume. But, B, to handle the instant discovery requirements of if you're going to do 80% of your business in the first two minutes. So, the challenge is you're always playing defense. You're reacting to issues. And you're mostly flying blind. By leveraging SignalFx, they're getting realtime visibility, realtime discovery of these components as they're coming up. We're the only solution that can do that. So, literally within seconds of spinning up all of these containers, they're getting live streams into their dashboards, and live analytics, and live alerts. And what that's enabled them to do is be a lot more aggressive and effectively doing a lot more of these launches. So, that's driving their business and it's helping them drive their digital strategy forward. >> And microservices is really enabling you guys to be more relevant. Because truly the signal from the noise is where all these services reporting to? >> Karthik: Yeah. >> You talk about container madness. >> Karthik: There are two fundamental problems. So, one there's an architecture shift. And that's driving massive amounts of volume. You have physical machines that will live for three years in a data center. Divide it up into VMs, 10, 20 VMs per server. That'll maybe live for a few months. To now every process running in it's own container that might live for a few minutes. So, you have a massive exponential explosion in the number of components. But that's not the only problem. I was part of an architectural shift at VMware for a number of years. We weren't just affecting an architecture change. What's happening now is there's a cultural change and a process change that's happening as well. Because with containers, your development team can push changes directly out into a production environment. And what you're finding is you're going from sequential product development to parallel product development and a massive exponential increase in the number of code pushes. The only way you can operationalize that is you have to have realtime visibility in everything that's happening. Otherwise, the left arm doesn't know what the right arm is doing. >> John: And you need prescriptive and predictive analytics. >> Exactly. And you need predictive analytics to identify there's something unusual here. It's not a problem yet. But this is highly unusual and maybe it's your canary release. We need to do a code push. So, you want to roll it back. So, having that level of predictiveness becomes absolutely critical. >> Yeah, you mentioned realtime. We used to argue what really is realtime. And it was usually well in time to react to what the customer needs. What does realtime mean to your customers? Architecturally, is there something you do different to kind of understand what that means? >> Arijit: Yeah, so we actually fundamentally took a very different approach when we build a product. Where, typically, monitoring our metrics, monitoring was done with what we call a store and create or a batch-like architecture where you store all the data points that are coming in, then you create from it to any other use cases. While what we build at SignalFx is a fully end-to-end streaming architecture which is realtime. And what we mean by realtime is like two to three seconds between a data point coming through us and it's firing an alert or showing up in your chart. So, that's the kind of realtime. And it requires us to do lots of innovations up and down the stack. And we've built a lot of IP. We've got now patterns. And more are coming because the approach we took was quite novel. Different from-- >> John: You guys got a great management team. And looking at what you guys have done. I've been impressed with you guys. I want to just ask, Karthik, you mentioned about all these parallel processes that are going on. Totally agree. The process change, operationalizing an all new cultural way to create software manage the data. I mean, it really is the perfect storm for innovation. But also, it could literally screw people up. So, I got to ask you, who are you targeting for your customer? Who is the person that you talk to? Assuming it's kind of DevOps, so it's more like a cloud architect. Who do you target? Who do you sell to? Who's the buyer? Who uses your service? >> Karthik: Well, we see ... Every enterprise we see following a very similar journey. So, the first stage is, typically, you're just getting familiar with cloud. And you're probably just lifting and shifting enterprise workloads into the cloud. Probably experimenting with big data on the cloud. You're not yet doing microservices or containers or DevOps. And for them, we're still selling largely to classic IT. There just trying to get better visibility into their digital environment, you know, they're cloud environment. But then, what ends up happening is they very quickly get to what we call basically chaos. It's stage two. And it has a lot of parallels to shadow IT. What happened with SAS, where you have hundreds of different SAS tools is happening all over again with cloud but you've got hundreds or thousands of different operational tools. Different ways of doing monitoring, logging, security. And every team is doing it's own thing. And so, that's a big problem for enterprises who are trying to build best practices across their broader team. In that place, we're typically selling to departments because they don't have a centralize strategy yet. But what we find is the organizations at maturity have figured out that it's important to have certain centralized core services. And that doesn't mean they're forced on the end users. But they provide best practices around monitoring, logging, and such. And just make it easy for them to use those solutions. So, that's almost a new IT organization. It's platform engineering -- >> John: Is that a cloud architect? >> Platform engineering team, infrastructure engineering team, and they are effectively building best practices around the new stack not the traditional stack. >> So, you are or aren't targeting department level? Are you are? >> We sell to departments. But we also sell to the teams that are standardizing across the entire organization. >> So, cloud architects, for instance? >> Depends on the stage of the cloud journey. >> Or company. >> And the company, exactly. >> From an architectural standpoint, you talked that there's virtualization, there's containers, now serverless. How do you even figure out what to monitor in serverless? How fast is that changing? And how is that impacting your road map? >> So, serverless brings a very interesting challenge because they are very, very ephemeral. Like they're ephemeral in some sense. So, we realize there are two things. One is serverless, there's a reason why things are moving faster. It's because you want to be able to move faster. But then you also need to be able to monitor faster. It's no good monitoring serverless at five minutes later, for example. So, one of the things we invested in was how to get metrics, etc. and telemetry from these serverless environments in a very fast fashion. And that's something that we've done. The second thing we are doing that really works for this environment is afterall it's not about how many times a serverless function ran, it's about the value that it's providing the application that's running on it. And by focusing on a platform that let's you send these application metrics in great detail and then be able to monitor and analyze them, I think really amplifies the value in some sense. So, those are the two ... >> John: And talk about the ecosystems. One of the things I want to ask you guys because we've been seeing a collision between a lot of the different clouds. Clients want multicloud. Well, obviously, we're here at Amazon. They believe they should be the only cloud. But I think most customers would look at either legacy systems with some instrumentation and operational data to edge of the network, for instance. I mean, look at the edge of the network. That's just an extension of the data center depending on how you look at it. So, how do you guys view that kind of direction where customer says, "Hey, you know, I got a cloud architect. We're on Amazon. Of course, we have some old Microsoft stuff. So, we've got Azure going up there. We're kicking the tires on Google. And I got this whole IoT Edge project. SignalFx, instrument that for me. (laughs) Is that what you do? Or how do you deal with that? How would you deal with that kind of conversation? >> Well, I think most enterprises, the larger companies we see looking at multiple clouds. And they have different workloads running in different clouds, depending on the needs and what they're looking to do. So, the nice thing about a solution like SignalFx is we span all of these different architectures. And what we find is that most of the larger companies want to separate their business process solutions from their runtime architectures. Because they want to have a solution like SignalFx that it doesn't matter who you're using. If you choose to have your analytics intensive workloads in Google Cloud and your eCommerce workloads in Amazon, but you only want one system that will page someone in the middle of the night if there's a problem, then you have SignalFx to do that. And then you have your choice of runtime environments depending on what your developers need or what the business demands. We provide a lot of that glue across the different environments. >> Do you see that as the preferred architecture with most customers? Cause that makes a lot of sense. I mean, whether you're doing other data services, it kind of makes sense to separate out. Is that consistent? >> To have different applications >> Yeah. >> In different clouds? It depends. I mean, I think we see some people who are more comfortable running on a single cloud vendor and they make the decision based on what a portfolio of platforms and service features that are available. And they really like those, and they say it's easy to just go with one. But more often, we find people wanting to at least have some percentage running in a different cloud vendor. >> John: All right, final question. What's the secret sauce for the company? Tell us about the secret sauce. >> Arijit: I think-- >> We got the patents. I heard patents. You don't have to show all this exactly. But what is the secret DNA of the tech? What's the magic? >> I think it's our very unique architecture. It's entirely different from what you have. It's streaming and it focuses on scale, on timeliness, as well as on analytics capability. I think that unique combination is very special for us. And that, in a way, sort of allows us to address very, very different use cases, including this hybrid environments and what not, in a very effective way. So, it's a very, very powerful platform that can be used for many use cases. >> All right, so that was John's final question. Karthik, I've got one last one for you. What's it like being a CEO of a software company in the cloud era today compared to what it's been earlier in our career? >> Well, it's moving very, very quickly, right? I mean, technology always move very quickly. But I think compared to when I was at VMware in the mid 2000s, it just feels like every 18 months there's a new technology wave. You know, when we started our company five years ago, that was the first year that AWS eclipsed a billion dollars in sales and Dagra hadn't even launched. It launched a month after we started the company. And then serverless came. And now function architecture is all there. So, there's just so much change happening, and it's happening so quickly, it forces vendors like us to really be on the cutting edge and forward looking and making sure that you're keeping an eye out for what's coming cause the markets are moving way faster, I think, then they were 15 years ago. >> John: Well, Karthik, thanks so much. We appreciate you guys coming on, SignalFx. I'll give you the final word on the interview. Take a minute to share something with the audience that they might not know about SignalFx that they should know about. >> Well, I think what people may not realize is how realtime we can actually get. I think most people are used to doing all their monitoring and observation, and they think of realtime in the order of minutes, or if you can get stuff every 30 seconds. We really are the only realtime solution. That's why we say real realtime. We're on the order of seconds. You can build really, really sophisticated analytics and get visibility like you can't anywhere else. So, it's real, realtime. >> And that's soon to be table stakes. TheCUBE is realtime. We're live right here, on theCUBE here, in San Francisco at Amazon Web Services, AWS Summit 2018. We've been covering all the Amazon re:Invents since it started, of course. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music) (gentle instrumental music)