(gentle music) >> Okay. We're back at AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. Think it's the first time, at re:Invent, we've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re:Invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the senior vice president of alliances. And he's joined by Ankur Jain, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Tom, tell us about Merkel, for those who might not be familiar with you. >> Yeah. So, Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the dentsu umbrella. Dentsu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars, which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. >> So you're a tech company? >> Yes. >> Right? Okay. So there's some big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously, the pandemic, the forced march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing, that you're trying to ride? >> So what we're seeing is, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem, that we manage today, within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment. To be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realizing they need, to be in a digital environment. And so, that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. >> And you're relatively you new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you can talk about that, Ankur. >> Well, actually, as a partner, we may be new. But Merkle has been working with AWS for over five years. >> Dave Vellante: As a customer? >> As a customer. >> Yeah. >> So what we did was, last year, we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we are part of the re:Stack program, basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialization of marketing. So, as Tom said, you know, we are part of a dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us, to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. >> So, I mean, your on-prem databases, there's probably a lot of diversity on-prem. (laughs) A lot of tech... When the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical philosophy. >> Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described... So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are, essentially, Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem. Especially, MarTech ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints, customer data from disparate sources. And they, basically, integrate that data in one central place. And then bolt-on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on top of it. Helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases, currently, sit on-prem, on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them. Give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities, to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate that. >> Dave Vellante: And you do that as a service? >> We do that as a service. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Strategically, >> Yes. >> you're sort of transforming your business- >> Yes. >> to help your customers transform their business. >> Right. >> Right? Take away, it's classic. I mean, it's happening. This theme of, you know, AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Superclouds, we call 'em. >> Superclouds, yeah. (Dave laughs) It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And, for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them, and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for 'em. >> Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media. And all they keep talking about was direct-to-consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third-party anymore, if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that, kind of, the play here? >> Yes. Direct-to-consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick-and-mortar-based, or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors, are now, basically, transforming themselves to be direct-to-consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment. Because, now, those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems, that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS, to bring all those technologies, and build those next generation solutions for our customers. >> So what kind of initiatives are you working on with AWS? >> So, there are, like, three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. You know, and they have a transformation like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services. To give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one, we are doing in partnership with AWS. To reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations. You know, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environment, by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Merkury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to, actually, easily use that solution. And number four, I would say is, helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. You know, leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms. Which is, bring on your first-party data, join it with Amazon data, to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com. Which gives insight to these brands, to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are, like, four, five focus areas. >> No, it's good. So, I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy. Like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists, that... Your clients have first-party data. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources. >> Yes. >> And then you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >> Well, ultimately, client owns the data, because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third-party data, which is what we call as... So Merkle has a service called DataSource, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is, to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange. So that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first-party data, take this third-party data from Merkle, and then, segment their customers much more intelligently. >> And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? >> Yeah. CMO is our main customer profile. And we'll work with the chief data officer, or we'll work with the chief technology officer. We bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing, and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. >> And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too? >> Tom Miller: Yeah, he fits in there too. >> CGO, chief dig. officer, CMO. Sometimes, they're one in the same. Other times, they're mixed. >> Yep. Yep. >> I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. >> Yes. >> Sure. >> It's all data. >> It's all data. (Dave laughs) >> Yeah. Some of the roles that come into play, as Tom mentioned, and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers, from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talked about the business initiatives, like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkle comes in, to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years, on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >> So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise, that now, you're making that available as a service. Is that right? >> That's right. Yes. >> Yes. >> How far are you into that journey, of saasfying your business? >> Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkle. >> Yeah. Where you began leveraging the cloud? >> That's right. >> Dave Vellante: And then the light bulb went off and- >> So cloud, again, we use cloud in multiple aspects. From general computing perspective, leveraging, you know, fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece, on the cloud side, is SaaS offering, Software as a Service offerings, like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkle covers a huge spectrum, when it comes to cloud. >> And you got a combination, you have a consulting business, and also- >> So Merkle has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them. Where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives, and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have a data business, the data assets that I was talking about, that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. >> Dave Vellante: Quite a portfolio. >> Yes. >> You mentioned analytics a couple of times, how do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics, so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? >> Yeah. So that's a very important line. Because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, because that's the actionable part. So, few areas. I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now, who those set of customers are, you know, where they should target this, who their target customers are, what their demographics are, that's all done through analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell, and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. >> Used to be, really, pure art, right? It's really becoming- >> Not any more, it's all data driven companies. (Tom laughs) >> It's "Moneyball." >> Yes. Exactly. (Dave laughs) >> Tom Miller: Exactly. >> There's, maybe, still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair, still. >> Yes. >> But you got to go with the data. >> And that's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art, to present it to a end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. >> And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves. Where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkle. >> You got to teach 'em how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in two to three years? Where do you want to take? >> I think future is cloud, AWS being the market leader. I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS, I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sales in, majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to tell. >> Yeah, that's good news for AWS. If a little of your DNA could rub off on them, it'd be good. >> Tom Miller: Yeah. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> It was great to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re:Invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high-tech coverage. Be right back. (gentle music)

>>Okay, We're back at AWS Re. Invent. You're watching the >>cubes. Continuous coverage >>coverage. This is Day four. I think it's the first time it reinvent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering Reinvent. Tom Miller is here is the senior vice president of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane. Who's the global cloud? Practically practise lead at Merkel. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tom. Tell us about Merkel. For those who might not be familiar with you. >>So Merkel is a customer experience management company. That is, um, under the Dentsu umbrella. Dense. Who is a global media agency? We represent one of the pillars which is global, our customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkel does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. They're a tech company. Yes. >>Okay, so there's some big big tail winds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic. You know, the force marched to digital. Uh, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? >>So what we're seeing is, uh we've got, uh, as a start. We've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on Prem that we manage today within a sequel environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data to be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realising they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environments. >>And you're relatively new to the ws world, right? Maybe you can talk >>about that anchor actually, as a partner. We may be new, but Merkel works with AWS has been working with AWS for over five years as a customer as a customer. So what we did was last year we formalise the relationship with us to be, uh, an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restock programme, basically which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialisation of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of, uh Dentsu umbrella are our core focuses on customer experience, transformation and how we do that Customer experience. Transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernise the solutions that Martin can take to the market. >>So your on Prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on a lot of technical that when the cloud more agility, infinite resources do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe >>your I can take that what time just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Markle, helping big brands 1400 Fortune 500 brands to organise their marketing ecosystem, especially Martek ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints customer customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about, and and these databases currently set on Prem on Merkel's own data centre. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernise them. Give all these ai ml type of capabilities advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS is the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service. We do that as a service. >>Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business right? Take away. It's it's classic. I mean, you really it's happening. This theme of, you know a W started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ. Goldman Sachs. You guys in the media world essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes, super clouds. We call >>them Super Cloud. Yeah, it's about helping our clients understand What is it they're trying to accomplish? And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey where the customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey and doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical form. >>I was listening to the, uh, snowflake earnings call from last night and they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media and all. I keep talking about direct direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot of media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily. I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to, Technology is enabling that is that kind of the play here? >>Yes, Director Consumer is a huge player. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalisation comes becomes a big theme, especially indeed to see type of environment, because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's there like. What's their dislike? Which products which services are they interested in? So that's that's all kind of advanced analytics machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkel is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and and build those next generation solutions for access. So what kind >>of initiatives are you working >>on? So there are, like, 34 areas that we are working very closely with AWS number one. I would say Think about our marketers friend, you know, and they have a transformation like direct to consumer on the channel e commerce, these types of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools? What technologies will be part of that ecosystem. That's where Merkel provides consulting services to to give them a road map, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two as Tom mentioned migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernise their environment by migrating them to cloud number three. Merkel has a solution called mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are Modernising all that solution of making that available on AWS marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing Data Lake leveraging AWS technologies like blue, red shift and and actually modernise their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data. Join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on amazon dot com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four or five focus areas. So I was >>gonna ask you about the data and the data strategy like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists that your clients have first party data and you might recommend bringing in other data sources. And you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >>Well, ultimately, client also data because that that's their customers' data. Uh, to your point on, we helped them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call is. So Merkel has a service called data source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests so we monetise all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS data exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data. Take this third party data from Merkel and then, uh, segment their customers much more intelligently. >>And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile. >>Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer Will work with the chief technology officer. We kind of we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get both get what they want. >>And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in their CDOs. Chief Digital officer CMO. Sometimes they're all they're one and the same. Other times they're mixed. I've seen see IOS and and CDOs together. Sure, you sort of. It's all data. It's all >>day. >>Yeah, some of the roles that come into play, as as Tom mentioned. And you mentioned C I o c T. O s chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the side. And then we have the CMOS chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what I t speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct to consumer Omni Channel E commerce, those are more business driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then at the same time, how do we translate translate those strategic initiatives into it transformation because it does require a lot of idea transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >>So you got data. You've got tools, you've got software. You've got expertise that now you're making that available as a as a service. That's right. How far are you into that? journey of satisfying your business. >>Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, 5 to 7 years ago at Merkel, >>where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off >>the cloud again. We use clouds in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyse it and and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is, uh, SAS, offering software as a service offerings like Adobe Salesforce and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum. When it comes to cloud and you got >>a combination, you have a consulting business and also >>so Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business that data assets that I was talking about, that we monetise. We have promotions and loyalty. We have media, so we recover multiple services portfolio. >>How do you mentioned analytics a couple times? How do you tie that? Back to the to the to the sales function. I would imagine your your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yes, >>So that's a very important line because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it? Because that's the actionable part. So a few areas I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to the to a set of customers Now who those set of customers are, You know where they should target this, who their target customers are, what the demographics are that's all done through and analytics and what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence machine learning those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalised the offerings that they're going to offer to. The customers >>used to be really pure art, right? It's really >>not anymore. It's all data driven. Moneyball. Moneyball? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe still a little bit of hard in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you've got to go with the data. >>That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in and how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer. That's exactly you know. It's a combination, >>and we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel, >>teach them how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in 2 to 3 years. Where do you want to take it? >>I think future is Cloud AWS being the market leader. I think aws has a huge role to play. Um, we are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS cells in, uh, majority of the sales happen in our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that would be a very powerful story for us to be >>good news for AWS. They little your DNA can rub off on them would be good, guys. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube Day four aws re invent. Were the Cube the global leader in high tech coverage? Right back. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the queue from Las Vegas. We are live at AWS reinvent 19 Lisa Martin with John furrier. We've been having lots of great conversations. John, we're about to have another one cause we always love to talk about customer proof in the putting. Please welcome a couple of guests. We have Rafael, director of analytics and data management from triple a life. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Our pleasure. And from Burkle anchor Jane, the SVP of cloud platforms. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So here we are in this, I can't see of people around us as, as growing exponential a by the hour here, but awkward. Let's start with you give her audience an understanding of Merkel, who you are and what you do. >>Yeah, absolutely. So Marco is a global performance marketing agency. We are part of a dental agent network and a, it's almost about 9,000 to 10,000 people worldwide. It's a global agency. What differentiates Merkel from rest of the other marketing agencies is our deep roots and data driven approach. We embrace technology. It's embedded in all our, all our solutions that we take to market. Um, and that's what we pride ourselves with. So, um, that's basically a high level pitch about Merkel. What differentiates us, my role, uh, I lead the cloud transformation for Merkel. Um, uh, basically think of my team as the think tanks who bring in the new technology, come up with a new way of rolling out solutions product I solutions, uh, disruptive solutions, which helps our clients and big fortune brands such as triple life insurance, uh, to transform their marketing ecosystem. >>So let's go ahead and dig. A lot of folks probably know AAA life, but, but Raphael, give us a little bit of an overview. This is a 50 year old organization. >>So we celebrate our 50th 50 year anniversary this year. Actually, we're founded in 1969. So everybody life insurance, we endeavor to be the provider of choice for a AAA member. Tell them to protect what matters most to them. And we offer a diverse set of insurance products across just about every channel. Um, and um, we engage with Merkel, uh, earlier, the, um, in 2018 actually to, to, uh, to build a nice solution that allows us to even better serve the needs of the members. Uh, my role, I am the, I lead our analytics and data management work. So helping us collect data and manage better and better leverage it to support the needs of members. >>So a trip, I can't even imagine the volumes of data that you're dealing with, but it's also, this is people's data, right? This is about insurance, life insurance, the volume of it. How have you, what were some of the things that you said? All right guys, we need to change how we're managing the data because we know there's probably a lot more business value, maybe new services that we can get our on it or eyes >>on it. >>So, so that was, that was it. So as an organization, uh, I want to underscore what you said. We make no compromises when it comes to the safety of our, of our members data. And we take every step possible to ensure that it is managed in a responsible and safe way. But we knew that on, on the platform that we had prior to this, we weren't, we weren't as italics. We wanted to be. We would find that threaten processes would take spans of weeks in order to operate or to run. And that just didn't allow us to provide the member experience that we wanted. So we built this new solution and this solution updates every day, right? There's no longer multi-week cycle times and tumbler processes happen in real time, which allows us to go to market with more accurate and more responsive programs to our members. >>Can you guys talk about the Amazon and AWS solution? How you guys using Amazon's at red shift? Can he says, you guys losing multiple databases, give us a peek into the Amazon services that you guys are taking advantage of that anchor. >>Yeah, please. Um, so basically when we were approached by AAA life to kind of come in and you know, present ourselves our credentials, one thing that differentiated there in that solution page was uh, bringing Amazon to the forefront because cloud, you know, one of the issue that Ravel and his team were facing were scalability aspect. You know, the performance was, was not up to the par, I believe you guys were um, on a two week cycle. That data was a definition every two weeks. And how can we turn that around and know can only be possible to, in our disruptive technologies that Amazon brings to the forefront. So what we built was basically it's a complete Amazon based cloud native architecture. Uh, we leveraged AWS with our chip as the data warehouse platform to integrate basically billions and billions of rows from a hundred plus sources that we are bringing in on a daily basis. >>In fact, actually some of the sources are the fresh on a real time basis. We are catching real time interactions of users on the website and then letting Kimberly the life make real time decisions on how we actually personalize their experience. So AWS, Redshift, you know, definitely the center's centerpiece. Then we are also leveraging a cloud native ELT technology extract load and transform technology called. It's a third party tool, but again, a very cloud native technology. So the whole solution leverage is Python to some extent. And then our veil can talk about AI and machine learning that how they are leveraging AWS ecosystem there. >>Yeah. So that was um, so, uh, I anchor said it right. One thing that differentiated Merkel was that cloud first approach, right? Uh, we looked at it what a, all of the analysts were saying. We went to all the key vendors in this space. We saw the, we saw the architecture is, and when Merkel walked in and presented that, um, that AWS architecture, it was great for me because if nausea immediately made sense, there was no wizardry around, I hope this database scales. I was confident that Redshift and Lambda and dynamo would this go to our use cases. So it became a lot more about are we solving the right business problem and less about do we have the right technologies. So in addition to what Ankur mentioned, we're leveraging our sort of living RNR studio, um, in AWS as well as top low frat for our machine learning models and for business intelligence. >>And more recently we've started transition from R to a Python as a practitioner on the keynote today. Slew a new thing, Sage maker studio, an IDE for machine learning framework. I mean this is like a common set. Like finally, I couldn't have been more excited right? That, that was my Superbowl moment. Um, I was, I was as I was, we were actually at dinner yesterday and I was mentioning Tonker, this is my wishlist, right? I want AWS to make a greater investment in that end user data scientists experience in auto ML and they knocked it out of the park. Everything they announced today, I was just, I was texting frat. Wow, this is amazing. I can't wait to go home. There's a lot of nuances to, and a lot of these announcements, auto ML for instance. Yeah. Really big deal the way they did it. >>And again, the ID who would've thought, I mean this is duh, why didn't we think about this sooner? Yeah. With auto ML that that focus on transparency. Right. And then I think about a year ago we went to market and we ended up not choosing any solutions because they hadn't solved for once you've got a model built, how do you effectively migrated from let's say an analyst who might not have the, the ML expertise to a data science team and the fact that AWS understood out of the gate that you need that transparent all for it. I'm really excited for that. What do you think the impacts are going to be more uptake on the data science side? What do you think the impact of this and the, so I think for, I think we're going to see, um, that a lot of our use cases are going to part a lot less effort to spin up. >>So we're going to see much more, much faster pilots. We're going to have a much clearer sense of is this worth it? Is this something we should continue to invest in and to me we should drive and I expect that a lot, much larger percentage of my team, the analysts are going to be involved in data and data science and machine learning. So I'm really excited about that. And also the ability to inquire, to integrate best practices into what we're doing out of the gate. Right? So software engineers figured out profiling, they figured out the bugging and these are things that machine learners are picking up. Now the fact that you're front and center is really excited. Superbowl moment. You can be like the new England Patriots, 17 straight AFC championship games. Boston. Gosh, I could resist. Uh, they're all Seattle. They're all Seattle here and Amazon. I don't even bring Seattle Patriots up here and Amazon, >>we are the ESPN of tech news that we have to get in as far as conversation. But I want to kind of talk a little bit, Raphael about the transformation because presumably in, in every industry, especially in insurance, there are so many born in the cloud companies that are a lot, they're a lot more agile and they are chasing what AAA life and your competitors and your peers are doing. What your S establishing with the help of anchor and Merkel, how does this allow you to actually take the data that you had, expand it, but also extract insights from maybe competitive advantages that you couldn't think about before? >>Yeah, so I think, uh, so as an organization, even though we're 50 years old, one of the things that drew me to the company and it's really exciting is it's unrelated to thrusting on its laurels, right? I think there's tremendous hunger and appetite within our executive group to better serve our members and to serve more members. And what this technology is allowed is the technology is not a limiting factor. It's an enabling factors. We're able to produce more models, more performant models, process more of IO data, build more features. Um, we've managed to do away with a lot of the, you know, if you take it and you look at it this way and squeeze it and maybe it'll work and systematize more aspects of our reporting and our campaign development and our model development and the observability, the visibility of just the ability to be agile and have our data be a partner to what we're trying to accomplish. That's been really great. >>You talked about the significant reduction in cycle times. If we go back up to the executive suite from a business differentiation perspective, is the senior leadership at AAA understanding what this cloud infrastructure is going to enable their business to achieve? >>Absolutely. So, so our successes here I think have been instrumental in encouraging our organization to continue to invest in cloud. And uh, we're an active, we're actively considering and discussing additional cloud initiatives, especially around the areas of machine learning and AI. >>And the auger question for you in terms of, of your expertise, in your experience as we look at how cloud is changing, John, you know, educate us on cloud cloud, Tuto, AI machine learning. What are, as, as these, as businesses, as industries have the opportunity to for next gen cloud, what are some of the next industries that you think are really prime to be completely transformed? >>Um, I'm in that are so many different business models. If you look around, one thing I would like to actually touch upon what we are seeing from Merkel standpoint is the digital transformation and how customers in today's world they are, you know, how brands are engaging with their customers and how customers are engaging with the brands. Especially that expectations customer is at the center stage here they are the ones who are driving the whole customer engagement journey, right? How all I am browsing a catalog of a particular brand on my cell phone and then I actually purchased right then and there and if I have an issue I can call them or I can go to social media and log a complaint. So that's whole multi channel, you know, aspect of this marketing ecosystem these days. I think cloud is the platform which is enabling that, right? >>This cannot happen without cloud. I'm going to look at, Raphael was just describing, you know, real time interaction, real time understanding the behavior of the customer in real time and engaging with them based on their need at that point of time. If you have technologies like Sage maker, if you have technologies like AWS Redship you have technologies like glue, Kinesis, which lets you bring in data from all these disparate sources and give you the ability to derive some insights from that data in that particular moment and then interact with the customer right then and there. That's exactly what we are talking about. And this can only happen through cloud so, so that's my 2 cents are where they are, what we from Merkel standpoint, we are looking into the market. That's what we are helping our brands through to >>client. I completely agree. I think that the change from capital and operation, right to no longer house to know these are all the sources and all the use cases and everything that needs to happen before you start the project and the ability to say, Hey, let's get going. Let's deliver value in the way that we've had and continue to have conversations and deliver new features, new stores, a new functionality, and at the same time, having AWS as a partner who's, who's building an incremental value. I think just last week I was really excited with the changes they've made to integrate Sage maker with their databases so you can score from the directly from the database. So it feels like all these things were coming together to allow us as a company to better off on push our aims and exciting time. >>It is exciting. Well guys, I wish we had more time, but we are out of time. Thank you Raphael and anchor for sharing with Merkel and AAA. Pleasure. All right. Take care. Or John furrier. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from Vegas re-invent 19 we'll be right back.