>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live. Yes. Live in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, with Dave Nicholson. David's great to co-host with you. How you doing >>Fantastic. Great to be here with >>You, Lisa, as always, we're going to have a great conversation. Next to Cuba actually is two lifestyles, two remote studios. We've got over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next decade and cloud innovation and Dave and I are pleased to welcome Scott Carter, the CTO of TSS to the program. Scott. Welcome. >>Thank you. It's really, really great to be here. Really >>This a little bit. Great to have you on the program. Talk to us a little bit about, about TCIs and let's talk about your kind of journey to the cloud and your relationship with AWS. >>Absolutely. Um, you know, TCIs, we've been around as a company for about 40 years. We specialize in, uh, payment products specifically on the issuing side. So card issuing, we've worked with some of the largest financial brands in the world and retailers as well. Uh, and, and a lot of, you know, what I always tell people is if you have a card in your wallet today, uh, you could probably pull it out. And at least one of those cards is something that we manage and service for our customers. And, and we, uh, do everything full lifecycle of those payment products for our customers around the globe >>On behalf of being a cardholder. Thank you. Talk to me a little bit about the AWS partnership here we are at re-invent. >>Yeah, well, we started a very special, uh, partnership with AWS about 18 months ago. We're about 18 months into the journey, uh, and really our goal and our vision is to build out a financial services cloud for all of our clients and our retailers and fintechs. Uh, we're really focused right now on migrating some of our key products to the AWS cloud environment. We built we've used us a variety of AWS technology by some on-premise and in the cloud environment to migrate our processing platforms and all of our customer servicing systems. So we're in the middle of that journey. Uh, we've had a lot of successes so far. AWS is helping us out. Our engineering team is working side by side with the AWS engineering team to produce what we believe is going to be the next generation of payments, especially on the card issuing side, >>Next gen that's, that's important as a consumers, consumer life business life. We have that expectation that we're going to be able to transact whatever we want anytime day or night, >>Absolutely choice is key, uh, virtual physical, no matter where you are, we want to be able to facilitate your payment and make sure you have everything you need to support you through the full card life cycles, the life cycle of your account. >>So you talk about those cards being in our wallets and handbags. I know there's one that's actually smoking. It's so hot from use in my co-hosts handbag, but, >>Uh, we appreciate that >>Talk, talk, talk about this journey from the perspective of someone who, um, I assume like me is not just out of college, right? You've working, you've been working in this business for a while. And so you're going through the transition from the world of what some will refer to as legacy it into the world of cloud. Uh, talk about the challenges there. How do you go after the low hanging fruit versus the high hanging fruit? How do you evaluate something from an ROI perspective? Talk about that. >>Yeah, and I, you know, uh, I get that quite a similar question a lot. I get, you know, people are, are interested in the journey and especially CTOs and CEOs who were starting journeys at their own. I get a chance to talk with a lot of banks and retailers about their individual like modernization and transformation journeys. Um, and you know, the, the basics are true about the journey. And I had somebody tell me years ago that it's, it's, it's psychology, it's not technology. Uh, you've really got to address the people's side of the equation. First, you've got to focus on training and upskilling, make sure that the team comes along on the journey. And then you've gotta be a really good recruiter. You've got to go out and get the talent, the skills you need to build a good foundation. You gotta have the right partners. >>You know, we have partners like PWC and, and, uh, AWS and others that are really helping us with the journey. So that part of it's really, really important. The key is, and I think for us, uh, we really started building our talent pool, uh, probably more than five years ago. And so we were able to bring in some skill sets in dev ops and some skill sets. And, you know, nowadays AI we'd do a lot with ML and AI skill sets. Uh, but we were able to build in a lot of cloud skills and start to build out our development environments first, very, very early on. That's what we did. And we used those development environments for our engineers to cut their teeth and really get comfortable in the cloud. Um, I remember probably about three years ago, we installed our first Kubernetes cluster. Um, and we did it with a small team. >>And then over time we really incented the team by allowing them to get more and more certifications and grow their skills. And we really built up a really large team around just our on-premise cloud first. And then later that helped us with the migration, the journey into the actual public cloud for those same services. Um, and we use that, that same team as there today, we really invest in our people. We think it's important to have a staff that's there. We insource our staff. We really believe in that. Um, that's super important, even though we have partners that we really value, we make sure that we've got a core group of people that are really passionate about the journey and about cloud. And so that >>You mentioned that, that kind of cultural aspect. Yeah. And you mentioned bringing in a team starting years ago with a specific focus. What about the transition of folks who have been it practitioners for maybe decades making that transition? How has, how has that worked out culturally? Have you adopted a policy where you're basically saying, look, if you have experience with this stuff, great, stay with it. Yeah. But we're hiring net new people for the new stuff. Is that the strategy or is it >>Look like I've seen some do that? I personally don't feel that that works because you need some subject matter experts. You need people who really know your products and your company and your solutions and your customers. You really need those people to come along the journey. So what we've done internally is we created, for example, a digital boot camps where our team members could sign up that could come in. We actually construct the boot boot camps on about a six week schedule. Uh, we do two week sprints. So we do three sprints. We, we get them sort of inculcated and agile from the very beginning, we have demos at the end of each sprint. So they're working in an agile way as they're going through their training course. And then of course we, that gives us a chance to identify people who are really high potential to move into some of our cloud teams and our dev ops teams. >>And so that's been really, really beneficial for us. And I would tell you that today we've got people that have a broad range of skills just because of that digital bootcamp. So they may have started their career doing assembler or COBOL or something like that. But now they've tacked on some dev ops and some cloud skills. Uh, we have some that know dynamo DB, and they also know DB too. And we like that. So they have a broad range and those people bring a lot of deep expertise that you're not going to necessarily get with somebody that you're bringing, you know, new, you know, sometimes straight out of college into your company. You've got to grow those people too, but you need the experience, people there to help develop them. >>No, we often talk about people, process and technology, and it's kind of a phrase that's thrown around right. At every event with every vendor. But I really admire the focus on the people, part that you're talking about there and how it's really essential to enable, to enable the people, how you started very strategically starting with the people in the focus and the training on-prem then making the decision that they've, they've got the foundation. Now we need to migrate to the cloud. I'm curious the why AWS, you have a lot of choice course here we are at reinvent. But talk to me about why AWS is that strategic partner. >>We've, we've looked at a number of different cloud platforms for our business. And in fact, uh, global payments is a large company. So TCIs is sort of the issuing part of that. And so we have really great relationships with GCP and other cloud platforms, even some Azure in certain pockets of the company for the issuing side of the business, we went through a thorough evaluation and we felt like the tools, the technology, the platforms, really the, the maturity of that platform. And then the scale, you know, scale matters in our business. And a lot of businesses, it matters, uh, you know, the locations of all of the, uh, uh, availability zones and the regions that was really important to us. We were able to align all of the different AWS regions to where our customer locations are. And that's becoming more and more important as we, you know, we try to be more flexible now about where we, uh, you know, deploy our products around the globe. We want to make sure that whoever we partner with has a point of presence in those markets and that we can do that very, very quickly. We can stand up a new environment when we need to. And so that's what that's been really beneficial that we made that choice with AWS. Um, you know, there's a lot of cloud platforms out out there there's a lot of choice, but we just felt like AWS was the best for us. >>AWS is also very, very, very customer focused, but they probably would say customer obsessed, really that customer flywheel that generates everything that we'd even heard this morning in the keynote culturally, is TCIs similar to AWS in that respect. And can you share a little bit about that? >>Very much. So our reputation as a business is based on the relationships that we built with our customers, and we're known for that in financial services, the TCIs brand and the way that we think about our customers and the way that we partner with them. Um, you know, we, when we taught with the AWS team, we, we try to explain, you know, our history is, you know, w we're kind of the cloud for our customers. So they have a number of products and services. We support those, we manage those products. We, we build on top of, of those products for them. And so we really understand that it's important, not only that you're building a platform, but that platform has got to be able to support all the different things that our customers do every day. And we want that to be broad. We don't want it to be narrow. It's not just focused in one area. If our customers come to us and they say, well, you know, I need to build a data and an analytics platform, or I need some really specific fraud capabilities. We want to be able to support that on demand with our customers. And that's really the journey that we've taken with AWS. AWS is enabling that for us. >>And on-demand is key. I think we've one of the things that's been in short supply during the last 22 months is patients, right? That's >>Right. Absolutely. >>So describe the role of a CTO in that process. What does that look like? Because this isn't, you're not making unilateral decisions here, obviously you're working with the team, but talk about the CTO's perspective as you make decisions about whether AWS is the right fit for a part of your environment or GCP or something else. >>Yeah. I think, you know, um, we, we have, uh, a long history of supporting our own solutions and supporting our systems. And we run some of the world's largest like authorizations platforms, which those are the platforms where when you go into the store and you swipe your card, you, you have to get a response back from us. Like we have to give you that and we have to give it, we have a really specific amount of time. We have to give that back to you. And so we really understand operations and support and how to scale, uh, applications and systems and, and, and how to build really, really reliable solutions. We really understand that part of the business. So whoever we partner with, and, and you asked about my decision to CTO, it was really a group decision. You know, I have to partner with our business team, I have to get their buy-in. Um, they have to support the decision, whatever we do, it's a big investment, we're making the move to the cloud. And so, um, but we have to make sure that we, we cover off the basis. They've gotta be able to at least whatever, whoever our partner is, they've got to be able to at least provide the operational support and the reliability that we're able to give our customers today. So it's just a spreadsheet that's right. Technical qualifier, >>And whoever has the most boxes checked wins. That's right. You're taking into consideration all of those cultural aspects and the goals of the business. That's right. So as a chief technology officer, it's not just about the technology, it's about the business >>That's right, right. So I have a very, very close relationship with the president of our business, Galen, Jowers, um, and, and we built a team and we have on, on the, uh, the actual modernization or transformation team, we have members that represent that from a business perspective there I report into, uh, directly into the business teams. And then we have, uh, people from my, from my side of the, of the company. And we work every single day together and we're driving this forward. So the important part of that is at some point, we, we go to our customers and we show them, Hey, for this particular product or service that we're offering, we're going to be moving that to cloud on this kind of a schedule. And we're there together as a unified front and a unified communication with our customer to explain that journey. And we think that's really important that we do it that way and not do it. You know, like I've seen some companies they'll segment it and sort of technology, or it goes off and they kind of do their own sort of cloud initiative to us that wouldn't work for our business. It's gotta be together and enjoy it with the business. >>You sound like a very much a transformational CTO to me versus a traditional CTO and working at a legacy company that's been around for 40 years. That's impressive that the company is that forward in thinking, first of all, about its people, but also about that business, it partnership. But that has to be in lock step. We talk about that all the time, but it's hard to facilitate that, but you really sound like you guys have done a phenomenal job with some key strategic foresight is not the word. Um, I liked, like Dave was saying, it's not a spreadsheet. It's a checklist of technology requirements that people element is absolutely. >>Absolutely. And you have to, you have to, you have to be all in together on it because you know that as you go on the journey, you're going to have some failure. You're going to experience some challenges. Your customers might not be happy with every decision you make. So you have to be in it together. You're going to have to make that commitment as a company. And that's what we decided early earlier on is that we were going to do that and it's worked out well for us. >>What are some of the things that are going to be happening next for TCIs as we hopefully round out the year 2021 and go into a much better 20, 22, >>We've got a, we've got some really big things on the horizon. One of the things that we're working on right now is, um, we've, since we've been at this for 18 months, we're starting to get to a point where we have certain solutions that are ready to go. We're ready. We're going to be able in 2022 to make some key announcements around some parts of our platform, they're going to be available in AWS as a, as an offering. So we're excited about that. A lot of our customer servicing and some of the things that we do outside of our core processing platform are already cloud native. We run them in a cloud environment on our premise and some of those services, we're going to be able to go ahead and launch into the AWS in 2022. So we're really excited about that. We're right now in the throws of building an onboarding team, that's going to be working with both our customers and with our internal teams to make that shift and start migrating those applications out to the environment. >>So big, big things underway there. We've got a couple of, uh, really key strategic relationships that we've built over the last 12 months or so, um, that are all in, on our cloud journey. And so we're going to be able to announce some of those, uh, pretty soon as some of our customers and prospects, uh, that really want to be on the journey with us. So we're pretty excited about that. And I don't want to spoil any surprises there, so we'll wait and let that come out with the, with the schedule. But yeah, we've got a lot of great things ahead and we're very, very excited for where we're going. >>Awesome, Scott, great stuff. I love how transformational you are, the focus that you guys have on the people, as well as the technologies and the processes. Exciting. Congratulations on your, on your 18 month journey. And we'll have to have you back on so we can hear some of those, those, uh, you know, little, uh, Easter eggs that you just dropped. >>I'd love to, I'd love to be back on. This has been great. All right. >>And how did you know I have a credit card in my wallet running a whole. >>I've been feeling bad about saying that the whole time. He's not going to go well when we're done here, >>Wherever in Vegas, we hope you've enjoyed this. Like for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in a live chat coverage.

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn in New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Stu Miniman. We're going to talk cloud service providers. Cloud is obviously a very hot topic this week at VeeamOn. Matt Chesterton is here. He's the CEO of OffsideDataSync and he's joined by William Bell who's the vice president of production development for cloud and enterprise services at PhoenixNAP. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> So, let's start. What's happening at VeeamOn? You heard what I said about, you know, cloud seems to be a major theme here. What are you guys seeing this week? >> We're seeing the same thing. So today is officially cloud day at VeeamOn and some great announcements that are going on so new product announcements with B10, so we're excited about that. >> William, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, the general session this morning covered so much around cloud and what's that's going to mean to the end user at Veeam. Right, and how the ecosystem is being built and working both with the hyper-scalers and guys like us. >> So, so much talk in the industry about the big, really the big three. Maybe you throw a China cloud in there, a Japan cloud in there, how is it that folks like you all can differentiate from the likes of AWS and Azure and Google. Maybe you can start, Bill, and share with us. >> Yeah, sure, and service. I think that's really the key is that customers need a help. >> Dave: You mean I could talk to you? >> You could talk to me. We can actually help you achieve an outcome that you're looking for with your business. That's not something that you're going to get from a hyper-scaler, period. >> You don't have a little device I can put in my house that I talk to instead? >> No, no new devices, no books, no operating systems to install, just help. >> So your value property is really high-touch. >> High-touch, high-touch for us, it's high-touch global, right? So we can help you do the same things that you're trying to accomplish anywhere in the world talking to the same people, alright? And that's our kind of commitment. >> And yet you've also got infrastructure behind that. >> William: We do. >> So why wouldn't you, for example, could a viable strategy be, say, I'll put that high-touch in front of AWS or Azure? Why not? >> Well, for us, it really comes down to margins, right? At the end of the day, it's that we derive margin from infrastructure just the same way we do from the service angle of that. So if it's only service and there's no margin on the infrastructure it's a tougher business to scale, right? We also can capture markets that are uncapturable. This isn't a cloud business for us, right? We're data center owner-operators. We're doing things that customers need that are not cloud-centric. >> How about you guys, Matt? Little different story here. You guys are more specialized. >> Yeah, little bit, little bit different. So service is always important. We've taken the approach with the public clouds of kind of going with the tide. So layering products and services that go with that. Example, today or yesterday, I think it was announced with the scale-up backup repositories being integrated with storage like Glacier. I'm sure there's a product plan there for a service provider like us so that we can offer that as a service, too. So kind of taking that momentum and working with it. So integrating with what's already going on. It's going to be a tough tide to fight if we don't kind of direct it in the way we want, so we're kind of taking that and going in the direction of how can we use it and how can we benefit from it. >> Matt, can you build on that Veeam as a partner. I think it was Peter McKay told us 30% of their business is to the, you know, thousands and thousands of service providers they have. You know, where do you find opportunity, products, growth when it comes to Veeam? >> Good question, Stu. What Veeam's doing, they make it very easy for us as partners, in the cloud of course, so that when something's delivered, they make a cloud available, as well. So as you can see, users of Veeam can direct their backups and archives to the cloud, private, public, but they've also made that available and are going to make that available for us so they're a great partner. They always think about cloud and cloud first so they don't just develop a product that can be used in and around service providers but that we can take and capitalize from it as well. >> William, what I want to add on there, you're also a VMware partner. Maybe tell us what it's like being a VMware and Veeam and do you go beyond the VMware piece too with Veeam or? >> Yeah, so I mean, in Veeam's ecosystem, VMware and Microsoft are very important to both of them, right? And because of where Veeam started, hyper-V's a large part of their business and growing still very rapidly part of their business, right? And so we're forced to address both sides of that. When we go to build our own infrastructure, when we're going to offer our own services, we've made a commitment to VMware today, right? And we're building services around that ecosystem including the stuff that's happening with Veeam. But let me talk about Veeam as a partner, right? Veeam has been singularly the best manufacturer partner that we've worked with up until this point. Maybe it doesn't mean that somebody else maybe not tomorrow, but at least up until this point, they've help both of our businesses really grow. >> Matt: I couldn't agree more. >> And grow in branding and grow in product diversity and grow all over the place. >> Explain that more. >> Is it simplicity? Is it pricing? Is it, you know, community? >> It's their dedication to us as a partner. So you hear of partner relationships in the community. Veeam has taken it to a new level. They're truly a partner with us. They care about how our business is doing and how they can develop us and how they can find out what we don't have experience with and then help us. So design a program or introduce us to the right folks or make the right alliance relationships. So they genuinely look at it >> So are they a channel for you or are you a channel for them? >> William: Both. >> Yeah, sometimes you don't know. The lines are not exactly clear. And that's good. >> Yeah, I think that those unclear lines means an increase in all kinds of things for both of our companies mutually, right? We're here. We started together in this Veeam ecosystem, you know, three and a half years ago I guess now, and you know, as the first five service providers that were teamed up with Veeam, and we're also both standing here with gigantic platinum sponsorships at their show because it's become that important to us and our business. >> And you guys, I mean, you sell to, your customers are doing everything. They got one of everything in their floor. They're, I'm sure, diverse. You've seen a bunch of folks on stage this week. We saw Microsoft today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We saw Cisco yesterday. What kind of relationships do you have with the big whales? >> So we align very well with Cisco. In fact, that's what we power our networks with, and we use their Cisco UCS series for everything we power in our data centers, too. So it's great to see them here and interact with the team. They're a great partner for us. >> And HP Nimble Storage is our other clear-cut top partner, right, in this ecosystem. And there's a great marriage there, both on the integration side, but from a powering these Veeam powered cloud services like offsite backup and Zas recovery requires a lot of storage, right, to take that data in and hold it and replicate it and do things with it. And so our partnership with HP Nimble's large. 6- In some of the expansion that we're seeing Veeam talk about, the kind of new ten years where they're going, some of that is as a service. How do they talk about that dynamic of potentially being a competitor now to the 18,000 great partners that they've had? >> You know, I think a lot of it's got up in a bit of semantics problems, right, semantic issues. Veeam is doing a lot of things that are going to enable services and as a service, I don't see them building solutions that would compete, right? They have a great example of what it looks like to do that with vCloud Air being such a VMware-centric partnership, that was a headwind that they were unable to overcome even the size of VMware, right, going out and building and being a service provider and building an infrastructure service, trying to take their software company and become a service provider, it doesn't work. The same for us, I'm not going to go start building backup software. (laughs) >> So, if you think about the mega phases of cloud. We've been doing this for a long time, and I think back to the early VMworlds that we did, we had so much discussion around cloud, and back in the early days, it was kind of, you know, after Amazon announced AWS and cloud sort of got coined, it was an experiment, it was for startups, and that was pretty clear. And then in sort of 2008 when the economy tanked, a lot of CFOs said, "All right, shift capex to opex." And that was sort of the next phase. And then coming out of the downturn, a lot of lines of business said, "Hey, we got cash. We need speed. Let's go," and started to invest. And then after that IT sort of embraced it. And now seems to be whatever term you want to use, cloud broker or just, they've sort of captured a religion in a nut to hang it onto lun provisioning anymore as a practice. Now I'm wondering if that is a reflection of your world or because you in your case are specialists and you guys are more service oriented, did you ride those waves, was it different ways. Maybe William we can start with you. >> So, our first product line was a 250,000 square foot facility in Phoenix, Arizona, right? Building a kolo, a network access point, that's the heritage of the PhoenixNAP, right, the name, and so we were relying on capex. People to go in and buy equipment and stick it in our facility. Everyone had already decided they didn't want to build data centers. Right, in 2010, everyone's like, "You know what, ten million dollars to get my data room up? No thanks." Right? But they were committed to buying hardware. And we took advantage of that and grew that business and we started to address the opex side in 2012 kind of moving forward. At least we believe we're prime positioned because at the end of the day, it's going to be both. All opex is not the answer, right? I truly believe that. And that's part of that hybrid story, as well. >> And Matt, what about you guys? Again, being specialists in all kinds of things, DR, recovery, etc, did you take a different journey? >> Yeah, Dave, we did. And I heard the term even this week, born in the cloud. If it makes sense, we're a cloud company that had that vision from the beginning. So we didn't build a facility, but that's certainly what we do, leverage space power bandwidth that we partner with Switch and Supernet facilities for our data centers. And we believe that customers are and will continue to move into the opex model into the cloud, so both production work loads and DRAs backup as well. It's interesting to see that mix, too, especially as things from Veeam are announced that really becomes one. So the workloads of DRAs are soon within, you know, 15 minutes or 15 seconds can become a production work load. So if customers aren't necessarily moving their infrastructure to the cloud, it's going to happen one way or the other, whether it's the model of they don't want to purchase hardware any longer or they've had some sort of failure, disaster, and they're going to move that way. >> I want to let you speak a little bit more about your customers. There was a great line, I thought, from Mark Russinovich which said that the C-suite doesn't come asking for infrastructure as a service, they want to figure out how to take their business to the next level. Where are you customers in that kind of cloud strategy and how are you helping them along that journey? >> We have a discussion with them. We try to understand what their business objectives are and what they're trying to achieve by either pushing to the cloud or understanding what the cloud is. And there's a spectrum there from as I mentioned before, backup, disaster recovery as a service, infrastructure as a service, and not all things line up to one single service or way you can put it in the cloud. So we try to understand what their business objectives are and say, "It's going to make the most sense to put some of the work load in the cloud, but some applications stay onsite and you have DRAs replication to get them offsite." So really engaging and understanding what their business needs are and getting under the hood of what they're trying to achieve. >> Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, we are focused on a hybrid future. We truly believe that customers will search for the cloud experience, the business optimization for a period of time where they're saying, "You know what? I don't care. I want this outcome. Go get me this outcome." At some point, it will come back. They will be like, "We have the outcome. How can we optimize this outcome? Are we spending the right amount of money to achieve this outcome?" And the moment they do that, they will find that opex purely and blatantly, if you just say, "I'm all in. I'm always on. I'm only opex." You will spend more money on that over time. If you pick and choose the things that you are incapable of doing or would cost you more to do through capex and staffing, then you can basically position both of those things to maximize value. >> Horses for course, gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, 'preciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from VeeamOn 2017. This is theCUBE.