>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> Good to have you here on theCUBE, as we continue our coverage at AWS re:Invent. We're at day three here in Las Vegas in the Sands Expo Hall D, and we got about a half hour. Come by and say hi to us if you would. I'm here with Rebecca Knight, John Walls, and two gentleman here to join us. One from GitLab, Brendan Jung, who is the vice president of alliances. Brendan, good to see you sir. >> Thank you for having us. >> And Alex Hale, platform engineering at Beacon Platform. >> Hello, Alex, how are you doing? >> Not bad, I'm surviving the whole experience. >> It's a test! >> Well, let's talk about the whole experience (mumbles) What have you picked up this week? >> I've picked up that AWS is going very much into this sort of enterprise space. We saw that theme last year, and I think this year it's even more so that they're really catering towards how enterprise and then big organizations are getting in. And I think that's been a big. You can see it in how they're doing their storage strategies, how they're doing their network strategies, and how they're just really targeting towards security, and compliance, and governance. And I think that's a big theme that's from last year to this year, and I think it's going to continue on. >> Yeah, they've been waving a big flag for sure telling the enterprise it's safe to come onboard the public cloud's open for ya. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah for sure. >> Brendan, if you would, you were telling a story that you worked at Google for quite some time. >> I was, yes. >> Worked on some fairly high profile projects >> there, and you've been >> Yes. at GitLab for five months now. Instant transition for ya? >> Five months, yes. >> What was behind that? >> So a couple of it is, I mean when we get down to it sometimes you're either a builder or a runner just in the way you're oriented. And I'm a builder, so the biggest thing was love building that from the ground up with Google. Amazing team they did amazing job. We got to do a lot of really fun things. Was looking for something kind of new, and I'd worked with GitLab since I ran the partner organization for a lot of the partners at Google. I had worked with them for a number of years and it's rare when you work regularly with the company that you get surprised. So the kind of the point that I was like, "Oh, I really need to look into this more deeply," is I've done detailed work with GitLab for years. And I was in a meeting with Sid, our CEO. And he kind of, "Hey, you know what we're up to." And I'm like, "Oh, of course I know what we're up to." Right, cuz that's you always answer that. I mean you don't answer the question, "No, I have no idea what you're up to." We met four weeks ago, of course I know what you're up to. And he's really humble. But simply like oh hey, you want to see me insert. Hey, this is what we're working on. Slides across the floors to report, and he's like, oh, in the CI space, under three years we went from no product to the very best of the business. Beat out Microsoft, and CloudBees, and all these. And I was like wait, I didn't know you were in the CI space. I shouldn't say this publicly, >> Alright it's alright. >> but I went like I didn't know that. >> It's okay. You got the job. >> No, I'm safe, but the ability that's just the speed that the company moves. Everyone says it, but when you can go that fast with that kind of quality, I was like I got to dig deeper. And so we just kind of went down that path, and it's been quite an adventure. >> Good. >> Obviously, Microsoft buying GitHub has made for a whole lot of discussions in a whole lot of different ways for us. And competition's good, so it's been a lot of fun. >> Well, we definitely want to talk about the GitLab and Beacon Platform partnership, but I want to first ask you, Alex. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the Beacon Platform. >> So Beacon Platform is a company that came out of the financial services from the large banks; the Goldman Sachs, the J.P. Morgans, the Bank of Americas. And in those places, internally they have to have this quite open source like culture where there is people contributing in the same codebase, there's a lifecycle of how things are done, and it's rapid moving. And people don't associate them with large banks, but there is these products out there. In fact, some of the Goldman Sachs partners refer to those as the golden source, so they secret source. And if large banks can do it, why can't someone else. So we've taken those experiences that people have done for years to build these communities, best practices, and prescriptions, and turn it into a product. So we've taken the same model of here is a set of financial tooling, and infrastructure, and toolboxes to make financial applications. And we've brought it to the smaller bunch; so your insurance companies, even your large banks, Komodo used firms, insurance people. They can take our platform, and then bring their own analytics, and then build financial applications that they want on top of it and whilst doing so be ensured that they're compliant with security. We've done the governance for you. We've done the security for you. All you have to do is put your good ideas to use and make applications. >> So give us some examples of the business problems that this platform solves. >> So typically in the financial space, the people that have the great ideas are pawns, and they're by nature mathematicians. They're not developers. They're not UX people. They're not UI designers. They're certainly not security people. And yet they are are the people that are driving the core business and the value. And so the question is how do we make them be productive? How do we make sure that their lives are easier? Which means that you give them an idea. You give them a lifecycle for software that they can start saying, "Ooh, I've got an idea. I'll hack it up." And when it's hacked, they can publish it. It comes out the other end, and all the reporting is underneath there. Their security is there. The compliance is there. All the authentication is there. And that idea is now being actualized in the matter of days, weeks rather than months and years. And that means that our customers can take these ideas that they've been working on or just conceiving and turn it into reality in a very short amount of time. And then be comfortable that whole platform itself remains secure, compliant, and all the same thing that Amazon is actually counting to us. >> You know it seems like if your focus, your core competence, was or is financial services. I mean you're starting at a very high level of demand client, right? >> Yes. >> And appropriately so, and so there are a lot of lessons that migrate to other businesses that I assume are quite attractive to them, >> Yes. >> because if you mention your client, BOA, if they've got comfort, I have comfort. Right, because how much of that do you see that the experiences that you've developed or that you have put them through translate in a very positive way to other sectors? >> We've found out some of our customers are starting off in the cloud, and they're making their cloud journey. They're financial companies that want to take the journey to the cloud, but don't really know how to. And so we as a company which has already running on the cloud, as a company we don't actually own a physical single server. We're all on the cloud, all in. And they, our customers, come to us to say, "How are you in the cloud? What do you do? "You have the experience. You've worked at these places. "How does that all work?" And so we give them a sort of in the same way that out platform does. Prescriptive advice on how things are going to be done. And our customers come along with us on the journey. And so we take the customers on their cloud journey whereas our customers are taking us on their needs, and bringing their needs, and what they need to us to say, "I want to build an application like this. "What more do I need to do? What do I have to do?" And so it's a very collaborative relationship doing our customers to say, "I can help you in the cloud space. "You can help us in the financial ideas space, "and together we can actually make applications." Whatever we build ourselves, becomes we can resell it to others whilst the customers intellectual property can stay with them. It's a really interesting collaboration of. >> Symbiotic in many respects, right? >> Yes. >> You're leaning on them. And what about the relationship between the two of you again in terms of. >> Sure yeah, so as much as Beacon is very financial services focused, we're a DevOps tool and end DevOps tool for anyone, right. So in many ways what Beacon is doing is taking what GitLab's done about builing that whole tool chain, 'cause there's really a tool chain crisis out there. If you start looking at what needs to be set up for a developer, they want to live in their IDE, do their development, and publish as he said. But you start looking at what that needs to be set up after that, you're talking often times on a company 12, 15 other steps to go through. And that was kind of our aha was there's an opportunity to treat that as one full application as a DevOps tool set across the entire board. Started down that journey really like three years ago, and that's kind of I think we kind of match up. The similar story; they wrap all the important financial data, all the other things that matter to a bank, right. And they're got to whole bunch of extra tooling, extra data, extra services. But at the core of it, they also leveraged GitLab both as a tool to develop their own product and also to offer it as a tool possibly to their own customers, right. So their other customers need to develop. They need a DevOps toolset, so we work back and forth a whole lot on this. They move so fast. It's been amazing, and so every time we sit down we're like wait, what if we did, okay cool let's iterate. And we can turn that around. We ship every month to our customers. You can run it anywhere you want. The majority of our customers, they love the fact that they can run anywhere. Which in fact while Beacon does runs on Amazon, their customer bases have to run on (mumbles), right? And while we're seeing that hybrid become more and more common which is great, that's the truth that's been there forever. That's the world that we've lived, they live everyday and have lived for a long time, and so it's kind of fun to come here and see that be like yes, oh yeah that does exist, and we're kind of like yeah that's existed for a long time. >> Everybody caught up. >> Right yeah, we're there and there's always going to be reasons for that on both directions. And so we work really well together on that side, and they push us hard. Right, so we're actually right on stage. We're sitting there in just this morning, he's like hey, you finally (mumbles). You know I've got all these merge requests that he wants in our product. (mumbles) opens, it's open. Everyone in the world, anyone that watches this, go put a merge request on GitLab. We're going to track it. You're going to know where it lands. You're going to know when it gets delivered. So and if you want to write the code, you can write it and it's in. So it's been actually a ton of fun. >> And have at it, right? >> Yes. >> Well if the relationship's working good to see. >> Yes. >> And you're five months in, and I'm sure the one year anniversary's right around the corner for you. I'll try to be able to wait. >> Be here before you'll know it right? >> Hell yeah. >> (mumbles) thanks for joining us. Good to have you here on theCUBE, and look forward to hearing about this continuous success down the road I'm sure. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much. >> (mumbles) having us. >> Thank you both. Back with more here on theCUBE. You're watching this live at AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. (techno music)