>> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>> 10, nine, eight, (clears throat) four, three. >> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, The Cube in San Francisco, Moscone West for the Red Hat Summit 2018 exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube. I'm here with my cohost, John Troyer, who is the co-founder of Tech Reckoning, an advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Jonathan Donaldson, Technical Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud. Former Cube Alumni. Formerly was Intel, been on before, now at Google Cloud for almost two years. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Good to see you too, it's great to be back. >> So, had a great time last week with the Google Cloud folks at KubeCon in Denmark. Kubernetes, rocking the world. Really, when I hear the word de facto standard and abstraction layers, I start to get, my bells go off, let me look at that. Some interesting stuff. You guys have been part of that from the beginning, with the CNCF, Google, Intel, among others. Really created a movement, congratulations. >> Yeah, thank you. It really comes down to the fact that we've been running containers for almost a dozen years. Four billion a week, we launch and collapse. And we know that at some point, as Docker and containers really started to take over the new way of developing things, that everyone is going to run into that scalability wall that we had run into years and years and years ago. And so Craig and the team at Google, again, I wasn't at Google at this time, but they had a really, let's take what we know from internally here and let's take those patterns and let's put them out there for the world to use, and that became Kubernetes. And so I think that's really the massive growth there, is that people are like, "Wow, you've solved a problem, "but not from a science project. "It's actually from something "that's been running for a decade." >> Internally, that's called bore. That's tools that Google used, that their SRE cyber lab engineers used to massively provision manage. And they're all software engineers, so it's not like they're operators. They're all Google engineers. But I want to take a minute, if you can, to explain. 'Cause you're new to Google Cloud. You're in the industry, you've been around, you helped form the CNCF, which is the Cloud Native Foundation. You know cloud, you know tech. Google's changed a lot, and Google Cloud specifically has a narrative of, they're one big cloud and they have an application called Google stuff and enterprises are different. You've been there now for almost a year or more. >> Jonathan: Little over a year, yeah. >> What's Google Cloud like right now? Break the myths down around Google Cloud. What's the current status? I know personally, a lot of cloud DNA is coming in from the industry. They've been hiring, making some great progress. Take a minute to explain the Google Cloud. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. So again, it comes back from where you started from. So Google itself started from a scale consumer SAS type of business. And so that, they understood really well. And we still understand, obviously, uptime and scalability really, really well. And I would say if you backtrack several years ago, as the enterprise really started to look at public clouds and Google Cloud itself started to spin up, that was probably not, they probably didn't understand exactly all of the things that an enterprise would need. Really, at that point in time, no one cloud understood any of the enterprise specifically. And so what they did is they started hiring in people like myself and others that are in the group that I'm in. They're former CIOs of large enterprise companies or former VPs of engineering, and really our job in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud is to help with the product teams, to help them build the products that enterprises need to be able to use the public cloud. And then also work with some of those top enterprise customers to help them adopt those technologies. And so I think now that if you look at Google Cloud, they understand enterprise really, really well, certainly from the product and the technology perspective. And I think it's just going to get better. >> I interviewed Jennifer Lynn, I had a one-on-one with her. I didn't publish it, it was more of a briefing. She runs Product Management, all on security side. >> Jonathan: Yeah, she's fantastic. >> So she's checking the boxes. So the table stakes are set for Google. I know you got to do some basic things to catch up to get in the cloud. But also you have partnerships. Google Next is coming up, The Cube will be there. Red Hat's a partner. Talk about that relationship with Red Hat and partners. So you're very partner-centric with Google Cloud. >> Jonathan: We are. >> And that's important in the enterprise, but so what-- >> Well, there tends to be two main ares that we focus on, from what we consider the right way to do cloud. One of them is open source. So having, which again, aligns perfectly with Red Hat, is putting the technologies that we want customers to use and that we think customers should use in open source. Kubernetes is an example, there's Istio and others that we've put out that are examples of those. A lot of the open source projects that we all take for granted today were started from white papers that we had put out at one point in time, explaining how we did those things. Red Hat, from a partner perspective, I think that that follows along. We think that the way that customers are going to consume these technologies, certainly enterprise customers are, through those partners that they know and trust. And so having a good, flourishing ecosystem of partners that surround Google Cloud is absolutely key to what we do. >> And they love multicloud too. >> They love multicloud. >> Can't go wrong with it. >> And we do too. The idea is that we want customers to come to Google Cloud and stay there because they want to stay there, because they like us for who we are and for what we offer them, not because they're locked into a specific service or technology. And things like Kubernetes, things like containers, being open sourced allows them to take their tool chains all the way from their laptop to their own cloud inside their own data center to any cloud provider they want. And we think hopefully they'll naturally gravitate towards us over time. >> One of the things I like about the cloud is that there's a flywheel, if you will, of expertise. Like I look at Amazon, for instance. They're getting a lot of metadata of the kinds of workloads that are on their cloud, so they can learn from that and turn that into an advantage for them, or not, or for their customers, and how they could do that. That's their business decision. Google has a lot of flywheel action going on. A lot of Android devices connected in the Google system. You have a lot of services that you can bring to bear in the cloud. How are you guys looking at, say, from a security standpoint alone, that would be a very valuable service to have. I can tap into all the security goodness of Google around what spear phishing is out there, things of that nature. So are you guys thinking like that, in terms of services for customers? How does that play out? >> So where we, we're very consistent on what we consider is, privacy is number one for our customers, whether they're consumer customers or whether they're enterprise customers. Where we would use data, you had mentioned a lot of things, but where we would use some data across customer bases are typically for security things, so where we would see some sort of security impact or an attack or something like that that started to impact many customers. And we would then aggregate that information. It's not really customer information. It's just like you said, metadata, themes, or trends. >> John Furrier: You're not monetizing it. >> Yeah, we're not monetizing it, but we're actually using it to protect customers. But when a customer actually uses Google Cloud, that instance is their hermetically sealed environment. In fact, I think we just came out recently with even the transparency aspects of it, where it's almost like the two key type of access, for if our engineers have to help the customer with a troubleshooting ticket, that ticket actually has to be opened. That kind of unlocks one door. The customer has to say, "Yes," that unlocks the other door. And then they can go in there and help the customer do things to solve whatever the problem is. And each one of those is transparently and permanently logged. And then the customer can, at any point in time, go in and see those things. So we are taking customer privacy from an enterprise perspective-- >> And you guys are also a whole building from Google proper, like it's a completely different campus. So that's important to note. >> It is. And a lot of it just chains on from Google proper itself. If you understood just how crazy and fanatical they are about keeping things inside and secret and proprietary. Not proprietary, but not allowing that customer data out, even on the consumer side, it would give a whole-- >> Well, you got to amplify that, I understand. But what I also see, a good side of that, which is there's a lot of resources you're bringing to bear or learnings. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> The SRE concept, for instance, is to me, really powerful, because Google had to build that out themselves. This is now a paradigm, we're seeing a cloud scale here, with the Cloud Native market bringing in all-new capabilities at scale. Horizontally scalable, fully synchronous, microservices architecture. This future is a complete game-changer on functionality at the different scale points. So there's no longer the operator's room, provisioning storage here. >> And this is what we've been doing for years and years and years. That's how all of Google itself, that's how search and ads and Gmail and everything runs, in containers all orchestrated by Borg, which is our version of Kubernetes. And so we're really just bringing those leanings into the Google Cloud, or learnings into Google Cloud and to our customers. >> Jonathan, machine learning and AI have been the big topic this week on OpenShift. Obviously that's a big strength of Google Cloud as well. Can you drill down on that story, and talk about what Google Cloud is bringing on, and machine learning on OpenShift in general? Give us a little picture of what's running. >> Yeah, so I think they showed some of the service broker stuff. And I think, did they show some of the Kubeflow stuff, which is taking some machine learning and Kubernetes underneath OpenShift. I think those are very, very interesting for people that want to start getting into using AutoML, which is kind of roll-your-own machine learning, or even the voice or vision APIs to enhance their products. And I think that those are going to be keys. Easing the adoption of those, making them really, really easy to consume, is what's going to drive the significant ramp on using those types of technologies. >> One of the key touchpoints here has been the fact that this stuff is real-world and production-ready. The fact that the enterprise architecture now rolling out apps within days or weeks. One of those things that's now real is ML. And even in the opening keynote, they talked about using a little bit of it to optimize the scheduling and what sessions were in which rooms. As you talk to enterprises, it does seem like this stuff is being baked into real enterprise apps today. Can you talk a little bit about that? >> Sure, so I certainly can't give any specific examples, because what I think what you're saying is that a lot of enterprises or a lot of companies are looking at that like, "Oh, this is our new secret sauce." It always used to be like they had some interesting feature before, that a competitor would have to keep up with or catch up with. But I think they're looking at machine learning as a way to enhance that customer experience, so that it's a much more intimate experience. It feels much more tailored to whomever is using their product. And I think that you're seeing a lot of those types of things that people are starting to bake into their products. We've, again, this is one of these things where we've been using machine learning for almost 10 years inside Google. Things like for Gmail, even in the early days, like spam filtering, something just mundane like that. Or we even used it, turned it on in our data centers, 'cause it does a really good job of lowering the PUE, which is the power efficiency in data centers. And those are very mundane things. But we have a lot of experience with that. And we're exposing that through these products. And we're starting to see people, customers gravitate to grab onto those. Instead of having to hard code something that is a one to many kind of thing, I may get it right or I may have to tweak it over time, but I'm still kind of generalizing what the use cases are that my customers want to see, once they turn on machine learning inside their applications, it feels much more tailored to the customer's use cases. >> Machine learning as a service seems to be a big hot button that's coming out. How are you guys looking at the technical direction from the cloud within the enterprise? 'Cause you have three classes of enterprise. You have the early adopters, the power, front, cutting-edge. Then you have the fast followers, then you have everybody else. The everybody else and fast followers, they know about Kubernetes, some might not even, "What is Kubernetes?" So you have kind of-- >> Jonathan: "What containers?" >> A level of progress where people are. How are you guys looking at addressing those three areas, because you could blow them away with TensorFlow as a service. "Whoa, wowee, I'm just trying to get my storage LUNs "moving to a cloud operation system." There's different parts of this journey. Is there a technical direction that addresses these? What are you guys doing? >> So typically we'll work with those customers to help them chart the path through all those things, and making it easy for them to use and consume. Machine learning is still, unless you are a stats major or you're a math major, a lot of the algorithms and understanding linear algebra and things like that are still very complex topics. But then again, so is networking and BGP and things like OSPF back a few years ago. So technology always evolves, and the thing that you can do is you can just help pull people along the continuum there, by making it easy for them to use and to provide a lot of education. And so we work with customers on all ends of the spectrum. Even if it's just like, "How do I modernize my applications, "or how do I even just put them into the cloud?" We have teams that can help do that or can educate on that. If there are customers that are like, "I really want to go do something special "with maybe refactoring my applications. "I really want to get the Cloud Native experience." We help with that. And those customers that say, "I really want to find out this machine learning thing. "How can I actually make that an impactful portion of my company's portfolio?" We can certainly help with that. And there's no one, and typically you'll find in any large enterprise, because there'll be some people on each one of those camps. >> Yeah, and they'll also want to put their toe in the water here and there. The question I have for you guys is you got a lot of goodness going on. You're not trying to match Amazon speed for speed, feature for feature, you guys are picking your shots. That is core to Google, that's clear. Is there a use case or a set of building blocks that are highly adopted with you guys now, in that as Google gets out there and gets some penetration in the enterprise, what's the use, what are the key things you see with successes for you guys, out of the gate? Is there a basic building? Amazon's got EC2 and S3. What are you guys seeing as the core building blocks of Google Cloud, from a product standpoint, that's getting the most traction today? >> So I think we're seeing the same types of building blocks that the other cloud providers are, I think. Some of the differences is we look at security differently, because of, again, where we grew up. We do things like live migration of virtual machines, if you're using virtual machines, because we've had to do that internally. So I think there are some differences on just even some of the basic block and tackling type of things. But I do think that if you look at just moving to the cloud, in and of itself is not enough. That's a stepping stone. We truly believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning, Cloud Native style of applications, containers, things like service meshes, those things that reduce the operational burdens and improve the rate of new feature introduction, as well as the machine learning things, I think that that's what people tend to come to Google for. And we think that that's a lot of what people are going to stay with us for. >> I overheard a quote I want to get your reaction to. I wrote it down, it says, "I need to get away from VPNs and firewalls. "I need user and application layer security "with un-phishable access, otherwise I'm never safe." So this is kind of a user perspective or customer perspective. Also with cloud there's no perimeters, so you got phishing problems. Spear phishing's one big problem. Security, you mentioned that. And then another quote I had was, "Kubernetes is about running frameworks, "and it's about changing the way "applications are going to be built over time." That's where, I think, SRE and Istio is very interesting, and Kubeflow. This is a modern architecture for-- >> There's even KubeVirt out there, where you can run a VM inside a container, which is actually what we do internally too. So there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice. >> Yeah, how relevant is that, those concepts? Because are you hearing that as well on the customers? 'Cause that's pain point, but also the new modern software development's future way to do things. So there's pain point, I need some aspirin for that. And then I need some growth with the new applications being built and hiring talent. Is that consistent with how you guys see it? >> So which one should I tackle? So you're talking about. >> John Furrier: VPN, do the VPNs first. >> The VPNs first, okay. >> John Furrier: That's my favorite one. >> So one of the most, kind of to give you the backstory, so one of the most interesting things when I came to Google, having come from other large enterprise vendors before this, was there's no VPNs. We don't even have it on our laptop. They have this thing called BeyondCorp, which is essentially now productized as the Identity-Aware Proxy. Which is, it actually takes, we trust no one or nothing with anything. It's not the walled garden style of approach of firewall-type VPN security. What we do is, based upon the resource you're going to request access for, and are you on a trusted machine? So on one that corporate has given you? And do you have two-factor authentication that corporate, not only your, so what you have and what you know. And so they take all of those things into awareness. Is this the laptop that's registered to you? Do you have your two-factor authentication? Have you authenticated to it and it's a trusted platform? Boom, then I can gain access to the resources. But they will also look for things like if all of a sudden you were sitting here and I'm in San Francisco, but something from some country in Asia pops up with my credentials on it, they're going to slam the door shut, going, "There's no way that you can be in two places at one time." And so that's what the Identity-Aware Proxy or BeyondCorp does, kind of in a nutshell. And so we use that everywhere, internally, externally. And so that's one of the ways that we do security differently is without VPNs. And that's actually in front of a lot of the GCP technologies today, that you can actually leverage that. So I would say we take-- >> Just rethinking security. >> It's rethinking security, again, based upon a long history. And not only that, but what we use internally, from our corporate perspective. And now to get to the second question, yeah. >> Istio, Kubeflow, is more of the way software gets run. One quote from one of the ex-Googlers who left Google then went out to another company, she goes, she was blown away, "This is the way you people ship software?" Like she was a fish out of water. She was like, "Oh my god, where's Borg?" "We do Waterfall." So there's a new approach that opens doors between these, and people expect. That's this notion of Kubeflow and orchestration. So that's kind of a modern, it requires training and commitment. That's the upside. Fix the aspirin, so Identity Proxy, cool. Future of software development architecture. >> I think one of the strong things that you're going to see in software development is I think the days of people running it differently in development, and then sandbox and testing, QA, and then in prod, are over. They want to basically have that same experience, no matter where they are. They want to not have to do the crossing your fingers if it, remember, now it gets reddited or you got slash-dotted way back in the past and things would collapse. Those days of people being able to put up with those types of issues are over. And so I think that you're going to continue to see the development and the style of microservices, containers, orchestrated by something that can do auto scaling and healing, like Kubernetes. You're going to see them then start to use that base layer to add new capabilities on top, which is where we see Kubeflow, which is like, hey, how can I go put scalable machine learning on top of containers and on top of Kubernetes? And you even see, like I said, you see people saying, "Well, I don't really want to run "two different data planes and do the inception model. "If I can lay down a base layer "of Kubernetes and containers, then I can run "bare metal workloads against the bare metal. "If I need to launch a virtual machine, "I'll just launch that inside the container." And that's what KubeVirt's doing. So we're seeing a lot of this very interesting stuff pop. >> John Furrier: Yeah, creativity. >> Creativity. >> Great, talk about your role in the Office of the CTO. I know we got a couple of minutes left. I want to get out there, what is the role of the CTO? Bryan Stevens, formerly a Red Hat executive. >> Yeah, Bryan's our CTO. He used to run a big chunk of the engineering for Google Cloud, absolutely. >> And so what is the office's charter? You mentioned some CIOs, former CIOs are in there. Is it the think tank? Is it the command and control ivory tower? What's the role of the office? >> So I think a couple of years ago, Diane Greene and Bryan Stevens and other executives decided if we want to really understand what the enterprise needs from us, from a cloud perspective, we really need to have some people that have walked in those shoes, and they can't just be Diane or can't just be Bryan, who also had a big breadth of experience there. But two people can't do that for every customer for every product. And so they instituted the Office of the CTO. They tapped Will Grannis, again, had been in Boeing before, been in the military, and so tapped him to build this thing. And they went and they looked for people that had experience. Former VPs of Engineering, former CIOs. We have people from GE Oil and Gas, we have people from Boeing, we have people from Pixar. You name it, across each of the different verticals. Healthcare, we have those in the Office of the CTO. And about, probably, I think 25 to 30 of us now. I can't remember the exact numbers. And really, what our day to day life is like is working significantly with the product managers and the engineering teams to help facilitate more and more enterprise-focused engineering into the products. And then working with enterprise customers, kind of the big enterprise customers that we want to see successful, and helping drive their success as they consume Google Cloud. So being the conduit, directly into engineering. >> So in market with customers, big, known customers, getting requirements, helping facilitate product management function as well. >> Yeah, and from an engineering perspective. So we actually sit in the engineering organization. >> John Furrier: Making sure you're making the good bets. >> Jonathan: Yes, exactly. >> Great, well thanks for coming on The Cube. Thanks for sharing the insight. >> Jonathan: Thanks for having me again. >> Great to have you on, great insight, again. Google, always great technology, great enterprise mojo going on right now. Of course, The Cube will be at Google Next this July, so we'll be having live coverage from Google Next here in San Francisco at that time. Thanks for coming on, Jonathan. Really appreciate it, looking forward to more coverage. Stay with us for more of day three, as we start to wrap up our live coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. We'll be back after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)