(uplifting music) >> The data lake we see is evolving and ChaosSearch has built some pretty cool tech to enable customers to get more value out of data that's in lakes so that it doesn't become stagnant. Time to dig deeper, dive deeper into the water. We're here with Kevin Miller, who's the vice president and general manager of S3 at Amazon Web Services. We're going to talk about activating S3 for analytics. Kevin, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. It's great to be here again. >> So S3 was the very first service offered by AWS 15 years ago. We covered that out in Seattle. It was a great event you guys had. It has become the most prominent and popular example of object storage in the marketplace. And for years, customers use S3 as simple, cheap data storage, but because there's so much data now stored in S3, customers are looking to do more with the platform. So, Kevin, as we look ahead to reinvent this year, we're super excited about that, what's new? What's got you excited when it comes to the AWS flagship storage offering? >> Yeah, Dave. Well, that's right. And we're definitely looking forward to reinvent. We have some fun things that we're planning to announce there, so stay tuned on those. But, I'd say that one of the things that's most exciting for me as customers do more with their data and look to store more, to capture more of the data that they're generating every day, is our storage class that we had an announce a few years ago. But we actually just announced some improvements to the S3, intelligent-tiering storage class. And this is really our storage class, the only one in the cloud at this point that delivers automatic storage cost savings for customers where the data access patterns change. And that can happen, for example, as customers have some data that they're collecting and then a team spins up and decides to try to do something more with that data, and that data that was very cool and sitting sort of idle is now being actively used. And so with intelligent tiering, we're automatically monitoring data. And then, for customers there's no retrieval costs and no tiering charges. We're automatically moving the data into an access tier that reduces their costs, though, when that that data is not being accessed. So we've announced some improvements to that just a few months ago. And I'll just say, I look forward to some more announcements at reinvent, that will continue to extend what we have in our intelligent-tiering storage class. >> That's cool, Kevin. I mean, you've seen, you know, that technology, that tiering concept had been around, you know. But since back in the mainframe days the problem was it was always inside a box. So you didn't have the scale of the cloud and you didn't have that automation. So, I want to ask you, as the leader of S3, that business, when you meet with customers, Kevin, what do they tell you that they're facing as challenges when they want to do more, get better insights out of all that data that they've moved into S3? >> Well, I think that's just it, Dave. I think that most customers I speak with, of course they have the things that they want to do with their storage costs, you know: reducing storage costs and just making sure they have capacity available. But increasingly I think the real emphasis is around business transformation. What can I do with this data, that's very unique and different that unlike, you know, prior optimizations where it would just reduce the bottom line, they're saying, what can I do that will actually drive my top line more by either, you know, generating new product ideas, allowing for faster closed-loop process for acquiring customers? And so it's really that business transformation and everything around it that I think is really exciting. And for a lot of customers, that's a pretty long journey. And helping them get started on that, including transforming their workforce, and up-skilling, you know, parts of their workforce to be more agile and more oriented around software development, developing new products using software. >> So when I first met the folks at ChaosSearch, Thomas took me through sort of the architecture with Ed as well. They had me at "you don't have to move your data." That was the grabber for me. And there are a number of public customers, Digital River, Blackboard, or Klarna, we're going to get the customer perspective little later on, and others, that use both AWS S3 and ChaosSearch. And they're trying to get more out of their S3 data and execute analytics at scale. So, wonder if you could share with us, Kevin, what types of activities and opportunities do you see for customers like these that are making the move to put their enterprise data in S3, in terms of capabilities and outcomes that they are trying to achieve and are able to achieve beyond using S3 as just a bit bucket? >> Right. Well, Dave, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about outcomes. 'Cause that, I think, is key here. Customers want to reduce the time it takes to get to a tangible result that affects their business, that improves their business. And so that's one of the things that excites me about what ChaosSearch is doing here, specifically is that automatic indexing. Being able to take the data, as it is, in their bucket, index it and keep that index fresh and then allow for the customers to innovate on top of that and to try to experiment with a new capability, see why it works and then double down on the things that really do work to drive that business. And so, I just think that that capability reduces the amount of what I might call undifferentiated heavy-lifting the work to just sort of index and organize and catalog data. And instead allow customers to really focus on here's the idea, let's try to get this into production or into a test environment as quickly as possible to see if this can really drive some value for our business. >> Yeah, so you're seeing that sort of value that you've mentioned, the non-differentiated heavy-lifting, moving up the stack, right? It used to just be provisioning and managing the storage. Now it's all the layers above that. And we're going beyond that. So my question to you, Kevin, is, how do you see the evolution of all this data at scale? I'm especially interested as it pertains to data that's, of course, in S3, which is your swim lane. When you talk to customers who want to do more with their data and analytics, and, by the way, even beyond analytics, you know, where it's having conversations now in the community about building data products and creating new value. But how do you respond and how do you see ChaosSearch fitting in to those outcomes? >> Well, I think that's it, Dave. It's about kind of going up the stack and instead of spending time organizing and cataloging data, particularly as the data volumes get much larger. When modern customers and modern data lakes that we're seeing, quickly go from a few petabytes to tens, to hundreds of petabytes or more. And, when you're reaching that kind of scale of data, a single person can't reasonably kind of wrap their head around all that data, you need tools. S3 provides a number of first party tools. And, you know, we're investing in things like our S3 batch operations to really help give the end users of that data, the business owners that leverage to manage their data at scale and apply their new ideas to the data and generate, you know, pilots and production work that really drives their business forward. And so I think that, you know, ChaosSearch, again, I would just say is a good example of, you know, the kind of software that I think helps go upstack, automate some of that data management, and just help customers focus really specifically on the things that they want to accomplish for their business. >> So this is really important. I mean, we've talked for well over a decade, how to get more value out of data, and it's been challenging for a lot of organizations. But we're seeing themes of scale, automation, fine-grain tooling ecosystem participating on top of that data and then extracting that data value. Kevin, I'm really excited to see you face to face at Reinventing, and learn more about some of the announcements that you're going to make. We'll see you there. >> Yeah. Stay tuned. Looking forward to seeing you in person. Absolutely. >> All right. Great to have Kevin on. Keep it right there because in a moment we're going to get the customer perspective on how a leading practitioner is applying ChaosSearch on top of S3 to create business value from data. You're watching The Cube, your leader at digital high-tech coverage. (uplifting music)

>>Welcome back. I really liked the drill down a data lakes with ed Walsh and Thomas Hazel. They building some cool stuff over there. The data lake we see it's evolving and chaos search has built some pretty cool tech to enable customers to get more value out of data that's in lakes so that it doesn't become stagnant. Time to dig, dig deeper, dive deeper into the water. We're here with Kevin Miller. Who's the vice president and general manager of S3 at Amazon web services. We're going to talk about activating S3 for analytics. Kevin, welcome. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, thanks Dan. It's great to be here again. So >>S3 was the very first service offered by AWS 15 years ago. We covered that out in Seattle. It was a great event you guys had, it has become the most prominent and popular example of object storage in the marketplace. And for years, customers use S3 is simple, cheap data storage, but because there's so much data now stored in S3 customers are looking to do more with the platform. So Kevin, as we look ahead to reinvent this year, we're super excited about that. What's new. What's got you excited when it comes to the AWS flagship storage offering. >>Yeah. Dan, well, that's right. And we're definitely looking forward to reinvent. We have some fun things that we're planning to announce there. So stay tuned on those, but I'd say that one of the things that's most exciting for me as customers do more with their data and look to store more, to capture more of the data that they're generating every day is our storage class that we had an announced a few years ago, but we, we actually just announced some improvements to the S3 intelligent tiering storage class. And this is really our storage class. The only one in the cloud at this point that delivers automatic storage cost savings for customers where the data access patterns change. And that can happen. For example, as customers have some data that they're collecting and then a team spins up and decides to try to do something more with that data and that data that was very cool and sitting sort of idle is now being actively used. And so with intelligent tiering, we're automatically monitoring data. And then there's for customers. There's no retrieval costs and no tiering charges. We're automatically moving the data into an access tier that reduces their costs though. And that data is not being accessed. So we've announced some improvements to that just a few months ago. And I'll just say, I look forward to some more announcements at reinvent that will extend, continue to extend what we have in our intelligent tiering storage class. >>That's cool, Kevin. I mean, you've seen, you know, that technology, that tiering concept had been around, you know, but since back in the mainframe days, the problem was, it was always inside a box. So you, you didn't have the scale of the cloud and you didn't have that automation. So I want to ask you as the leader of that business, when you meet with customers, Kevin, what do they tell you that they're there they're facing as challenges when they want to do more, get better insights out of all that data that they've moved into S3? >>Well, I think that's just it, Dave. I think that most customers I speak with they, of course they have the things that they want to do with their storage costs and reducing storage costs and just making sure they have capacity available. But increasingly I think the real emphasis is around business transformation. What can I do with this data? That's very unique and different than either that unlike, you know, prior optimizations where it would just reduce the bottom line, they're saying, what can I do that will actually drive my top line more by either, you know, generating new product ideas, um, allowing for faster, you know, close, closed loop process for acquiring customers. And so it's really that business transformation and all, everything around it that I think is really exciting. And for a lot of customers, that's a pretty long journey and, and helping them get started on that, including transforming their workforce and up-skilling, you know, parts of their workforce to be more agile and more oriented around software development, developing new products using software. >>So w when I first met the folks at, at chaos search, you know, Thomas took me through sort of the architecture w with ed as well. They had me at, you don't have to move your data. That was saying that was the grabber for me. And there are a number of public customers that digital river, uh, Blackboard or Klarna, we're going to get the customer perspective little later on and others that use both AWS S3 and chaos search. And they're trying to get more out of their, their S3 data and execute analytics at scale. So wonder if you could share with us Kevin, what types of activities and opportunities do you see for customers like these that are making the move to put their enterprise data in S3 in terms of capabilities and outcomes that they are trying to achieve and are able to achieve beyond using S3 is just a Bitbucket, >>Right? Well, Dan, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about outcomes. Cause that I think is, is key here. Customers want to reduce the time it takes to get to a tangible result that it affects the business that improves their business. And so that's one of the things that I excites me about what CAS search is doing here specifically is that automatic indexing, being able to take the data as it is in their bucket, index it and keep that index fresh and then allow for the customers to innovate on top of that and to try to experiment with a new capability, see, see what works and then double down on the things that really do work to drive that business. And so I just think that that capability reduces the amount of what I might call undifferentiated, heavy, lifting the work to just sort of index and organize and catalog data. And instead allow customers to really focus on here's the idea. Let's try to get this into production or into a test environment as quickly as possible to see if this can really drive some value for our business. >>Yeah. So you're seeing that sort of value that you've mentioned the non-differentiated heavy lifting, moving up the stack, right. It used to just be provisioning and managing the, now it's all the layers above that and it would go and beyond that. So my question to you, Kevin, is how do you see the evolution of this, all this data at scale I'm especially interested in, as it pertains to data that's of course, an S3, which is your swim lane. When you talk to customers who want to do more with their data and analytics, and by the way, even beyond analytics, you know, where it's having conversations now in the community about, about building data products and creating new value, but how do you respond and how do you see chaos search fitting in to those outcomes? >>Well, I think that's, that's it Dave, it's about kind of going up the stack and instead of spending time organizing and cataloging data, particularly as the data volumes give much larger when the modern customers and modern data lakes that we're seeing quickly go from a few petabytes to tens, to hundreds of petabytes or more. And when you reaching that kind of scale of data, it's a single person can reasonably kind of wrap their head around all that data. You need tools as three provides a number of first party tools and, you know, we're investing in things like our S3 batch operations to really help give the end users of that data, the business owners that leverage to manage their data at scale and apply their new ideas to the data and generate, you know, pilots and production work that really drives their business forward. And so I think that, you know, cast search again, I would just say as a good example of, you know, the kind of software that I think helps go, upstack automate some of that data management and just help customers focus really specifically on the things that they want to accomplish for their, their business. >>So this is, >>I mean, we've talked for well over a decade, how to get more value out of data. And it's been challenging for a lot of organizations, but we're seeing, we're seeing themes of scale automation, fine-grain tooling ecosystem participating, uh, on top of that data and then extracting that, that data value who Kevin, I'm really excited to see you face to face at re-inventing and learn more about some of the announcements that you're going to make. We'll see you there. >>Yeah. Stay tuned. Looking forward to seeing in person absolutely >>Have Kevin on, keep it right there because in a moment we're going to get the customer perspective on how a leading practitioner is applying chaos search on top of S3 to create a business value from data you're watching the cube, your leader, digital high tech coverage.

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of APN partner experience. We are theCUBE Virtual and I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by Ed Walsh, CEO of ChaosSearch. Ed, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> Now, this is not your first time here on theCUBE. You're a regular here and I've loved it to have you back. >> I love the platform you guys are great. >> So let's start off by just reminding people about what ChaosSearch is and what do you do there? >> Sure, the best way to say is so ChaosSearch helps our clients know better. We don't do that by a special wizard or a widget that you give to your, you know, SecOp teams. What we do is a hard work to give you a data platform to get insights at scale. And we do that also by achieving the promise of data lakes. So what we have is a Chaos data platform, connects and indexes data in a customer's S3 or glacier accounts. So inside your data lake, not our data lake but renders that data fully searchable and available for analysis using your existing tools today 'cause what we do is index it and publish open API, it's like API like Elasticsearch API, and soon SQL. So give you an example. So based upon those capabilities were an ideal replacement for a commonly deployed, either Elasticsearch or ELK Stack deployments, if you're hitting scale issues. So we talk about scalable log analytics, and more and more people are hitting these scale issues. So let's say if you're using Elasticsearch ELK or Amazon Elasticsearch, and you're hitting scale issues, what I mean by that is like, you can't keep enough retention. You want longer retention, or it's getting very expensive to keep that retention, or because the scale you hit where you have availability, where the cluster is hard to keep up running or is crashing. That's what we mean by the issues at scale. And what we do is simply we allow you, because we're publishing the open API of Elasticsearch use all your tools, but we save you about 80% off your monthly bill. We also give you an, and it's an and statement and give you unlimited retention. And as much as you want to keep on S3 or into Glacier but we also take care of all the hassles and management and the time to manage these clusters, which ends up being on a database server called leucine. And we take care of that as a managed service. And probably the biggest thing is all of this without changing anything your end users are using. So we include Kibana, but imagine it's an Elastic API. So if you're using API or Kibana, it's just easy to use the exact same tools used today, but you get the benefits of a true data lake. In fact, we're running now Elasticsearch on top of S3 natively. If that makes it sense. >> Right and natively is pretty cool. And look, 80% savings, is a dramatic number, particularly this year. I think there's a lot of people who are looking to save a few quid. So it'd be very nice to be able to save up to 80%. I am curious as to how you're able to achieve that kind of saving though. >> Yeah, you won't be the first person to ask me that. So listen, Elastic came around, it was, you know we had Splunk and we also have a lot of Splunk clients, but Elastic was a more cost effective solution open source to go after it. But what happens is, especially at scale, if it's fall it's actually very cost-effective. But underneath last six tech ELK Stack is a leucine database, it's a database technology. And that sits on our servers that are heavy memory count CPU count in and SSDs. So you can do on-prem or even in the clouds, so if you do an Amazon, basically you're spinning up a server and it stays up, it doesn't spin up, spin down. So those clusters are not one server, it's a cluster of those servers. And typically if you have any scale you're actually having multiple clusters because you don't dare put it on one, for different use cases. So our savings are actually you no longer need those servers to spin up and you don't need to pay for those seen underneath. You can still use Kibana under API but literally it's $80 off your bill that you're paying for your service now, and it's hard dollars. So it's not... And we typically see clients between 70 and 80%. It's up to 80, but it's literally right within a 10% margin that you're saving a lot of money, but more importantly, saving money is a great thing. But now you have one unified data lake that you can have. You used to go across some of the data or all the data through the role-based access. You can give different people. Like we've seen people who say, hey give that, help that person 40 days of this data. But the SecOp up team gets to see across all the different law. You know, all the machine generated data they have. And we can give you a couple of examples of that and walk you through how people deploy if you want. >> I'm always keen to hear specific examples of how customers are doing things. And it's nice that you've thought of drawn that comparison there around what what cloud is good for and what it isn't is. I'll often like to say that AWS is cheap to fail in, but expensive to succeed. So when people are actually succeeding with this and using this, this broad amount of data so what you're saying there with that savings I've actually got access to a lot more data that I can do things with. So yeah, if you could walk through a couple of examples of what people are doing with this increased amount of data that they have access to in EKL Search, what are some of the things that people are now able to unlock with that data? >> Well, literally it's always good for a customer size so we can go through and we go through it however it might want, Kleiner, Blackboard, Alert Logic, Armor Security, HubSpot. Maybe I'll start with HubSpot. One of our good clients, they were doing some Cloud Flare data that was one of their clusters they were using a lot to search for. But they were looking at to look at a denial service. And they were, we find everyone kind of at scale, they get limited. So they were down to five days retention. Why? Well, it's not that they meant to but basically they couldn't cost-effectively handle that in the scale. And also they're having scale issues with the environment, how they set the cluster and sharding. And when they also denial service tech, what happened that's when the influx of data that is one thing about scale is how fast it comes out, yet another one is how much data you have. But this is as the data was coming after them at denial service, that's when the cluster would actually go down believe it or not, you know right. When you need your log analysis tools. So what we did is because they're just using Kibana, it was easy swap. They ran in parallel because we published the open API but we took them from five days to nine days. They could keep as much as they want but nine days for denial services is what they wanted. And then we did save them in over $4 million a year in hard dollars, What they're paying in their environment from really is the savings on the server farm and a little bit on the Elasticsearch Stack. But more importantly, they had no outages since. Now here's the thing. Are you talking about the use case? They also had other clusters and you find everyone does it. They don't dare put it on one cluster, even though these are not one server, they're multiple servers. So the next use case for CloudFlare was one, the next QS and it was a 10 terabyte a day influx kept it for 90 days. So it's about a petabyte. They brought another use case on which was NetMon, again, Network Monitoring. And again, I'm having the same scale issue, retention area. And what they're able to do is easily roll that on. So that's one data platform. Now they're adding the next one. They have about four different use cases and it's just different clusters able to bring together. But now what they're able to do give you use cases either they getting more cost effective, more stability and freedom. We say saves you a lot of time, cost and complexity. Just the time they manage that get the data in the complexities around it. And then the cost is easy to kind of quantify but they've got better but more importantly now for particular teams they only need their access to one data but the SecOP team wants to see across all the data. And it's very easy for them to see across all the data where before it was impossible to do. So now they have multiple large use cases streaming at them. And what I love about that particular case is at one point they were just trying to test our scale. So they started tossing more things at it, right. To see if they could kind of break us. So they spiked us up to 30 terabytes a day which is for Elastic would even 10 terabytes a day makes things fall over. Now, if you think of what they just did, what were doing is literally three steps, put your data in S3 and as fast as you can, don't modify, just put it there. Once it's there three steps connect to us, you give us readability access to those buckets and a place to write the indexy. All of that stuff is in your S3, it never comes out. And then basically you set up, do you want to do live or do you want to do real time analysis? Or do you want to go after old data? We do the rest, we ingest, we normalize the schema. And basically we give you our back and the refinery to give the right people access. So what they did is they basically throw a whole bunch of stuff at it. They were trying to outrun S3. So, you know, we're on shoulders of giants. You know, if you think about our platform for clients what's a better dental like than S3. You're not going to get a better cross curve, right? You're not going to get a better parallelism. And so, or security it's in your, you know a virtual environment. But if you... And also you can keep data in the right location. So Blackboard's a good example. They need to keep that in all the different regions and because it's personal data, they, you know, GDPR they got to keep data in that location. It's easy, we just put compute in each one of the different areas they are. But the net net is if you think that architecture is shoulders of giants if you think you can outrun by just sheer volume or you can put in more cost-effective place to keep long-term or you think you can out store you have so much data that S3 and glacier can't possibly do it. Then you got me at your bigger scale at me but that's the scale we'r&e talking about. So if you think about the spiked our throughput what they really did is they try to outrun S3. And we didn't pick up. Now, the next thing is they tossed a bunch of users at us which were just spinning up in our data fabric different ways to do the indexing, to keep up with it. And new use cases in case they're going after everyone gets their own worker nodes which are all expected to fail in place. So again, they did some of that but really they're like you guys handled all the influx. And if you think about it, it's the shoulders of giants being on top of an Amazon platform, which is amazing. You're not going to get a more cost effective data lake in the world, and it's continuing to fall in price. And it's a cost curve, like no other, but also all that resiliency, all that security and the parallelism you can get, out of an S3 Glacier is just a bar none is the most scalable environment, you can build an environment. And what we do is a thin layer. It's a data platform that allows you to have your data now fully searchable and queryable using your tools >> Right and you, you mentioned there that, I mean you're running in AWS, which has broad experience in doing these sorts of things at scale but on that operational management side of things. As you mentioned, you actually take that off, off the hands of customers so that you run it on their behalf. What are some of the areas that you see people making in trying to do this themselves, when you've gone into customers, and brought it into the EKL Search platform? >> Yeah, so either people are just trying their best to build out clusters of Elasticsearch or they're going to services like Logz.io, Sumo Logic or Amazon Elasticsearch services. And those are all basically on the same ELK Stack. So they have the exact same limits as the same bits. Then we see people trying to say, well I really want to go to a data lake. I want to get away from these database servers and which have their limits. I want to use a data Lake. And then we see a lot of people putting data into environments before they, instead of using Elasticsearch, they want to use SQL type tools. And what they do is they put it into a Parquet or Presto form. It's a Presto dialect, but it into Parquet and structure it. And they go a lot of other way to, Hey it's in the data lake, but they end up building these little islands inside their data lake. And it's a lot of time to transform the data, to get it in a format that you can go after our tools. And then what we do is we don't make you do that. Just literally put the data there. And then what we do is we do the index and a polish API. So right now it's Elasticsearch in a very short time we'll publish Presto or the SQL dialect. You can use the same tool. So we do see people, either brute forcing and trying their best with a bunch of physical servers. We do see another group that says, you know, I want to go use an Athena use cases, or I want to use a there's a whole bunch of different startups saying, I do data lake or data lake houses. But they are, what they really do is force you to put things in the structure before you get insight. True data lake economics is literally just put it there, and use your tools natively to go after it. And that's where we're unique compared to what we see from our competition. >> Hmm, so with people who have moved into ChaosSearch, what's, let's say pick one, if you can, the most interesting example of what people have started to do with, with their data. What's new? >> That's good. Well, I'll give you another one. And so Armor Security is a good one. So Armor Security is a security service company. You know, thousands of clients doing great I mean a beautiful platform, beautiful business. And they won Rackspace as a partner. So now imagine thousand clients, but now, you know massive scale that to keep up with. So that would be an example but another example where we were able to come in and they were facing a major upgrade of their environment just to keep up, and they expose actually to their customers is how their customers do logging analytics. What we're able to do is literally simply because they didn't go below the API they use the exact same tools that are on top and in 30 days replaced that use case, save them tremendous amount of dollars. But now they're able to go back and have unlimited retention. They used to restrict their clients to 14 days. Now they have an opportunity to do a bunch of different things, and possible revenue opportunities and other. But allow them to look at their business differently and free up their team to do other things. And now they're, they're putting billing and other things into the same environment with us because one is easy it's scale but also freed up their team. No one has enough team to do things. And then the biggest thing is what people do interesting with our product is actually in their own tools. So, you know, we talk about Kibana when we do SQL again we talk about Looker and Tableau and Power BI, you know, the really interesting thing, and we think we did the hard work on the data layer which you can say is, you know I can about all the ways you consolidate the performance. Now, what becomes really interesting is what they're doing at the visibility level, either Kibana or the API or Tableau or Looker. And the key thing for us is we just say, just use the tools you're used to. Now that might be a boring statement, but to me, a great value proposition is not changing what your end users have to use. And they're doing amazing things. They're doing the exact same things they did before. They're just doing it with more data at bigger scale. And also they're able to see across their different machine learning data compared to being limited going at one thing at a time. And that getting the correlation from a unified data lake is really what we, you know we get very excited about. What's most exciting to our clients is they don't have to tell the users they have to use a different tool, which, you know, we'll decide if that's really interesting in this conversation. But again, I always say we didn't build a new algorithm that you going to give the SecOp team or a new pipeline cool widget that going to help the machine learning team which is another API we'll publish. But basically what we do is a hard work of making the data platform scalable, but more importantly give you the APIs that you're used to. So it's the platform that you don't have to change what your end users are doing, which is a... So we're kind of invisible behind the scenes. >> Well, that's certainly a pretty strong proposition there and I'm sure that there's plenty of scope for customers to come and and talk to you because no one's creating any less data. So Ed, thanks for coming out of theCUBE. It's always great to see you here. >> Know, thank you. >> You've been watching theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 with special coverage of APN partner experience. Make sure you check out all our coverage online, either on your desktop, mobile on your phone, wherever you are. I've been your host, Justin Warren. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. (soft music)

>> (Narrator) From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the digital version, I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alumni with me here, now Ronen Schwartz joins me from NetApp, the SVP and GM of Cloud Volumes. Ronen it's nice to see that you're doing well and healthy. >> Thank you, I'm glad to join you, even though it's virtually, I hope it will be fun as well. >> Oh yes it will, and that's one of the nice things with this time that we're all trying to figure out if we have technologies like this to be able to still engage with partners with customers, and there's been so much innovation that's gone. So I'd love to get your perspective on what's going on with them. I know you guys had NetApp Insight just a few weeks or a month or so ago, but talk to me about kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the market from a cloud adoption perspective. >> So cloud adoption is actually not new. What we're saying is a continuous acceleration of the cloud adoption, you know, we kind of started by the fact that we are remote and they think definitely, the pandemic, the need to work, remote engage remotely and so on, and actually even accelerated the adoption of cloud, that's something like that could, even exist, I think what we are saying the NetApp in the market in general is very fast adoption of cloud, the movement of the core services, core workloads into the cloud and organization that are not just adopting cloud, but actually innovating in the cloud faster than ever. >> What's been some of the conversations like with customers, cause I know, you know, we've talked a lot about this in the last nine months, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers needing to pivot multiple times, not just survive during this time period or keep the lights on, but really be able to thrive, and push their business forward. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations you're having, is this more of a business level conversation, right now with respect to moving to cloud from a strategic standpoint, because as every business suddenly had to, everyone got to work from home, that was a big shift. >> It is a major shift and it's also for some organization it's a very un-trivial change that needs to happen to the cadence of doing a business to them, to the specific setting, and then, I think we all as individual kind of feel the change, right, I sometimes have like this huge urge to sit with my team and kind of whiteboard, what needs to happen next. And then it will be different to do it, when it is a virtual whiteboard, but if I take it into the conversation that we're having with customers, I think customers have moved from the first few months when it was really about survival, and how do I make the basic things work and ensure continuity, into the place that organization are looking to leverage the change and increase the increasing innovation, increase the transformation they've already been going through, when it comes to these things I really want, there's a really good article from AWS that I want to share, that is really talking about, the six r's of cloud adoption. And, I really like that as an analogy because it talks about the fact that when you have cloud applications, you have the opportunity to rehost, when you lift and shift, then, you have the opportunity to replatform really designed them from the cloud, from scratch, you have the ability to refactor the applications, meaning that you're actually adopting certain cloud component. And in some cases you are actually repurchasing or retiring applications. And in some places, you just retain them on-premise. So I think organizations are looking into their current situation and they're basically choosing their strategy, not their strategy of adopting the cloud, but their strategy of how to move specific workloads into the cloud. >> Right to be, to take advantage of many things, including cost optimization. So talk to me about the NetApp partnership, you guys have been partners with AWS for seven plus years now, NetApp Cloud Volume Platform for AWS, talk to me about that. >> So, none of it's been a long-term partner of AWS and that data is in the core of the cloud business and basically moving data to the cloud, is also a super important, and NetApp is a company that has been a leader in cloud and data services, in general has been there from almost day one. We have been billing, did the capabilities from the cloud volumes NetApp to the cloud volume service, which is a native service in AWS in the last few years. Basically our latest announcement that we made in, in our Insight event is putting all of that in a single platform, the clouds volume and the cloud volumes platform, and that basically optimizing it for the AWS users, meaning that the user with no additional effort can store data, receives it, access to the data and the performance needed for the right application, but also enjoy out of the box data services, like backup, like disaster recovery, like compliance, and like caching and so on, really giving the different use cases, the full support needed. >> What are some of the changes in use cases that you've seen? Now, we talk about compliance. We just had another expansion of the California consumer privacy act on our ballot, during the last general election. We've seen ransomware on the rise. So talking about backup has been a big topic. Talk to me about some of those use cases that are shifting that you see that NetApp is helping customers address. >> This is an excellent question and they know sometimes people treat storage as infrastructure, but the truth is that the data on that storage is actually one of the most important assets that has moved into the cloud and really building your data fabric with the right level of governance and insurance, where everybody is a really important thing. We just talked about like all of this acceleration of moving into the cloud. What that means is that the core data services are no longer optional. They could not be left to a specific implementation desire or no desire, they have to be built into the platform and kind of be insured in a continuous way. >> Absolutely that data is gold or the new oil, if companies can protect it, secure access it and make sure that they can actually extract insights. So, and as we talk about and Gartner and analysts like show the projections of the volumes of data, just growing and growing and growing. And now we've got companies that have gone from maybe 100% on-site operations to maybe a hundred percent remote. We've got the expansion of cloud and the edge. There's a lot of changes going on there. And one of the things that we do know that's happening from an IT perspective, is it's getting more complex. So, talk to me about now, how you're working with customers to make things simpler as data volumes grow and as they're adjusting to a New World. >> So, sometimes maybe this is my opportunity to definitely correct one of the thinkings that some of the AWS customers might have NetApp, which is, it's focused about storage only, the truth is that, there is a variety of services around the infrastructure that we'll go way beyond storage. I kind of mentioned in my last answer, a few of them like disaster recovery, like backup and we just started to touch upon compliance the ability to understand the data that is moving into the cloud, the exposure to PII, PCI, and how does it fit the different regulations. But NetApp is also offering optimized computing, with our spot, with basically our spot acquisitions, but by NetApp technology, we're also offering the full virtual desktop service. And at least the last one is kind of the perfect example. If you would like to empower a thousand people to get their virtual desktops available, it has become a matter of a single click and full automation is giving you, not only the virtual desktop, but also a dedicated storage that is optimized for that. So we're looking into a variety of services, all of them optimize to work on the AWS cloud, all of that with, out of the box, very easy configuration that empower everybody to basically do the right thing in the clouds. >> So when you're in customer situations and conversations, which I know you still are obviously virtually, and you're saying that, you know, we want to make sure that we really clarify, the NetApp has evolved dramatically since 1992, we've been talking about that for a long time. I used to work at NetApp and marketing back in the day, but when you're having this customer conversations, I actually know let's give me a customer, an example of some successful customers who really understand, the value of the full breadth of value that NetApp delivers, especially in AWS environments. >> I would divide the customers buy in a high-level into three categories. You're seeing the basically application developers with a goal to deliver their application, as fast as possible. And then, they're not only, their need is not just to do it as fast as possible, but they're trying to do it in the most efficient cost effective way possible. So, the NetApp conversation with them is how can infrastructure empower them to do things better, faster, and cheaper, and then, there is actually a list of these capabilities that are supporting them very, very well. An example would be that today, a lot of the new developments are done, especially by the cloud native, are done leveraging Kubernetes. So NetApp is giving you Kubernetes optimized storage, Kubernetes say monitoring and resource optimization, and also of the ocean capabilities, the scalability to manage and optimize your containers. So this is kind of one group that developers group, and there is actually thousands of these customers, that are leveraging NetApp on AWS to deliver that. I think the second group is central IT and central IT has a really tough job these days. They need at the same time to support the innovation as we discussed on the first use case, but also the lift and shift and move of that critical applications. When we're looking at, when we're talking to central IT, we're guaranteeing to them the same latency or close as possible latency, the same performance, the same scale that they had on premise and even more in the cloud. So this is what allows, the largest customers in the world to move their SAP from on-premise to the cloud. Really them, I think that the top five and then, at least five of the top 10 SAP applications are leveraging the NetApp as part of their cloud journey. Another example, and maybe the third example, is that it's basically organization where they are putting an innovation in the cloud in parallel to their existing with their on-premise example, there I think one of our reference customers is Blackboard the vendor that is offering something very relevant these days, which is remote learning and capabilities like that. Well they've actually built a very extensive on-premise environment. A lot of their new capabilities, a lot of the innovation is delivered in the cloud where scale is faster, the resources are available, are much easier, but they still need the power of the best of breed and storage technology. They still are looking for cost effective optimization. And this is where NetApp is helping them. >> How do you kind of bridge their different groups you talked about, the developer groups and what they need and what they expect, and a regular world versus central IT, whose job as you said, is now more challenging with this spread. How does the NetApp help those two groups come together and really evaluate the opportunities that this new situation provides and how NetApp can help them accelerate that? So this is basically where the platform capabilities are playing their role, the developer and also the DevOps organization are able to consume the right capabilities that they need in order to get their job faster, both central IT can go into the same platform and basically manage it from security, from backup, from disaster recovery and from performance general performance perspective, including very easy that built-in automation to move, and the entire application from the 2QIA and into production. So the ability of basically the different users to have an optimized experience, when the developers are looking for productivity, time to market, maybe even the cost effectiveness DevOps is looking for the automation, the agility and basically the life cycle and then central IT is looking to optimize costs into the overall resourcing and really delivering it to multiple groups. Single platform gives you everything in one place, >> Make it sound so easy. So last question is, as we go into the year 2021, remember that joke last year, everyone said 2020 it's hindsight, we going to know everything, I think care to forget a whole bunch of things, but as we move forward, and I think we're all counting on the clock changing and bringing in good things, we've seen a lot of change, we've also seen a lot of opportunities uncovered, and you've talked about some of those. Talk to me about some of the things that NetApp and AWS customers can expect next year. >> So we've been innovating together very, very fast. If I just look into the last few months then, you've seen AWS pushing and outposting to the market as kind of the edge of the cloud. NetApp has been an early partner of that kind of coming together and saying that and really offering the best storage as part of outpost. I think what you'll is the, as we go into 2021 is, the foster innovation and the expansion of the offering is going to continue into 2021. The things that both AWS and NetApp already have in progress are kind of ensuring that, so that wouldn't be a big risk for me to share that I can already see the pipeline as it comes to, as it is going into the customer. I think the second thing that you would see is a lot of focus on optimization and a lot of that optimization done automatically for the customer without the customer needs, without the customer need to proactively define and set things, I think it is a very, very strong trend. We're both set optimization for scale, optimization for performance, optimization for costs are kind of built into the offering. I think as we're scaling into the cloud, you'll see significant growth in the amount of offerings coming from vendors, including NetApp and AWS, but also increased consumption of the customers that are, we'll expect more and more of it to be automatic. I think the last thing that I think we are going to see accelerating in 2021 is system of record moving into the cloud. Innovation has already done in a cloud first approach in almost all cases. That's what we're going to see is significant acceleration in the amount of system of records, moving and moving into the cloud analytics, moving into the cloud, and we're going to see it done by mainstream companies in a very, very large scale. >> Lots of things to look forward to. Ronen, thank you for joining me on theCUBE today and sharing what's the latest updates with NetApp and AWS, any opportunities for your customers. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, it was a pleasure to meet you virtually. >> Likewise, maybe sometime at some event we'll come back and we'll get to meet in person, I hope so. For Ronen Schwartz, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I wish we could be there in person, but we're doing remote because of the COVID and the pandemic. We've got a great guest, Paul Grist. Worldwide Public Sector, Head of Education International for AWS. Paul, thank you for coming on remotely. >> Great to be here, John. >> There's a lot of disruption in the education space this year with universities and schools still uncertain about what the future will look like. What are some of the biggest trends you're seeing? >> John, what we've seen is the rapid adoption of technology and the growth of flexible online learning, learning that can take place anytime, anywhere. What we've seen is universities, national education systems, and schools rapidly migrating systems and content to the cloud, spinning up new applications. And we've seen companies that provide technology and content and platforms, the ed techs and publishers of the world, increasing their capacity, increasing their capability to deliver new applications to education. >> What is some of this research that you're finding out there? >> Yeah. You know, a time of much change and things happening very, very fast. We responded fast to the changes, John. Got a load of customer conversations together, looking at speeches by educationalists who were responding to the changes at some of the online events that spun up very quickly at places like the University of Buckingham, ASU, JSV, Inside Higher Education, places like Blackboard World. And really just talked to those leaders about their responses to the change, what kinds of things they were doing, and brought that together into the research. It's underpinned by some in-depth research and insights from education reports and articles too. >> Thanks Paul, really appreciate it. Having that research is critical. I know you guys do a lot of work on that. I know you got some news, take a quick plug for the new research that's coming out. You guys just put out today, just take a minute to quickly explain what it's about and how to find it. >> We're publishing today some new research that shows the seven key emerging trends in this new world of education. Check it out on the AWS website. Two key trends, flexible learning and the new world of employability. >> So you guys got a lot of data. It's great with Amazon, got a lot of customers. Good to see you guys getting that research. The question I have for you Paul is, what amount of the research shows really the COVID situation? Because there's before COVID, there's kind of during, and then there's going to be a post-COVID mode. Was that prior research in place with COVID or after COVID? Can you share kind of the update on the relevance of your research? >> Yeah, I think the sector has changed. The sector has gone through the fastest change it's ever gone through. And undoubtedly most of the issues, most of the challenges and opportunities in the sector, predate the pandemic. But what we've seen is COVID accelerate many of the challenges and the opportunities, but also bring new opportunities. >> Yeah, one of the things we've seen with education is the disruption, and the forcing function with COVID. There's a problem, we all know what it is. It's important, there's consequences for those. And you can quantify the disruption with real business value and certainly student impact. There's been downsides with remote education. More teacher-parent involvement and students having to deal with isolation, less social interaction. How do you guys see that? Or what is Amazon doing to solve these problems? Can you talk about that? >> Yeah. I think you know, education is very much a people business. And what we've been trying to do is partner with organizations to ensure that the people are kept at the center of the business. So working with organizations such as LS, sorry, Los Angeles United School District in the US to spin up a call center to allow students to contact their tutors. And parents to interact with tutors, to get questions answered. >> So one of the challenges these academic institutions are facing is speed, it's pace of change. What's going on with competition? How are they competing? How are universities and colleges staying relevant? Obviously there's a financial crisis involved. There's also the actual delivery aspect of it. More and more mergers. You're starting to see ecosystem changes. Can you talk about what's going on in the educational ecosystem? >> Yeah I mean, educational institutions are being forced to rethink their business models. It's an international marketplace in higher education. It's been a growing marketplace for many, many years. That suddenly stopped overnight, so every university has had to rethink about where their revenues are coming from, where the students are coming from. There's been some surprises too. I mean in the UK, actually international enrollments are up post-COVID because one of the strange side effects of COVID is without being able to travel, there's actually a cost saving for students. And so we've seen universities in the UK benefit from students who want to study, perhaps travel and the cost of study was too high previously. Now being able to study remotely. It's an unexpected and unintended consequence. But it kind of shows how there are opportunities for all organizations during this time. >> Many countries had to cancel exams altogether this year, which has been a big, huge problem. I mean people are outraged and people want to learn. It's been, you know, the silver lining in all this is that you have the internet (laughs). You have the cloud. I want to get your thoughts. How are universities and schools dealing with this challenge? Because you have a multi-sided marketplace. You've got the institutions, you've got the students, you got the educators, they all have to be successful. How are universities dealing with this challenge? >> Yeah I think, you know, teaching and learning has been online for 20, 30 years. And I think a lot of organizations have adopted online teaching and learning. But I think assessment is the one big area of education that remains to be made available at scale at low cost. So most assessment is still a pen-and-paper-based. There's big trust and identity issues. And what we're seeing through this COVID change is organizations really getting to grip with both of those issues. So, having the confidence to put assessment online, to make it available at scale, and then also having the confidence to tackle trust and identity questions. So who is taking the exam, where are they sitting? Can we be sure that it's actually that person taking that exam? So you know, the rise of things like proctoring technologies giving organizations the opportunity to assess remotely. >> How has this crisis affected research at academic institutions? Because certainly we know that if you need a lab or something, certainly we're seeing students need to be physically in person. But with remote and all those changes going on with the scale and the pace of change, how has research at academic institutions been impacted? >> Yeah I mean, research has always been a really collaborative activity, but we've seen that collaboration increase. It's had to increase. Researchers have had to go remote. Many of them work in labs. They haven't been able to do that. They've needed to spin up applications and new technologies in the cloud to continue working. But what we're seeing is governments taking an increased interest in the research being applicable, making sure that it leads to innovation which is meaningful. Getting much more involved and insisting that the research is made available now. And of course there's no place that that's clearer than in health research and trying to find a cure for COVID. And then secondly, we're seeing that research is becoming much more collaborative not just across institutions but also countries. So one of the great projects we're involved in at the moment is with the University of Adelaide who are collaborating with researchers from the Breeding and Acclimatization Institute in Poland on a project to study the increase in crop yield of wheat. >> One of the things that's coming out of this, whether it's research or students is open online courses, virtual capabilities. But a concept called stackable learning. Can you explain what that is? >> Yeah. We're in a global marketplace in education and there's increased competition between universities and education providers to make new types of certificates and online badges available. We know that employers are looking for ever more agile methods of scaling and upskilling. And stackable learning is a concept that's been around for a couple of decades now, where learning is broken down into smaller chunks, put together in a more personalized way from a number of different providers. Spun up very, very quickly to respond to need and then delivered to students. We're seeing some of the big providers like edX and Coursera who, again have been around for over a decade become really prominent in the provision of some of these stackable credentials. Their systems run on the cloud. They're easy to access, in many, many cases they're free. We're seeing an increasing number of employers and education institutions adopt and embed these types of delivery systems into their curriculum. >> Totally a fan of stackable learning, it's called the Lego model, whatever I call it. But also online brings the nonlinear progressions. The role of data is super important. So I'm very bullish on education being disrupted by cloud providers and new apps. So you know, I wanted to call that out because I think it's super important. Let me get to a really important piece that it has to be addressed, and I want to get your thoughts on. Cyber security. Okay, cyber attacks and privacy of students are two areas that are super important for institutions to address. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I mean the use of more technology becomes, you know again, a target for cyber attack and unfortunately it's an increasing phenomenon. Simply put, every organization needs to put security first. Needs to operate as a security-first organization. They need to adopt technologies, people and processes that can protect their investments. And work with data management vendors, cloud vendors who've got the compliances and the common privacy and security frameworks such as GDPR in place to make sure that they provide secure services. AWS's security offerings include auditing, login and identity management, data encryption capabilities that offer more transparency and control, to allow institutions protect student data. >> Super important, thanks for sharing. Finally, what's the steps institutions can take to close the digital divide because now some people are taking gap years. Research is changing. People might not even have PCs or internet connections. There's still, this exposes the haves and have nots. What steps can institutions take to do their part? >> Yeah, digital learning is here to stay, John. We've learned that many learners do not have access to technology necessary for online learning. Whether those are devices or a reliable internet connection. But again, you know governments, states, educational authorities have all turned their attention to these issues over the last few months. And we're seeing organizations partner with technology providers that can provide internet connections. Partners in AWS, such as Kajeet who've installed hotspot devices on buses to deploy in areas with no connectivity. You know whether that's a place like Denver, Colorado or whether it's a place, you know, in Nigeria in Africa, remote connection remains a problem everywhere. And we're seeing everybody addressing that issue now. >> Paul, great to have you on theCUBE and sharing your insights on what's going on in international education. Final question for you. In your own words, why is this year at the AWS Public Sector Summit Online important? What's the most important story that people should walk away in this educational industry? >> The most important story, John, is it's a time of incredible change but also incredible opportunity. And we're seeing organizations who have wanted to change, who've wanted to deliver more to their students, who want to deliver a greater experience, who want to access more students and have much greater reach. Now with the appetite to do that. re:Invent is a great opportunity to work with AWS, to understand what's going on with our partners, with our customers. And look at some of the common solutions for the challenges that they're looking to solve. >> Paul Grist, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Worldwide Head of Education for International AWS. Thank you for sharing. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Remote, virtual, this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. Their virtual conference. I'm John Furrier here in the Cube studio for a conversation with Matt Garman, Vice president. Sales amount of AWS. We're here with our quarantine crew. Matt. Thanks for joining me. I know your remote as well. We're living in a virtualized world. Thanks for coming on. AWS Summit is now online. You're running sales and market for the company. This is really caught a lot of companies by surprise this this situation sheltering in place. It's highlighted a lot of scale problems. One of them is events. So we're here at the AWS Summit online, and you guys are still pulling it off A lot of content. Great to see you. >>Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>So before we get into some of the announcements in the customer focus things that you guys are doing, you and I both met. We did an interview when you were running the EEC to you've been with Amazon for a long time, Got a storied history. You were there from one E. C two launched saw Amazon grow. This really kind of ties into some reporting that we've been doing where cloud native a scale of what advice became it really was a game changer and that showed the at scale opportunity for startups. And now the enterprise. This covert 19 is really showing companies and individuals their living it, of being disrupted, where the Internet and large scale tools and technologies can help them, but also exposes gaps in their lives or in companies, cases, things like provisioning VP ends. Maybe they didn't figure out 100% would be at home, but then going forward, the applications are now thinking about this new virtualized world. Even when it comes back to normal, be somewhat of a hybrid, you know, integrated world. This will put pressure on you guys as Amazon to build more capacity like you did with the see too, but at a whole nother level. So I want to get into that and more. But this covert 19 really has changed the game for the world. What do you guys see in your customer base? This is a big part of the conversation. What's going on? >>Thanks, John, And you're right. This is an unprecedented time for us, and on day eight of us as well as our customers are all trying to figure it out. I think you know, part of part of what we've seen from our customers as we talk out there, whether they're public service or private customers is is really that that demands that they're seeing from their customer bases are rapidly changing. Some customers have their businesses have seen much fewer lower demands and others before. But others they're seeing 10 21 100 x more business than they were before. And what we're seeing is that those customers that have their business running in the cloud are able to handle that on quickly. Our ableto adapt and change and grow with their changing customer base, and sometimes that's internal. Sometimes you're like you said. That's because, um, they need to scale up their VPN or they need to scale up their virtual workstations. Other times, it's customers who maybe they run a large call center business. But their call center folks are no longer able to come into the office, and they quickly spin up a virtual call center. We've seen our Amazon connect business really, really take off as customers quickly united to figure out how they can manage the actually increased call Williams they're seeing, but in a virtual location. And finally, we're just seeing some customers, whether they're from entertainment from communication or online education. Many of these businesses they're scaling rapidly wouldn't have been able to do it if they're running in their own data center. But because they're in the cloud, they're able to quickly spin up more instances, spin up more storage and meet the demands of their customers. So I think it's been nice to see. Fortunately for us, we've had many years, as you mentioned, I used to run the C two team on, and we've been thinking for over a decade about how we really manage that supply chain. How do we ensure that we're able to handle rapidly scaling? So we've really optimized our supply chain Unfortunately, in a good position where we can continue to operate, continue to scale and continue to handle the demands are growing customer base even unprecedented times like this. >>You know, you mentioned that I want to get into that concept. You wrote a block post the other day on the Amazon Day one blawg keeping organizations running during Covad 19 and you kind of teased out this point about average connected time. And if you think about this crisis, this really is that the true test for scale and elasticity of having that cloud model and some of the clouds have not done as well as Amazon. There's been some stories out there. Google and Microsoft has had the up time you guys had, but this really has been the future pulled forward. So you guys have a lot of customers like Netflix like slack, that are really taken advantage of this. This is the true test of cloud and only the beginning again. Like I said, this is going to show a lot of gaps in most other traditional enterprises. But this highlights the tests that you guys were waiting for. I won't say that you're waiting for a crisis, but cloud, this is ultimately the test. Your thoughts on Netflix, who Lou Slack, A bunch of other names land and he throws the slide. But we have re invent. But the >>big I think if you look at, obviously we have a lot more time at home, right? I'm at home here in Seattle. A lot of us are spending more time at home. And so a lot of the streaming services like you said, the Netflix is the who lose that Disney Pluses of the world. Also games. Think about how many kids were playing fortnight or playing a or the video games. A lot of those businesses have really seen an increase in their demand on they have been able to just seamlessly scale along with eight of us on the work side. Think about everybody from slack that runs entirely on AWS Zoom, who runs the vast majority of their infrastructure and aws all of these communication on work from home capabilities. These are all running on AWS enabled many of the scale, and we think all of our kids, our kids are all trying to figure out what a school look like. You don't actually go to school. I was talking from the team at Blackboard. They've seen a 10 sometimes even 100 X increase in their business. America will just seamlessly scale up on demand. I mean, really overnight just exploded. >>I was on Twitter just the other day, talking with some folks because the whole jet, I think, is going down. I was gonna wing of my normal commentary. Um and this is the public sector challenge as well. You mentioned schools. These air traditionally? No, I t or enterprise like chops. They need scale now. They need it fast. They have to stand up. I imagine this is the kind of scenario that this is also gonna hit the small, medium sized enterprises as well as some of the big ones. So the big guys have legacy problems, data silos, whatever we've had, great. Comes with some of your team members there. But that's just one sector. You got small, medium size enterprises that don't have any I t public sector and education. They're gonna be in market in months, if not >>tomorrow. Public sector is a super interesting one. And, frankly, our public sector team I don't know that they have slept in the past three months working to try to help governments, both the United States and internationally, everything from me. If you think about it, our our unemployment systems in states across the United States have gone from something like 3% unemployment claims to 15% unemployment claims within a two month period. Those systems are not meant to scale like that, and they reached out to us pretty quickly to see how we could help them start to scale. You think about some of the the systems that are trying to send out checks to people, systems that are trying to send out small making loans to folks. We've been really working deeply with many of those government agencies to try to figure out how we can get the money in the hands of the individuals that need it as quickly as possible and really help those legacy systems. Sometimes they're built on, you know, legacy databases or Oracle's or Microsoft sequel systems. And those things just aren't scaling. And they're trying to figure out How can they get to a more modern architecture that can really keep scaling with the needs of the new demand that they're reaching? It's just something that didn't anticipate before. >>Yeah, and I think your customers, as you're now going to be overseeing the larger global organization, sales and marketing, um, it's not like you guys are preaching to the customers because you're living through the same crisis in an environment that they are. You certainly can align with their empathy and certainly help them solve problems. But now we're in a business climate where we're seeing unemployment numbers of massive numbers. Usually companies come out of these challenges, and we think it could be highly accelerated on an upward trajectory, flat or negative. In 2008. That crisis we saw the winners come out of that one. You guys rode that wave with AWS. Easy to can. You know that world now coming out of this next pandemic, it's going to be hybrid or virtualization of meat of life. >>How are >>you leading your team? How are you talking to customers? I'm out of this empathy, but you got to run an organization. You have to still sell services and market your products You got reinvent was a physical event. I mean, >>these air, >>huge challenges you're living them to. What's your >>take on >>all this? >>Yeah, part of I think you know, in my new role. And as you mentioned, I used to run the computing with AWS, including easy to many compute services for about 13 years before coming and running. Now the sales and marketing, or AWS >>and And in >>that role, you know, a lot of what I would think about is how we really help our customers understand how critical it >>is to the >>her hair. The cloud gives you just so much more flexibility, so much more agility. And we would you know, there's a bunch of the early adopters would lead into that and really got it. And once they got onto the cloud, they saw their innovation level went up, their agility goes up all those things. But, you know, there was still a lot of folks that were they're interested. I mean, we obviously have, ah, decent sized business today and many, many millions of customers that are using the cloud today. But some of them are have been slower to kind of fully adopt and really move all of their business critical workloads to the cloud. I firmly believe that coming out of this crisis, you're gonna have two types of of businesses. You're gonna have some that just go into their shell, right? They're just going to say I'm just gonna try to survive. I'm just gonna try that to get by, going to try to conserve every little bit of something. I can just protect what I have. You know, I don't think those are long term. I'm not optimistic of. Those are going to be the businesses that right. I think every time you see a crisis, you have businesses that lean into it. They're smart about it. They think about long term. What are the things that are going to help me compete in this new world? And I think Cloud is gonna be one of those things. We've talked to everybody from airlines to traditional Fortune 500 enterprises, and they see that like they're still leaning into the cloud, even even airlines. No one's been hit harder than the airlines. And even I've talked to several executives and airlines their saying Look, my cloud initiative, that's the thing I'm not cutting. I'm gonna cut everything else. But this is the thing that's gonna let me succeed when I really get into that new world. And so I really think you're going to see some of those folks that maybe you were hesitant before so again in the next 34 years. Maybe I'll get to the cloud. I really think that they're going to start to lead in because they're going to realize if my competitors or in the cloud and I'm not that is gonna be a significant disadvantage and, you know, knock on wood. Hopefully, there's no other global pandemic, but they have to deal with. But I think it just really highlights any uncertainty in the world. There's going to be differences and they just are unable to deal with to the flexibility and the scale that they want to go up and down, by the way that they're unable to really handle whatever the world throws up. But I think we're going to be living in a continually uncertain environment. >>Yeah, I definitely would agree with you, and I think it's going to get back to normal at some point, but even is gonna have an impact into 2021 as many people are kind of figuring out the window, people saying no spring 2021 Maybe, you know, there we started get some semblance of normality the way it was, but still that environment and this brings up the whole summit online that you guys are doing. Your summits have been a great set of events. We've covered many of them with the real key physical cube. Now we're doing the Virtual Cube. They've been a practitioner and user, the developer builder event. It's a free event. Nutrition had. Now you have them all over the world. They're going on virtual. People still need to build out these projects. There's still a demand, and some projects are being cut. Some are, as you guys look over the horizon with your customer base conversations around what to fund whatnot the fund. As you mentioned. What are some of the things that you're seeing and recommending to customers that they should continue to double down on? Because smart manager is going to step back and say, Hey, I can see some gaps. We're going to double down on that and we're gonna kill that. We're gonna move this over here. There's going to be a reinvention and growth strategy that they have to figure out quickly. There's no yet playbooks emerging, but it's clear out the video virtual interactions. But those projects get double down your thoughts on the customer builders out there. >>I think that's absolutely right in it and expands every industry you can think about. Think about, you know, I was talking Teoh several customers in the healthcare space. And how long has it been five years that people have been touting that telemedicine is really gonna be that thing that eventually comes and eventually becomes a big thing? This has really accelerated that, such that. Now I've talked to probably dozens and dozens of people who, for the very first time of talk to their doctors over being their cell phone because they don't want to go into the hospital for you're getting, you know, six or something like that. Then they just have a minor medical things you need to do. Telemedicine is one of those things that is really taking off, and there's been really enabling, frankly, that customers have been able to do telemedicine. That's really helps, knows that that wanted to stay safe but also get good medical advice. I think that's just one example where we're gonna continue to see this go. I think coming out of this the other thing, our custom, lot of our customers were thinking about, and anytime you really go into an uncertain economic world. You want to think about capital preservation. Now is not the time you want to go spend money to build your own data center or to buy your own servers. If ever there was a time where the cloud makes the most sense, capital preservation >>is E >>particularly we don't know if there's gonna be an economic recession. We don't know how long this is going to take. All businesses, whether they're severely impacted, should be really thinking about that capital preservation. But they've also got to be thinking about how they innovate. You know, I've talked to ah, popular ride sharing customer the other day, and they were talking about how ride sharing his way down. But they're still using this as a time to lean forward into innovation because they know coming out of this, they want to be ahead of where their competitors are going to be. And they really want to use this as an opportunity to take their own internal teams, focus them on where they think the biggest potential is gonna be. And then once the economy turns around people out and about again, they can hit the accelerator and really take off. So I think that's really how a lot of our customers were thinking about situation where they're right now. >>You know, you guys haven't had a steep learning curve over the years with cloud and cloud scale. I think as the world comes in, the human capital piece becomes interesting, too, not just on of spending with money, monetary, the human capital to work, how people are contributing. So this brings up the whole reinvention. It's funny to watch as people are forced with these first generation problems of how to make things digital, how to get scale going. You have people who have learned it, have a learning curve, and again there's no compression algorithm for experience, as you guys like to point out. So >>this is >>creating this kind of like, How do I change the roles of my company? And so I want to get your thoughts because we're looking for proof points because a lot of the answers are not yet evolved and usually things they're not understood before they become mainstream. But people have to react really fast. What are some examples? Can you give around how Cove in applications are rolling out because that's truly a indicator in my mind of what people are doing with the cloud. Because Covert was an instant response. We've already interviewed a few folks that are on Amazon around Covitz Solutions, where the standing of either analytics or doing some things Could you use the covert of example of how rapid deployment or reinvention of data or business models our rendering themselves? >>Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a couple of different what one is. But for the very first thing that most people look at is how do we get data like we just need to find data around this space. And so we've worked with a number of partners and customers on How do we really go, help build Data Lakes in the cloud and coming getting all that data in one place so that both governments as well as private enterprises, can really start to think of that Data slices in different ways on get to look at what is the actual data, whether it's one of the number of hospital that's available one of the number of tests that are happening, you know, one of the number of oh infections that we're seeing, where the rate of change, etcetera. We also work with a number of our analytics partners, and we have a wide range of analytics partners that are really taking this as an opportunity where they can rapidly then take that data and slice it a number of different ways to try to help understand how they respond. I think you know, the first part of that was on the healthcare side where folks were saying, Where do we need enough ventilators? Where we where do we need to go? Build hospitals? Are we start to identify hot spots right where I see if you can really look at kind of second order derivatives of kind of changes, and you can look at it close enough, you could say, Oh, there's a hot spot popping up in this particular area and eventually you know, if we can get some better data, contract tracing and things like that where you can open up the economy and still have, you know very quickly identify where a hot spot might be a merging. Those are the types of data pieces that you know what the right levels of of security and data privacy, but with but with access to that data, we can get a handle on how some of these things are happening. Then I think you go and you look at s So that's that's kind of some of the data analytics pieces. Right? Then you also go look at what are folks doing on the testing side? And I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion about how well testing is done. I think we all >>know that there >>are ways that we always thought maybe it was a little bit further along with it is, but there's a number of private places that are actually really speeding up. I think this is one of the big areas that Amazon best, right? And I don't I don't know. We'll see if we are able to get there faster than some of the other places, but we we see a real need for testing. Testing is one of those such a critical component if we could do rapid testing, frequent testing, both for our own employees. But frankly, for for all the industries that we all rely on, I have come to rely on, particularly in this virtual world. We know that the faster we can get testing and more reliable, we can get testing. The better we are able to then isolate, get people to self quarantine and really kind of control that mass spread >>of the >>disease. >>I know >>you know >>healthcare is interesting. One of the emerging things we're seeing coming out of the summit here and some of the conversations we had is how the enterprise has always been kind of a hard environment to find stuff. As people live at home and working at home, working remotely, working in remote teams, the idea of searching for stuff becomes interesting. So you guys announced the general availability, Kendra. The timing couldn't have been better for that, because that's really giving you a Google like vibe feel for funding information. But it's really an integration play under the covers, so I think that's the kind of trend that we're seeing. We're seeing also startups putting up APS out there so you see a lot of activity. That's kind of in line with this. That you guys are announcing anything >>at any >>update on the Kendra or >>Canada is fantastic, and it's it's really I think struck a nerve with folks where the traditional way of thinking about search, particularly internal for internal Internets just doesn't work. You know how many hits you get and how many millions of people across billions and billions of people on the Internet that that model works on the Internet. You might be looking for very specific things. Um, and with machine learning, we're able to tell what is the intent of the requests that people are looking for and take you to the right place so that if you say you know one of the hours of my help desk, there's a very specific page that you're looking for, which is this number. In fact, you're not looking for a job to go to. You're not looking for information about help desks. You're looking for the actual hours of my internal help desks, particularly probably from my building. And as we do build these ML models that can start to learn on how your Internet works and how people are thinking about it and what's helpful or not, we've been able to improve an Internet search orders of magnitude. I've used it internally for our own. I'm instrumented it. It's night and day compared to what we used before was kind of your keyword search type of thing. So I think applying ML, particularly when people remote and really relying on resource, is like that where they can't just, you know, lean over to a cube next to them and say, Hey, we're still you know what time is the help desk open? >>I think getting breaking down the silos to just we build that abstraction layer a data leak really kind of makes a big difference. >>That's right. >>So final question for you as companies settle into the new realities that are upon them, what's the outlook for the rest of 2020 for you guys? And what do you say? That customers that are here on the online trying to consume the virtual content that they should be building out because you've got not just customers. You've got commercial customers, you got public sector and you got an ecosystem. You got partners out there who are building on top of AWS. Um, rolling this together. What's your message to them? What's on the outlook? >>2020 Number one. I encourage everyone to take advantage. I think In many ways, some of these virtual summits are great opportunity, maybe, for those were unable to travel to the summit or to be able to actually physically get there. It's a great opportunity to learn, really dive in trying to do some virtual labs really get in and understand some of the new features and functionality that are out there from a partner perspective. Many of the things that we're building, whether it's our outflow service that we just launched a couple of weeks ago, that helps us to really connects to our various partners into a data lake. As John was mentioning those air, these were really some of the things that you know, if you think about our broad swath of our partner ecosystem, encourage our customers to really look at all of the partners that are running on AWS who have great solutions. Like the Cube. You're looking for virtual events. They have. They have an awesome product you should check out, but we have a wide set of partners that will help you. Yeah, put together the virtual world that you all are trying to work through right now and encourage you just to learn >>I really appreciate the plug, actually, one for the cube. A new event Cloud. What? We're trying to figure it out. I think this kind of reminds me of a famous quote I heard on the queue, which is a notable one, is that everything in the future that is going to be invented was on Star Trek or Star Wars. So I assume we're gonna have video cameras and everyone's office, and we'll be able to go and talk to folks. So looking forward to again, standing up content, getting the content and connecting people. Thanks for spending >>the >>time out of your day to come in and talk with me and share your insights. And, ah, Amazon Summit Web services Summit online Virtual cube Virtual. Thanks for your time. Appreciate your insights. >>Great. Thank you. >>OK, Cube here. Virtual in our studio covering remotely all the top content out there covering AWS summit online. There's a whole new reality rolling it together. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington it's The Cube covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're here in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now they have another education conference, excuse me, Imagine Conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing, such a small conference with such great global representation. We've got our first guest, all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada and the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera. It's a mouthful, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. >> It was very impressive, the keynote by Andrew Co Intersession by Amazon. We were impressed, we were included in the keynote and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. >> Great, so before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you are trying to accomplish as an institution. So give us a little bit of background on the college, how big it was, and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. >> We are a Spanish University. We belong with CEU San Pablo Foundation which owns three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not for profit universities and in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago and right now we have reached 2500 international students which represents around 30-33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students. >> So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students and then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? >> It was a trend in higher education institutions but for us it was very important for two reasons, one the sustainability of the university, but also and I think the main reason is that we wanted to have our students to have a global experience. We wanted to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. >> Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? >> So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. For this we have a very helpful firm partnered on campus. It was the IT department with Jose Roch in charge of this department and through technology we have been able to escalate and automate, get the automation of all of this process in order to reach bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the needed of our international students, our new population of international students. >> Right, so you were highlighted today for a very specific thing, for a very specific device, which is Alexa, and voice as an interface and we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year, in terms of the kids asking it, you know, when is my test, is my homework due, these types of things, but you guys are actually taking it to the next level. Explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. >> So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students national and international students and one other things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that is not only in English, but also in Spanish. Like this we are covering the two most speaked language on campus, English and Spanish. >> So it's bi, so you've got a bilingual Alexa in the room. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us it was very important as explained before that technologies had been asked to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. >> Right and using English is kind of universal language, regardless of what their native tongue is. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation, was it written in Spanish, how did some of those logistics work out? >> So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon, they were very, very, very helpful for us. With Ana Cabez and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon and they guided us how to develop the Alexa skills for the goals that we set with them, what we wanted to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. >> And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write, so how many different skills did you write especially for your students? >> So we, what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the services in one only skill. So we are integrating services related with what my next assignment on Blackboard, which are my grades, how can I book a room in the library or another space of the university, locations of the different services or professors of the university. We are integrating a lot of services, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. >> So that's interesting, I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have. But you've got integration points in all these other systems. The room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. >> The learning management system. >> So how many points of integration are there? >> A lot we are working right now, we are focusing around five, seven integration points, because also we are integrating it with our CRM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending of if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. We think that integration with CRM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situations. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's not a general notification for all of the students on campus. >> Right, that's awesome. Again, highlighted in the keynote really I think is the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows, talk to a lot of big companies, everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat, that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world in which you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guys' school? >> So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, ten years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption and in this sense we are working a lot to improve the students' experience of our students on campus because if not we think that it makes no sense to study on campus when you can go online. >> Jeff: Right. >> So that's why we're using technology to improve the students' experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through the digital transformation. In order that we have more time for these value added interaction between the staff, academic and nonacademic staff, with the students. >> Right, and then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the nonacademic staff because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? >> So I seen all the institutions and you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor of these innovations, but the big number of professors and staff have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for these value added interaction with their students. For this in order to avoid only top-down decisions we have created digital ambassador programs which this program what we do is to share with our professors and with our nonacademic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. >> So you're six months into it you said since you launched it. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm just curious if you could share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like long and unintended consequences, you know, as you go through this process. >> So one of things is in Spain, Alexa was launched in November, last November so it's very new. >> Jeff: Very new. >> Very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months, it have exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology. They were impressed that the university so quickly reacted to the introduction of the technology. The other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. We have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students. And we have the huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. >> Right, right, just curious too, to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it. They're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google Assistant this or ask your Alexa this, you know, we still haven't learned it. From where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said get away from these emails in the middle of the night that ask, when's my paper due and I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpieces of a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? >> So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions would have use of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not to know. So if they can ask voice, virtual assistant, as in one case, they have the freedom when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think its a big difference between emails, in an email you decide when you send the information to the students, with voice technologies, the student, it's the student who is asking when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think it's important for them. >> It's huge because they never ask for the email. >> No, they, and after they tell us that it wasn't important information that they didn't check the email. >> Right. >> They complain that they don't have the right information. >> Right, well Inaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started, you've got a long ways to go. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you. He's Inaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time. 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(shutter clicking) >> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group happy to have one of users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this because it's kind of a fun event for us. >> Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? >> It's my third event. I was actually a speaker last year. >> Excellent. >> This year, I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions, and being social with the rest of the people who do business with Winslow. >> Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? >> Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. >> That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So, the good news, Boston University, I think, we don't need to explain what the university is. But what are some of the drivers happening at the university level. Changes happening, changes happening in every industry. But what, specifically, is happening there that kind of impacts your world? >> Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch-up for the last few years. And we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. >> Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? >> Yeah. >> Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? Obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone. But we know how fast in higher education the fees are going up. And therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. >> Oh we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus and move them up to the cloud and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OP-X. And it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. >> I've talked to lots of, kind of, K through 12 environments. And the students there, obviously, have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit, faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What do they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? >> Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses. So it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tide between what faculty want to do and their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year. And they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. >> Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really the kind of digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? >> Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XD series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students. And that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation where they're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and Ph.D. Students. >> Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs, and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? >> A little bit. BU has about ten MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning, and like every MOOC, it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet, so they're not really worth anything if students take them. But we want to get to that point where that is the case. We see the value. We see that's what the students want. We want to make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. >> Okay, I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list? What would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster, you know, beyond, I'm sure cost is always a concern, but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? >> Ease of manageability. Right now, a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge win for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. >> All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? >> I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future. That's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. >> And when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metrics? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? >> Well for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in. And I was amazed at how quickly my system administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. >> Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing with us >> Thank you. >> the journey that BU and your organization are going through. You're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. (shutter clicking)