>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent conversations with IT decision makers show a stark contrast between exiting 2023 versus the mindset when we were leaving 2022. CIOs are generally funding new initiatives by pushing off or cutting lower priority items, while security efforts are still being funded. Those that enable business initiatives that generate revenue or taking priority over cleaning up legacy technical debt. The bottom line is, for the moment, at least, the mindset is not cut everything, rather, it's put a pause on cleaning up legacy hairballs and fund monetization. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we tap recent discussions from two primary sources, year-end ETR roundtables with IT decision makers, and CUBE conversations with data, cloud, and IT architecture practitioners. The sources of data for this breaking analysis come from the following areas. Eric Bradley's recent ETR year end panel featured a financial services DevOps and SRE manager, a CSO in a large hospitality firm, a director of IT for a big tech company, the head of IT infrastructure for a financial firm, and a CTO for global travel enterprise, and for our upcoming Supercloud2 conference on January 17th, which you can register free by the way, at supercloud.world, we've had CUBE conversations with data and cloud practitioners, specifically, heads of data in retail and financial services, a cloud architect and a biotech firm, the director of cloud and data at a large media firm, and the director of engineering at a financial services company. Now we've curated commentary from these sources and now we share them with you today as anecdotal evidence supporting what we've been reporting on in the marketplace for these last couple of quarters. On this program, we've likened the economy to the slingshot effect when you're driving, when you're cruising along at full speed on the highway, and suddenly you see red brake lights up ahead, so, you tap your own brakes and then you speed up again, and traffic is moving along at full speed, so, you think nothing of it, and then, all of a sudden, the same thing happens. You slow down to a crawl and you start wondering, "What the heck is happening?" And you become a lot more cautious about the rate of acceleration when you start moving again. Well, that's the trend in IT spend right now. Back in June, we reported that despite the macro headwinds, CIOs were still expecting 6% to 7% spending growth for 2022. Now that was down from 8%, which we reported at the beginning of 2022. That was before Ukraine, and Fed tightening, but given those two factors, you know that that seemed pretty robust, but throughout the fall, we began reporting consistently declining expectations where CIOs are now saying Q4 will come in at around 3% growth relative to last year, and they're expecting, or should we say hoping that it pops back up in 2023 to 4% to 5%. The recent ETR panelists, when they heard this, are saying based on their businesses and discussions with their peers, they could see low single digit growth for 2023, so, 1%, 2%, 3%, so, this sort of slingshotting, or sometimes we call it a seesaw economy, has caught everyone off guard. Amazon is a good example of this, and there are others, but Amazon entered the pandemic with around 800,000 employees. It doubled that workforce during the pandemic. Now, right before Thanksgiving in 2022, Amazon announced that it was laying off 10,000 employees, and, Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, just last week announced that number is now going to grow to 18,000. Now look, this is a rounding error at Amazon from a headcount standpoint and their headcount remains far above 2019 levels. Its stock price, however, does not and it's back down to 2019 levels. The point is that visibility is very poor right now and it's reflected in that uncertainty. We've seen a lot of layoffs, obviously, the stock market's choppy, et cetera. Now importantly, not everything is on hold, and this downturn is different from previous tech pullbacks in that the speed at which new initiatives can be rolled out is much greater thanks to the cloud, and if you can show a fast return, you're going to get funding. Organizations are pausing on the cleanup of technical debt, unless it's driving fast business value. They're holding off on modernization projects. Those business enablement initiatives are still getting funded. CIOs are finding the money by consolidating redundant vendors, and they're stealing from other pockets of budget, so, it's not surprising that cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority in 2023. We've been reporting that for quite some time now. It's specifically cloud, cloud native security container and API security. That's where all the action is, because there's still holes to plug from that forced march to digital that occurred during COVID. Cloud migration, kind of showing here on number two on this chart, still a high priority, while optimizing cloud spend is definitely a strategy that organizations are taking to cut costs. It's behind consolidating redundant vendors by a long shot. There's very little evidence that cloud repatriation, i.e., moving workloads back on prem is a major cost cutting trend. The data just doesn't show it. What is a trend is getting more real time with analytics, so, companies can do faster and more accurate customer targeting, and they're really prioritizing that, obviously, in this down economy. Real time, we sometimes lose it, what's real time? Real time, we sometimes define as before you lose the customer. Now in the hiring front, customers tell us they're still having a hard time finding qualified site reliability engineers, SREs, Kubernetes expertise, and deep analytics pros. These job markets remain very tight. Let's stay with security for just a moment. We said many times that, prior to COVID, zero trust was this undefined buzzword, and the joke, of course, is, if you ask three people, "What is zero trust?" You're going to get three different answers, but the truth is that virtually every security company that was resisting taking a position on zero trust in an attempt to avoid... They didn't want to get caught up in the buzzword vortex, but they're now really being forced to go there by CISOs, so, there are some good quotes here on cyber that we want to share that came out of the recent conversations that we cited up front. The first one, "Zero trust is the highest ROI, because it enables business transformation." In other words, if I can have good security, I can move fast, it's not a blocker anymore. Second quote here, "ZTA," zero trust architecture, "Is more than securing the perimeter. It encompasses strong authentication and multiple identity layers. It requires taking a software approach to security instead of a hardware focus." The next one, "I'd love to have a security data lake that I could apply to asset management, vulnerability management, incident management, incident response, and all aspects for my security team. I see huge promise in that space," and the last one, I see NLP, natural language processing, as the foundation for email security, so, instead of searching for IP addresses, you can now read emails at light speed and identify phishing threats, so, look at, this is a small snapshot of the mindset around security, but I'll add, when you talk to the likes of CrowdStrike, and Zscaler, and Okta, and Palo Alto Networks, and many other security firms, they're listening to these narratives around zero trust. I'm confident they're working hard on skating to this puck, if you will. A good example is this idea of a security data lake and using analytics to improve security. We're hearing a lot about that. We're hearing architectures, there's acquisitions in that regard, and so, that's becoming real, and there are many other examples, because data is at the heart of digital business. This is the next area that we want to talk about. It's obvious that data, as a topic, gets a lot of mind share amongst practitioners, but getting data right is still really hard. It's a challenge for most organizations to get ROI and expected return out of data. Most companies still put data at the periphery of their businesses. It's not at the core. Data lives within silos or different business units, different clouds, it's on-prem, and increasingly it's at the edge, and it seems like the problem is getting worse before it gets better, so, here are some instructive comments from our recent conversations. The first one, "We're publishing events onto Kafka, having those events be processed by Dataproc." Dataproc is a Google managed service to run Hadoop, and Spark, and Flank, and Presto, and a bunch of other open source tools. We're putting them into the appropriate storage models within Google, and then normalize the data into BigQuery, and only then can you take advantage of tools like ThoughtSpot, so, here's a company like ThoughtSpot, and they're all about simplifying data, democratizing data, but to get there, you have to go through some pretty complex processes, so, this is a good example. All right, another comment. "In order to use Google's AI tools, we have to put the data into BigQuery. They haven't integrated in the way AWS and Snowflake have with SageMaker. Moving the data is too expensive, time consuming, and risky," so, I'll just say this, sharing data is a killer super cloud use case, and firms like Snowflake are on top of it, but it's still not pretty across clouds, and Google's posture seems to be, "We're going to let our database product competitiveness drive the strategy first, and the ecosystem is going to take a backseat." Now, in a way, I get it, owning the database is critical, and Google doesn't want to capitulate on that front. Look, BigQuery is really good and competitive, but you can't help but roll your eyes when a CEO stands up, and look, I'm not calling out Thomas Kurian, every CEO does this, and talks about how important their customers are, and they'll do whatever is right by the customer, so, look, I'm telling you, I'm rolling my eyes on that. Now let me also comment, AWS has figured this out. They're killing it in database. If you take Redshift for example, it's still growing, as is Aurora, really fast growing services and other data stores, but AWS realizes it can make more money in the long-term partnering with the Snowflakes and Databricks of the world, and other ecosystem vendors versus sub optimizing their relationships with partners and customers in order to sell more of their own homegrown tools. I get it. It's hard not to feature your own product. IBM chose OS/2 over Windows, and tried for years to popularize it. It failed. Lotus, go back way back to Lotus 1, 2, and 3, they refused to run on Windows when it first came out. They were running on DEC VAX. Many of you young people in the United States have never even heard of DEC VAX. IBM wanted to run every everything only in its cloud, the same with Oracle, originally. VMware, as you might recall, tried to build its own cloud, but, eventually, when the market speaks and reveals what seems to be obvious to analysts, years before, the vendors come around, they face reality, and they stop wasting money, fighting a losing battle. "The trend is your friend," as the saying goes. All right, last pull quote on data, "The hardest part is transformations, moving traditional Informatica, Teradata, or Oracle infrastructure to something more modern and real time, and that's why people still run apps in COBOL. In IT, we rarely get rid of stuff, rather we add on another coat of paint until the wood rots out or the roof is going to cave in. All right, the last key finding we want to highlight is going to bring us back to the cloud repatriation myth. Followers of this program know it's a real sore spot with us. We've heard the stories about repatriation, we've read the thoughtful articles from VCs on the subject, we've been whispered to by vendors that you should investigate this trend. It's really happening, but the data simply doesn't support it. Here's the question that was posed to these practitioners. If you had unlimited budget and the economy miraculously flipped, what initiatives would you tackle first? Where would you really lean into? The first answer, "I'd rip out legacy on-prem infrastructure and move to the cloud even faster," so, the thing here is, look, maybe renting infrastructure is more expensive than owning, maybe, but if I can optimize my rental with better utilization, turn off compute, use things like serverless, get on a steeper and higher performance over time, and lower cost Silicon curve with things like Graviton, tap best of breed tools in AI, and other areas that make my business more competitive. Move faster, fail faster, experiment more quickly, and cheaply, what's that worth? Even the most hard-o CFOs understand the business benefits far outweigh the possible added cost per gigabyte, and, again, I stress "possible." Okay, other interesting comments from practitioners. "I'd hire 50 more data engineers and accelerate our real-time data capabilities to better target customers." Real-time is becoming a thing. AI is being injected into data and apps to make faster decisions, perhaps, with less or even no human involvement. That's on the rise. Next quote, "I'd like to focus on resolving the concerns around cloud data compliance," so, again, despite the risks of data being spread out in different clouds, organizations realize cloud is a given, and they want to find ways to make it work better, not move away from it. The same thing in the next one, "I would automate the data analytics pipeline and focus on a safer way to share data across the states without moving it," and, finally, "The way I'm addressing complexity is to standardize on a single cloud." MonoCloud is actually a thing. We're hearing this more and more. Yes, my company has multiple clouds, but in my group, we've standardized on a single cloud to simplify things, and this is a somewhat dangerous trend, because it's creating even more silos and it's an opportunity that needs to be addressed, and that's why we've been talking so much about supercloud is a cross-cloud, unifying, architectural framework, or, perhaps, it's a platform. In fact, that's a question that we will be exploring later this month at Supercloud2 live from our Palo Alto Studios. Is supercloud an architecture or is it a platform? And in this program, we're featuring technologists, analysts, practitioners to explore the intersection between data and cloud and the future of cloud computing, so, you don't want to miss this opportunity. Go to supercloud.world. You can register for free and participate in the event directly. All right, thanks for listening. That's a wrap. I'd like to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages our podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out on social media, and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle.com. He does some great editing. Thank you, all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you've got to do is search "breaking analysis podcasts." I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com where you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me, @Dante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. By all means, check out etr.ai. They get the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be doing our annual predictions post in a few weeks, once the data comes out from the January survey. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (upbeat music)

>> TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day three. From the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2022. We've been here with about seven to 8,000 people. It's been outstanding since Monday night, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we have two of the ladies from Dell digital with us, excited to welcome Jaynene Hapanowicz and Betsy Davis, leaders in Dell digital, which is Dell's IT organization. Ladies, thanks for joining Dave and me. >> Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >> Jaynene, let's start with you. We've heard a lot this week about the need for IT leaders to think very meaningfully on how to leave a lasting legacy. How in today's dynamic environment do IT leaders do that? >> Yeah. Well look, let's start with IT leaders have a pretty tough job. You're trying to stabilize an environment. You're trying to take care of anomalies, security incidents. Like that's the blocking and tackling, except you also have to transform your organization at the same time. And I think it's really important that you build a strategy that enables you to do both those things. So you have to do, you have to do the blocking and tackling or you don't get a seat at the table, but the other things that you have to prioritize are things like building the business relationships, putting your customer at the center of what you do, and building great teams that trust you and you trust them to develop capabilities that you need for the future. And your strategy has to support both of those things. >> We've heard a lot about trust this week, specifically from Mr. Dell himself, Betsy you've spoken in the past about the need for IT and the business to collaborate. There has to be trust there. How do you advise folks to accomplish that true collaboration? >> Yeah, it's look, trust is so important and it's funny because last time we were here live at a CUBE session, we were talking about the product model, which is how we do things in Dell Digital now. And it's all focused on jointly with the business, agreeing on human-centered outcomes, starting small, iterating and together you deliver extraordinary things. And so over the last few years, building collaboration through that product model has done tremendous things. I would say what we're learning more about more recently is how to extend that. Especially when you're taking multiple legacy regional tools and globalizing them, how do you extend it to policies and processes? But what we're finding that's interesting is, the same principles apply, agree on outcomes. What are you going for? And then work through it together. You don't assign it to one side or the other. It's truly a collaboration exercise. >> You know, I want to comment. So Dell has a culture, obviously. Founder led company, chairman's name is on the name of the company, Say:Do ratio, trust, et cetera. It seems like Dell Digital has its own little culture going on. And the reason I say that is, when Jen felt was up on stage yesterday, I heard a lot of yelling, screaming, hooping, people were standing up. That didn't seem like a typical IT department thing. You know, that was pretty cool. So what's the Dell Digital culture like, is it just an extension? Is it? What's it like? >> Yeah, yeah. Well, I think our leader who we admire very much, which you saw yesterday has built a great leadership team and a culture that her leaders trust each other and that cascades down. And I think our employees, like all of our folks, they love working in Dell Digital, and they love working at Dell digital because we empower them to do their jobs. We let them work where they need to work, and we have, I think, great leadership at every level to really help people propel the company forward. We have a single mission and that mission is to make Dell better. >> I like the, thank you for that. I like the way Betsy, you were talking about the, I called the product mindset. >> Yep. >> As opposed to commonly in IT, there's a project mindset. Ah, I got another project to do. >> Yeah. >> Explain the difference. >> So a project is, some people might say waterfall, it's a very old school way of doing things where you say, okay, business give me requirements. They take six months, They come up with a list of requirements. Your IT team goes off and deliver in those requirements. And two years later you come back together and go, oh, that's not what we were looking for, and it's delayed by now. So product model is really focused on, hey, let's do short sprints. Let's agree the outcome, let's attempt to deliver it, but if we deliver it and then find out, oh, that's actually not what we were looking for, then you just iterate and you haven't wasted two and a half years. And it's also quite frankly, as a leader, it's a lot more fun to lead teams in that environment, because you're constantly getting wins and they're getting that constant reinforcement of look at the impact you're making for the business. Which is a great motivator for all of us at Dell Digital. >> Quick follow up if I may, is the enabler there a mindset or is it technology? Why are you able to do that? >> It's both. So part of what makes that possible, is our modern environment. Jaynene has done an incredible job, really building a modern toolkit for our developers that makes it easier to collaborate and move quickly and iterate. But so much of it is that product model mindset of, okay, what outcomes are we delivering? What's the smallest unit of work we can break that into and let's just go and iterate. >> And you put the user in the center, like it's so much easier to develop what a customer needs, if the customer is at the center of what you're trying to do, and you iterate from there. That wasn't the way that it has historically worked. >> So how do you advise it leaders to become transformational like this rather than traditional? Because I imagine those traditional ones, those businesses may not survive the changing times that we're living in, but being transformational that's a challenging mindset, especially for organizations that are legacy or history, have been there a while. Can you advise? >> I mean, you have to fire on all cylinders, that old people process and technology is actually still true. Building a great culture and building a culture of trust, super important, but you got to pull your folks along with you on a journey. You have to have leadership that buys into doing both transformation and running the business. You have to, your technology has to support what you're trying to do. You can't expect great outcomes from things that are 20 years old, You're not going to get it. And your processes, they have to be adjusted to reflect a cloud operating model. A lot of companies even struggle with that, because they're using processes from a decade ago, and they need to update those policies to reflect what it is to operate like a cloud, in a cloud. And how have you guys accelerated this culture and this mindset during the last couple of years where things just went crazy overnight? What was that acceleration like? 'Cause we talked about digital transformation acceleration with your customers, but you guys have had to transform too. >> Yeah, and you know, I look at it from a leadership angle. I think these last couple years have really given us an opportunity to take what we took in the product model of human-centered experiences for our customers and business partner, and really focus on, hey, we need to be human centered leaders. So in some ways that was easier to do with Dell because we were always very flexible on where people work, when they work, et cetera. But I think we've had the opportunity these last couple years to demonstrate, hey, it really is about our people first, we set our people up for success. We help them take care of their immediate needs, whether those be personal or work and everything else works out. And I think companies that keep that in the forefront and always approach things from a human center perspective, whether that's leadership or experiences in the product model, always come out ahead. >> How are you faring in the talent war? My specific question is, if I were younger and a perspective employee, how would you recruit me in terms of how you would nurture my career? What's my future look like? What would you tell me? >> Yeah, I, well, first of all, let's start with the talent war. That, I mean, look, it's real. Our folks are getting recruited like crazy too. Except I think there is a cultural aspect that really causes folks to pause. I also think enabling people to work where they want to work or where they need to work, it's both, that has helped us in our recruitment because the advantage of people do not want to go back to the office. Like, I don't know, I'm speaking for like probably myself and everybody I talk to. I just don't think people want to go back to the office, but we're benefiting from that, because we are actually drawing in talent from companies that are sending folks back to the office. And we gave our employees remotely great tools to be able to work from home. And that has all been a win for us in terms of retaining our staff and drawing in new talent. And I think the other thing and it's a very important point that you raise, is that the future is working in modern tool sets. And one of the things that we did and Jen spoke about yesterday, was around developers want to develop and you've got to give them the tools that they need to perform their jobs as quickly as possible, because digital transformation is ultimately about creating applications that drive business value. >> I think I'm the only one that probably here that wants to go back to the office. If I do one more Zoom call from home, I might go puke. >> I go to the office, but I'm like 15 minutes away, so. >> Oh, I'm about 30 seconds away to really look at my commute. Let's talk about from that cultural perspective and the great resignation, all the things that are going on. You talked about folks getting recruited, that flexibility of meeting your, as you said Jaynene meeting the employees where they are is the same culture that Dell has about meeting its customers where they are. And that's really kind of the foundation of a lot of the announcements that we've heard over the last few days, is really that flexibility to be able to deliver what a great customer experience and a great employee experience. I think to me, they're inextricably linked. >> So I totally agree. >> So this notion of work remotely, et cetera, great. Most people, like you said right now are saying I'm not going back. And I think some kind of hybrid is probably going to be the norm. >> Agree. >> That's cool. But we have a tendency to work longer laps times from home. And so there's that even weekends, it's like everybody's always on we should never get emails on Saturday, now I'm like, I got to look, of course spend an hour or two hour, whatever it is. So how do you balance that with folks? What do you tell people in your organization? >> Yeah, I mean, we're very focused on our employees having quality of life, now we're in IT. Like, let's be real. We have always worked weekends. But I think what we're really really being very thoughtful about, is that balance for our employees that we're not creating more stress in their lives. Like we want them to have a great quality experience. A lot of that happens with the technology that we have built under the covers, because that has allowed our developers to work less weekends and has allowed our folks to release independently, which is kind of in the world of IT, that's the utopia, you want to get to let folks work independently. And that has actually freed up the time for developers to have to work as if we all work together, and now they can work independently. And that has actually helped with quality of life. So it's, it is still though a combination of all those things. It is also having leadership team that values that. And I think that's what we have. >> What's cool about this conversation. We're talking about IT, we haven't even, we haven't talked tech. Now are you guys techies? >> Yeah. >> You are? >> Yeah. >> Okay. So one of the things, I was in one of these private analyst meetings, a handful of analysts with (indistinct) and I was asking her about the cloud migration, that's a lot of CIOs top priority. It's obviously, her response essentially was, yeah, well, we are modernizing our infrastructure, That's essentially our cloud. We've got our own cloud. I wonder if you could like double click on that a little bit. 'Cause security number one for most IT organizations, cloud number two, she translated that into, way I interpret that data is modernization. I wonder if you could give us your perspective on that. >> I think the first thing as you map out, hey, what do we want our modern environment to be? And you make those technology decisions, just like with our people, we need to design optionality in and make sure that we stay as flexible and nimble as we can. The same is true for our technology environment. So that's why you see whether we're talking about what we offer to our customers or how we're modernizing our environment. We want to make sure we've got flexibility and optionality because what we do all know is we don't know what the future will bring. >> How did you guys get into tech? When did you fall in love with technology? >> How many years ago? >> No, like, like what was, was there something in your life that like appealed to you or? >> It's actually really funny story. My father was a mainframe programmer, so. >> Okay, So he was doing COBOL. >> I swear I wanted nothing to do with it. And then I found myself in those shoes. >> Yeah. Horrible. >> Yeah, horrible. >> It's in your DNA. >> I think so. I think so. >> Okay. So you just, when things started to get more modern. >> I just thought it was interesting. Like I'm almost 30 years in. Like I just thought it was really interesting. >> That's awesome. >> And I still think it is. >> How about you Betsy? >> I actually started on the business side, so I worked with IT through my 20 years at Dell. And when they started shifting to the product model, I was a business partner and I saw these incredible outcomes we were delivering to. And I'm like, oh, look at that cool technology. We were doing like optical character recognition to automate it. It was just, it was super cool. And you know, I'd known Jen for a long time and she said, well, why don't you come over to Dell Digital? And I did, it's been, it been a blast but I started as a business partner. >> But you, then you bring that understanding of the business the outcomes focused to the IT side. And that's probably why you guys make it sound like it's so simple to facilitate the IT business collaboration that so many businesses struggle with >> The magic is to make it simple. >> I agree. >> Yeah totally. >> It's not easy. >> No, it's not easy, but it's possible. >> Well, and that's what drives adoption. >> How have in our final minute or so here, how have the customers, we know what 15,000 customers globally, great customers on stage. We've had some customers on the show this week. How have they been influential in terms of the modernization of Dell Digital in especially the last two years, any interesting stories of customer influence you can share. >> In terms of our modernization efforts? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, look, we share all the time with customers on best practices in IT. And I would really say we have also moved an organization and solved many of the problems, the very problems our customers are trying to address through much of what we've developed within IT. And I think customers are very interested in learning from us and helping them on their own transformation journey. >> Excellent, ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about really what's under the covers of Dell Digital, but it's really about people, process and technologies and collaboration. >> That's right. >> Great use case (indistinct). We appreciate your time. >> We appreciate it back. >> Thanks for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Stick around and be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. It's the biggest hybrid event of the year. One of the few physical events and we're psyched to be here. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm really pleased to bring back the host emeritus, Stu Miniman, somebody I worked with side-by-side, Stu, for 10 years in a setting much like this, many like this. So, good to have you back. >> Dave, it's great to be here with theCUBE team, family here and re:Invent, Dave. I mean, this show, I remember back, Dave, going to you after the first re:Invent we talked, we were like, "We got to be there." Dave, remember the first year we came, the second year of re:Invent, this is the 10th year now, little card tables, gaming companies, all this stuff. You had Jerry Chen on yesterday and Jerry was comparing like, this is going to be like the next Microsoft. And we bet heavy on this ecosystem. And yeah, we all think this cloud thing, it might be real. 20,000 people here, it's not the 50 or 75,000 that we had in like 2018, 2019, but this ecosystem, what's happening in the cloud, multiple versions of hybrid going on with the event and the services, but yeah, phenomenal stuff. And yeah, it's so nice to see people. >> That's for sure. It's something that we've talked about a lot over the years is, and you remember the early days of re:Invent and to this day, just very a strong developer affinity that AWS has done a tremendous job of building that up and it's their raison d'etre, it's how they approach the market. But now you've been at Red Hat for a bit, obviously as well, developer affinity, what have you learned? Specifically as it relates to the cloud, Kubernetes, hottest thing going, you don't want to do an OpenShift commercial, but it's there, you're in the middle of that mix. What have you learned generally? >> Well, Dave, to the comment that you made about developers here, it's developers and the enterprise. We used to have a joke and say, enterprise developer is an oxymoron, but that line between developers doing stuff, early as a cloud, it was stealth computing. It's they're often doing this stuff and central IT is not managing it. So how do the pieces come together? How do apps and infrastructure, how do those pieces come together? And it's something that Red Hat has been doing a long time. Think about the Linux developer. They might've not have been the app developers, the people building Linux and everything, but they had a decent close tie to it. I'm on the OpenShift team. What we do is cloud, Dave, and we've got a partnership here with Amazon. We GAed our native cloud service earlier this year. Andy Jassy helped name it. It is the beautifully named Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS or ROSA. But we've done OpenShift on AWS for more than five years, basically since we were doing Kubernetes, it's been here because of course customers doing cloud, where are they? A lot of them are here in Amazon. So I've been loving talking to a lot of customers, understanding how enterprise adoption is increasing, how we can enable developers and help them move faster. And yeah, I mean the quick plug on OpenShift is our service. We've got an SRE team that is going to manage all of that. A friend of the program, Corey Quinn, says, "Hey, an SRE team like that, because you don't want to manage as an enterprise." You don't want to manage Kubernetes. Yeah, you need to understand some of the pieces, but what is important to your business is the applications, your data and all those things and managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That's one of the reasons you went to the cloud. So therefore changing your model as to how you consume services in the cloud. And what are we seeing with Amazon, Dave? They're trying to build more solutions, simplify deployments, and offer more solutions including with their ecosystem. >> So I want to ask you. You said enterprise developer is kind of an oxymoron, and I remember, years ago I used to hang around with a lot of heads of application development and insurance companies and financial services, pharmaceutical, and they didn't wear hoodies, but they didn't wear suits either. And then when I talked to guys like Jeff Clark, for instance. He talks about we're building an abstraction layer across clouds, blah, blah, blah, which by the way, I think it is the right strategy. I'm like, "Okay, I'll drink some of that Kool-Aid." And then when I come here, we talked to Adam Selipsky. John flew out and I was on the chime. He goes, "Yeah, that's not hybrid. No, this is nothing like, it's not AWS, AWS is cloud." So, square that circle for me, 'cause you're in both worlds and certainly your strategy is to connect those words. Is that cloud? >> Yeah, right. I mean, Dave, we spent years talking about like is private cloud really a cloud? And when we started coming to the show, there is only one cloud. It is the public cloud and Amazon is the paragon of, I don't know what it was. >> Dave: Fake clouds, cloud washing. >> So today, Amazon's putting lots of things into your data center and extending the cloud out to that environment. >> So that's cloud. >> That's cloud. >> What do we call that cloud? What about the reverse? >> What's happening at the edge is that cloud is that extension of what we said from Amazon. If you look at not only Outpost, but Wavelengths and Local Zones and everything else like that. >> Let's say, yes, that's cloud. The APIs, primitives, check. >> Dave, I've always thought cloud is an operating model, not a location. And the hybrid definition is not the old, I did an ebook on this, Dave earlier this year. It's not the decade old NIS definition of an application that spans because I don't get up in the morning as an enterprise and say, "Oh, let me look at the table of how much Google is charging me or Microsoft or Amazon," or wake up one morning and move from one cloud to the other. Portability, follow the sun type stuff, does it ever happen? Yes, but it is rare thing. Applications oftentimes get pulled apart. So we've seen if you talk about AI, training the cloud, then transact and do things at the edge. If I'm in an autonomous vehicle or in a geosynchronous satellite, I can't be going back to the cloud to process stuff. So I get what I need and I process there. The same thing hybrid, oftentimes I will do my transactional activity in the public cloud because I've got unlimited compute capability, but I might have my repository of data for many different reasons, governance or security, all these things in my own data center. So parts of an application might live there, but I don't just span to go between the public cloud in my data center or the edge, it's specific architectural decisions as to how we do this. And by the way the developer, they don't want to have to think about location. I mean, my background, servers, storage, virtualization, all that stuff, that was very much an infrastructure up look of things. Developers want to worry about their code and make sure that it works in production. >> Okay, let me test that. If it's in the AWS cloud and I think it's true for the other hyperscale clouds too, they don't have to think about location, but they still have to think about location on-prem, don't they? >> Well, Dave, even in a public cloud, you do need to worry about sometimes it's like, "Okay, do I split it between availability zones? How do I build that? How do I do that?" So there are things that we build on top of it. So we've seen Amazon. >> I think that's fair, data sovereignty, you have to think about okay. >> Absolutely, a lot of those things. >> Okay, but the experience in Germany is going to be the same as it is in DC, is it not? >> More or less? There are some differences we'll see off and Amazon will roll things out over time and what's available, you've got cloud. >> For sure, though that's definitely true. That's a maturity thing, right? You've talked a bit, but ultimately they all sort of catch up. I guess my question would be is the delta between, let's say, Fed adoption and East Coast, is that delta narrower, significantly narrow than what you might see on-prem? >> The services are the same, sometimes for financial or political things, there might be some slight differences, but yes, the cloud experience should be the same everywhere from Amazon. >> Is it from a standpoint of hybrid, on-prem to cloud, across cloud? >> Many of the things when they go outside of the Amazon data centers are limited or a little bit different or you might have latency considerations that you have to consider. >> Now it's a tug of war. >> So it's not totally seamless because, David Foyer would tell us there, "You're not going to fight physics." There are certain things that we need to have and we've changed the way we architect things because it's no longer the bottleneck of the local scuzzy connection that you have there, it is now (indistinct). >> But the point I'm making is that gets into a tug of war of "Our way is better than your way." And the answer is depends in terms of your workload and the use case. >> You've looked at some of these new databases that span globes and do things of the like. >> Another question, I don't know if you saw the Goldman Sachs deal this morning, Goldman Sachs is basically turning its business into a SaaS and pointing it to their hedge funds and allowing people to access their data, their tools, their software that they built for their own purposes. And now they're outselling it. Similar to what NASDAQ has done. I can't imagine doing that without containers. >> Yeah, so interesting point, I think. At least six years ago now, Amazon launched serverless and serverless was going to take over the world. I dug into the space for a couple of years. And you had the serverless with camp and you had the container camp. Last year at re:Invent, I really felt a shift from Amazon's positioning that many of the abstraction layers and the tools that help you support those environments will now span between Lambda and containers. The container world has been adding serverless functionality. So Amazon does Fargate. The open-source community uses something called Knative, and just breaking this week. Knative was a project that Google started and it looks like that is going to move over to the CNCF. So be part of the whole Kubernetes ecosystem and everything like that. Oracle, VMware, IBM, Red Hat, all heavily involved in Knative, and we're all excited to see that go into the CNCF. So the reason I say that, I've seen from Amazon, I actually, John and I, when we interviewed Andy Jassy back in 2017, I asked him a follow-up question because he said if he was to build AWS in 2017, "I would start with everything underneath it serverless." I would wonder if following up with Adam or Andy today, I'd said, "Would it be all serverless or would containers be a piece of it?" Because sometimes underneath it doesn't matter or sometimes it can be containers and serverless. It's a single unit in Amazon and when they position things, it's now that spectrum of unit, everything from the serverless through the containers, through... James Hamilton wrote a blog post today about running Xen-on-Nitro and they have a migration service for a mainframe. So what do we know? That one of the only things about IT is almost nothing ever goes away. I mean, it sounded like Amazon declared coming soon the end of life of mainframe. My friends over at IBM might not be quite ready to call that era over but we shall see. All these things take time. Everything in IT is additive. I'm happy to see. It is very much usually an end world when I look at the container and Kubernetes space. That is something that you can have a broad spectrum of applications. So some of my more monolithic applications can move over, my cool new data, AI things, I can build on it, microservices in between. And so, it's a broad platform that spans the cloud, the edge, the data center. So that cloud operating model is easier to have consistency all the places that I go. >> Mainframe is in the cloud. Well, we'll see. Big banks by the next site unseen. So I think Amazon will be able to eat away at the edges of that, but I don't think there's going to be a major migration. They claim it. Their big thing is that you can't get COBOL programmers. So I'm like, "Yeah, call DXC, you'll get plenty." Let's talk about something more interesting. (Stu laughs softly) So the last 10 years was a lot of, a lot about IT transformation and there was a lot more room to grow there. I mean, the four big hyperscalers are going to do 120 billion this year. They're growing at 35%. Maybe it's not a trillion, but there's a $500 billion market that they're going after, maybe more. It looks like there's a real move. You saw that with NASDAQ, the Goldman deal, to really drive into business, deeper business integration in addition to IT transformation. So how do you see the next decade of cloud? What should we be watching? >> So, one of the interesting trends, I mean, Dave, for years we covered big data and big data felt very horizontal in it's approach thing. Hadoop take over the world. When I look at AI solutions, when I look at the edge computing technologies that happen, they're very vertically driven. So, our early customers in edge adoption tend to be like telco with the 5G rollout manufacturing in some of their environments. AI, every single industry has a whole set of use cases that they're using that go very deep. So I think cloud computing goes from, we talked about infrastructure as a service to it needs to be more, it is solution, some of these pieces go together. When Adam got up on stage and talked about how many instance types they have on Amazon, Dave, it's got to be 2X or 4X more different instant types than if I went to go to HPE or Dell and buy a physical server for my environment. So we need to have areas and guidance and blueprints and heck, use some of that ML and AI to help drive people to the right solutions because we definitely have the paradox of choice today. So I think you will find some gravity moving towards some of these environments. Gravatar has been really interesting to watch. Obviously that Annapurna acquisition should be down as one of the biggest ones in the cloud era. >> No lack of optionality to your point. So I guess to the point of deeper business integration, that's the big question, will Amazon provide more solution abstractions? They certainly do with Connect. We didn't hear a ton of that this show. >> Interestingly. (Dave speaking indistinctly) So the article that you and John Furrier wrote after meeting with Adam, the thing that caught my eye is discussion of community and ecosystems. And one of the things coming after, some, big communities out there like, you and I lived through the VMware ecosystem in that very tight community. There are forming little areas of community here in this group, but it's not a single cloud community. There are those focus areas that they have. And I do love to see, I mean, obviously working for Red Hat, talking about the ecosystem support. I was very happy to hear Adam mention Red Hat in the keynote as one of the key hybrid partners there. So, for Amazon to get from the 60 million, the 60 billion to the trillion dollar mark down the road, it's going to take a village and we're happy to be a part of it. >> Hey, great to have you back, enjoy the rest of the show. This is, let's see, day three, we're wrapping up. We're here again tomorrow so check it out. Special thanks to obviously AWS is our anchor sponsor and of course, AMD for sponsoring the editorial segments of our event. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. See you tomorrow. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching CUBE's worldwide leader in tech coverage. We're in person on the show floor. It's also a hybrid event, online as well. CUBE coverage online with Amazon re:Invent site. Great content all around, amazing announcements, transformation in all areas are exploding and in innovation, of course, we have innovation here with Sandy Carter, the worldwide public sector vice-president of partners and programs for Amazon Web Services. Sandy, welcome back, CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you and great to see you in person again. It's so exciting. The energy level, oh my God. >> Oh my God. It's so much. Thanks, great keynote. Good to see you again in person. A lot of action, give us the top announcements. What's going on? What are the top 10 AWS announcements? >> Yeah, so we, this year for 2022, as we frame it out, we decided on a 3D strategy, a three-dimensional strategy. So we started with destination then data and then delivery. So if I could do them in that order, does that sound good? >> Yeah. Destination. >> So let's start with destination. So I got this from one of the customers and he said to me, "look, Sandy, I thought it was all going to be about getting to the cloud. But when I got to the cloud, I realized it wasn't about just in the cloud, it was about what you do in the cloud." And so we made some announcements this morning, especially around migration, modernization, and optimization. So for migration, we have the mainframe announcement that Adam made, and then we also echoed it. Cause most of the mainframes today sit in public sector. So this is a managed service, it's working with Micro Focus, one of our partners. And Lockheed Martin one of our partners is one of the first into the mainframe migration, which is a service and services to help customers transform their business with the mainframe. And then as we compliment them, we look at that we also have modernization occurring. So for example, IoT. IDC tells us that IoT and that data has increased four times since COVID because now devices and sensors are tracking a lot of data. So we made an announcement around smart cities and we now have badging for our partners. We have 18 partners solutions now in smart cities. So working backwards from the partners they were talking about given now COVID is kind of in the midst of where it is smart cities and making those cities work better in public transportation and utility, it's just all where it's at. And then the final announcement in that category is containers. So 60% of our customers said that they're going to be using containers. So we announced a Rapid Adoption Assistance program for our partners to be able to help our customers move to containers overall. >> So mainframe migration, I saw that on stage, but Micro Focus, that was a good job. Get that legacy out of the way, move to the cloud. You've got smart cities, which is basically IoT, which brings cloud to the edge. And then containerization for the cloud native, either development or compatibility, interoperability kind of sets that table. That's the destination. >> That's right. That's right. Because all of those things, you know, you've got to get the mainframe to the cloud, but then it's about modernizing, right? Getting rid of all that COBOL code and then, you know, IoT and then making sure that you are ready to go with containers. It's the newest- >> So you've got the 3D, destination, data and delivery. >> That's right. >> Okay. Destination, check. Cloud. Cloud destination. >> Yeah. >> I'm putting dots together in real time. >> Destination cloud. There you go. You've got it. >> I'm still with it after all these interviews. >> Yeah, there you go. >> Data, I'll say killer Swami's onstage today, whole new data, multiple databases. What's the data focus in this area? >> So for our partners, first it's about getting the data to the cloud, which means that we need a way to really migrate it. So we announced an initiative to help get that data to the cloud. We had a set of partners that came on with us early on in this initiative to move that data to the cloud, it's called a Rapid Adoption Assistance, which helps you envision where you want to go with your data. Do you want to put it in a data lake? Do you want data stored as it is? What do you want to visualize? What do you want to do with analytics? So envision that and then get enablement. So all the new announcements, all the new services get enablement and then to pilot it. And then the second announcement in this area is a set of private offers in the marketplace. Our customers told us that they love to go after data, but that there's too many pieces and moving parts. So they need the assessment bundled with the managed service and everything bundled together so it's a solution for them. So those were our two announcements in the data area. >> So take me through the private marketplace thing, because this came up when I was talking with Stephen Orban who's now running the marketplace. What does that mean? So you're saying that this private offer is being enabling the suppliers and in government? >> Yeah. So available in the marketplace, a lot of our government agencies can buy from the marketplace. So if they have a contract, they can come and buy. But instead of having to go and say, okay, here's an assessment to tell me what I should do, now here's the offering, and now here's the managed service, they want it bundled together. So we have a set of offerings that have that bundled together today with the set of our great public sector partners. >> So tons of data action, where's the delivery fit in? >> So delivery. This one is very interesting because our customers are telling us that they no longer want just technology skills, they also need industry skills too. So they're looking for that total package. For example, you know, the state of New Jersey when hurricane Ida hit, category four storm, they wanted someone who obviously could leverage all the data, but they wanted someone who understood disaster response. And so Maxar fits that bill. They have that industry specialty along with the technology specialty. And so for our announcements here, we announced a new competency, which is an industry competency for energy. So think about renewables and sustainability and low carbon. These are the partners that do that. We have 32 different partners who met the needs of that energy competency. So we were able to GA that here today. The other really exciting announcement that we made was for small businesses to get extra training, it's called Think Big for Small Business communities. So we announced last year virtually, Think Big for Small Business. We now have about 200 companies who are part of that program, really getting extra help as diverse companies. Women owned, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned businesses, right? But now what they told us was in addition to the AWS help, what they loved is how we connected them together and we almost just stumbled upon it. I was hosting some meetings and I had Tia from Bellflower, I had Lisa from DLZP together and they got a lot of value just being connected. And we kept hearing that over and over and over again. So now we've programmatized that so it's more scalable than me introducing people to each other. We now have a program to introduce those small business leaders to each other. And then the last one that we announced is our AWS government competency is now the largest competency at AWS. So the government competency, which is pretty powerful. So now we're going to do a focus enhancement for federal. So all of our federal partners with all that opportunity can now take advantage of some private advisory council, some additional training that will go on there, additional go-to market support that they can use to help them. >> Okay. I feel like my brain is going to explode. Those are just the announcements here. There's a lot going. >> Yeah. There's a lot going on. >> I mean it's so much you've got to put them into buckets. Okay. What's the rationale around 3D? Delivery, data... I mean, destination, delivery, data. Destination, meaning cloud. Data, meeting data. And delivery meaning just new ways to get up and running- >> Skills. >> To get this delivery for the services. >> Yep. >> Okay. So is there a pattern emerging? What can you say? Cause remember we talked about this before a year ago, as well as in person at your public sector summit with your partners. Is there a pattern emerging that you're seeing here? Cause lots of the announcements are coming, done with the mainframes. Connect on your watch has been a big explosion. Adam Slansky told me personally, it's on fire. And public sector, we saw a lot of that. >> Well, in fact, you know, if you look at public sector, three factoids that we shared this morning in the keynote. Our public sector partners grew 54% this year, this is after last year we grew 45%. They grew the number of certifications that they had by 40% and the number of new customers by 32%. I mean, those are unreal numbers. Last year we did 28% new customers and we thought that was the cat's meow, now we're at 32%. So our partners are just exploding in this public sector space right now. >> It's almost as if they have an advantage because they dragged their feet for so long. >> It's true. It's true. COVID accelerated their movement to the cloud. >> A lot of slow moving verticals because of the legacy and whether it's regulation or government funding or skills- >> Or mainframes. >> All had to basically move fast, they had no excuses. And then the cloud kind of changes everyone's mindset. How about the culture? I want to ask you about the culture in the public sector, because this is coming up a lot. Again, a lot of your customers that I'm interviewing all talk... and I try to get them to talk about horizontally scalable and machine learning, and they're always, no, it's culture. >> Yeah. It's true. >> Culture is the number one thing. >> It is true. You know, culture eats strategy for lunch. So even if you have a great strategy around the cloud, if you don't have that right culture, you won't win in the marketplace. So we are seeing this a lot. In fact, one of our most popular programs is PTP, Partner Transformation Program. And it lays out a hundred day program on cloud best practices. And guess what's the number one topic? Culture. Culture, governance, technology, all of those things are so important right now. And I think because, you know, a lot of the agencies and governments and countries, they had moved to the cloud now that they're in the cloud, they went through that pain during COVID, now they're seeing all the impact of artificial intelligence and containers and blockchain and all of that, right? It's just crazy. >> That's a great insight. And I'll add to that because I think one of the things I've observed, especially with your partners is the fear of getting eliminated by technology or the fear of having a job change or fear of change in general went away once they started using it because they saw the criticality of the cloud and how it impacted their job, but then what it offered them as new opportunities. In fact, it actually increases more areas to innovate on and do more, whether it's job advancement or cross training or lateral moves, promotion, that's a huge retention piece. >> It really is. And I will tell you that the movement to the cloud enabled people to see it wasn't as scary as they thought it was going to be, and that they could still leverage a lot of the skills that they had and learn new ones. So I think it is. And this is one of the reasons why, I was just talking with Maureen launching that 29 million training program for the cloud, that really touches public sector because there is so many agencies, countries, governments that need to have that training. >> You're talking about Maureen Lonergan, she does the training. She's been working on that for years. >> Yeah. >> That's the only getting better and better. >> Yeah. >> Well Sandy, I've got to ask you, since you have a few minutes left, I want to ask you about your journey. >> Yeah. >> We've interviewed you going back a long time look where we are now. >> I know. It's incredible. >> Look at these two sets going on at CUBE. >> You've been an incredible voice on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you on because you're innovative. You're always moving like a shark. You can't sit still. You're always innovating. Still going on, you had the great women's luncheon from 20 to 200. >> Yeah, we grew. So we started out with 20 people back five years ago and now we had about 200 women and it was incredible because we do different topics. Our topic was around empathy and empathetic leadership. And you know how you can really leverage that today, back with the skills and your people. You know, given that Amazon just announced our new leadership principle about wanting to be the Earth's most employee centric company. It fits right in, empathetic leadership. And we had amazing women at that luncheon that told some great stories about empathy that I think will live in our hearts forever. >> And the other thing I want to point out, we had some of the guests on sitting on theCUBE. We had Linda Jojo from United airlines. >> Oh yeah. >> And a little factoid, yesterday in the keynote, 50% of the speakers were women. >> I know. The first time I did a blog post on it, like we had two amazing women in STEM and we had, you know, the black pilot that was highlighted. So it's showing more diversity. So I was just so excited. Thank you Adam, for doing that because I think that was an amazing, amazing focus here at the conference. >> I wanted to bring up a point. I had a note here to bring up to you. Public sector, you guys doubled the number of partners, large migrations this year. That's a big statoid. You've had 575,000 individuals hold active certifications. Okay. That grew 40% from August 2021, clearly a pandemic impact. A lot of people jumping back in getting their certs, migrating so if they're not... They're in between transitions where they have a tailwind or a headwind, whether you're United Airlines or whether you're Zoom, you got some companies were benefiting from the pandemic and some were retooling. That's something that we talked about actually at the beginning. >> That's right. Absolutely. And I do think that those certifications also demonstrate that customers have raised the bar on what they expect from a partner. It's no longer just like that technology input, it's also that industry side. And so you see the number of certifications going up because customers are demanding higher skill level. And by the way, for the partners we conducted a study with ESG and ESG said that more skilled partners, you drive more margin, profit margin, 42% more profit margin for a higher skilled partner. And we're seeing that really come to fruition with some of these really intense focus on getting more certifications and more training. >> I want to get your thoughts on the healthcare and life science. I just got a note here that tells me that the vertical is one of the fastest growing verticals with 105% year on year growth. Healthcare and life sciences, another important... Again, a lot of legacy, a lot of old silos, forced to expand and innovate with the pandemic growing. >> Yes. You know, government is our largest segment today, our largest competency. Healthcare is our fastest growing segment. So we have a big focus there. And like you said, it's not just around, you know, seeing things stay the same. It's about digital transformation. It's one of the reasons we're also seeing such an increase in our authority to operate program both on the government side and the healthcare side. So we do, you know, FedRAMP and IL5. We had six companies that got IL5, five of them in 2021, which is an amazing achievement. And then, you know, if you think about the healthcare side, our fastest growing compliance is HIPAA and HITRUST. And that ATO program really brings best practices and templates and stronger go to market for those partners too. >> Yeah. I mean, I think it's opportunity recognition and then capture during the pandemic with the cloud. More agility, more speed. >> That's right. >> Sandy, always great to have you on. In the last couple of seconds we have left, summarize the top 10 announcements in a bumper sticker. If you had to kind of put that bumper sticker on the car as it drives away from re:Invent this year, what's on that bumper sticker? What's it say? >> Partners that focus on destination, data and delivery will grow faster and add more value to their customers. >> There it is. The three dimension, DDD. Delivery... Destination, data and delivery. >> There you go. >> Here on theCUBE, bringing you all the data live on the ground here, CUBE studios, two sets wall-to-wall coverage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year, two live sets, two remote studios with AWS, and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year, going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, John Kodumal, the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management. John, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on theCUBE a couple of times, but it's been awhile. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly, what it is that you do and what's new. >> Yeah. LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags, to deliver better software faster, a better product experiences through the use of feature flags. >> One thing that I noticed on the website is you guys have some big customer names, Square, I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? >> Yeah. You know, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the Fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And, you know, I think it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to deliver better customer experiences. So, the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from Square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming... They're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company and that's where we help our customers, the customers that are delivering more digital experiences to their consumers. >> That is table stake these days, you mentioned all software, all companies rather becoming software companies. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer and you're right. You mentioned that's a quite a variety, NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it and how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? >> Absolutely. I think the fundamental thing that feature management provides, the simplest thing, that the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in a pre-LaunchDarkly world, when you deploy a new piece of software, you package the artifact up, you put it out on your servers, and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So, if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally, your entire customer base was impacted. And one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what's going on. Are there any bugs? Are there any performance problems? Or is everything's smooth sailing? And if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly, and with a lot of visibility control, scale that release and scale that roll-out out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. >> Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. I know you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. >> Yeah. I've got a number of years of experience working with AWS. So, you mentioned my time prior to starting LaunchDarkly, I was at Atlassian for many years, and I was at Atlassian and during that time period where Atlassian was switching from traditional hosting providers to public cloud, to AWS specifically, and the capabilities that an unlocked, not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. One of the things that we launched almost immediately on my team was the ability to like preview environments through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers desktop, but rather in the cloud. And that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS in particular from the earliest days, we started the platform on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and seeing more and more value. From a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes, and they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. We have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another, or go through modernization efforts and push change out safely as they migrate to a provider like AWS. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half, 20 months or more probably. Since the pandemic started, we've seen so much acceleration to cloud, so much cloud migration, so many companies, not only becoming software companies because they need to be competitive but understanding it's not why move to the cloud, it's when. How have you helped organizations, you know, from the NBC, the media folks to the retailers, to undergo those migrations safely but quickly in a time of such dynamics? >> Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic, a massive amount of change, not just in the move to digital and digital experiences, but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. We had customers in, for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations as they sort of needed to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end-user behavior. So, it was an incredible year. It was a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty, but it was a year where LaunchDarkly, our platform really helped many of our customers sort of navigate the waters and figure out how to get the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. >> Yeah. Rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years, 40 and slipped there. But talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how is LaunchDarkly helping them to address those trends? >> Yeah. One of the trends that we're seeing is the rapidity of change is forcing companies that even companies that were really software driven at their heart to iterate more rapidly. I think there's this story around modernization that is becoming more and more common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non software-driven companies, having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks, but the rapid pace of change is it's shifting things into a world where even companies like my own company, like LaunchDarkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old. And some of the things that we were doing seven years ago, they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies, and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to give our developers the quality of tools and processes that they expect. >> I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses, and I'll be honest, that's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as young as LaunchDarkly needing to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, so many of the practices are different. So even companies like us, we're having to change. I mean, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was going to end up being the winner and sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, none of our workloads were on Kubernetes. And even today, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes, we're sort of like legacy container-based. And that's just us, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. But even for us, we're having to sort of like revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. It's certainly a pace that is massively different from a company that is relying on a legacy software stack, I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, I would compare us to a company that's moving off of mainframes and COBOL or anything like that, but it's still something that we're cognizant of and something that we have to invest in. >> But you bring up a good point. And as we talk about this when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey, it's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's evaluating what you have under the hood, what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change, as the dynamics change, as trends change. >> Yeah. That's exactly how I think about it and that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software-driven are thinking about it too. Just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying what's working, what's not working. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that re-evaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted is increasing. And so, it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's modern. The practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. >> Right, exactly. So, I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDarkly, but can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulate the value that LaunchDarkly is delivering to your customers across industries? >> Yeah. What comes to mind is TrueCar. TrueCar has been a LaunchDarkly customer for a long time. They're great partners of ours. We have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. They shifted their workloads from one cloud provider to another and feature flags were instrumental in that. So, feature flags allowed them to sort of gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another and to sort of in real-time assess whether things were working or not as they did that migration. It took a process that would have been incredibly risky and scary, and made it sort of business as usual for that organization. So, that's a company that I think of that really understands the value of LaunchDarkly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. >> Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well, is this concept of release impact. Compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused A/B Testing. What's the difference? What are the similarities? >> Yeah. You know, A/B Testing has been around for a long time and it's used in software, definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously as a piece of the software development experience. But when I think about the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like A/B testing on a marketing site, you know, testing out the layout of a page, we're testing out which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than I'm building a SaaS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SaaS product. Traditionally, you wouldn't really A/B test that. And part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. And it's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, pry it out in production and then say, "You know what, that didn't work. That million dollar expense that we just made. We're just going to roll that back and not use it." So, that's sort of the way I think about the difference between a traditional optimization focused A/B Testing, where it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where what you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release, but you're not necessarily interested in sort of like A/B testing focused optimization, picking a winner in a short period of time. One of the things that we've realized at LaunchDarkly is those are two separate tasks, they're two separate processes, and they require different analysis and different tools under the hood. And so, we're really excited at LaunchDarkly to be innovating on sort of both fronts, not only just providing a platform for optimization focused A/B Testing, but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization, but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're shipping to customers. >> The impact, and of course, it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors and at any industry. Last question, John, for you as we're coming up on re:Invent in-person, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and see at the LaunchDarkly booth? >> Yeah. You're going to learn a lot about, if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the direction that we're taking, which is I think the exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities. For engineering teams, we help you mitigate risks. We help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. It lets you ship more product and see whether it's working. LaunchDarkly also though provide something on the flip side of that, which is the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform, you get the ability for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more change in production and see whether it's working. And then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers. And you combine that together, and at the end of the day, what LaunchDarkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better, more quickly through the R&D investments that you're making, the software that you're producing. >> And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy, more at bats. Fantastic, John, thank you for joining me talking to the audience about LaunchDarkly, what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address, the partnership with AWS, and what folks can learn when they visit the LaunchDarkly booth at re:Invent. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Me too, for John Kodumal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>>text, you know, consumer opens up their iphone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my eyes. What's it been like being on the shark tank? You know, filming is fun, hang out, just fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big and you get a good tables at restaurants who says texas has got a little possess more skin in the game today in charge of his destiny robert Hirschbeck, No stars. Here is CUBA alumni. Yeah, okay. >>Hi. I'm john Ferry, the co founder of silicon angle Media and co host of the cube. I've been in the tech business since I was 19 1st programming on many computers in a large enterprise and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard total of nine years in the enterprise brian's jobs from programming, Training, consulting and ultimately as an executive salesperson and then started my first company with 1997 and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology and I love covering you know, emerging technology as trained as a software developer and love business and I love the impact of software and technology to business to me creating technology that starts the company and creates value and jobs is probably the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to the queue because the Cubans were all the ideas are and what the experts are, where the people are and I think what's most exciting about the cube is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen, entrepreneur ceo of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day in and day out basis, building great companies and the technology business is just not a lot of real time live tv coverage and, and the cube is a non linear tv operation. We do everything that the T. V guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We asked tougher questions, we ask sometimes some light questions. We talked about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation authentic And for shows that have the Cube coverage and makes the show buzz. That creates excitement. More importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. Over 31 million people have viewed the cube and that is the result. Great content, great conversations and I'm so proud to be part of you with great team. Hi, I'm john ferrier. Thanks for watching the cube. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. We are here live on the ground in the expo floor of a live event. The AWS public sector summit. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here for the next two days. Wall to wall coverage. I'm here with Sandy carter to kick off the event. Vice president partner as partners on AWS public sector. Great to see you Sandy, >>so great to see you john live and in person, right? >>I'm excited. I'm jumping out of my chair because I did a, I did a twitter periscope yesterday and said a live event and all the comments are, oh my God, an expo floor a real events. Congratulations. >>True. Yeah. We're so excited yesterday. We had our partner day and we sold out the event. It was rock them and pack them and we had to turn people away. So what a great experience. Right, >>Well, I'm excited. People are actually happy. We tried, we tried covering mobile world congress in Barcelona. Still, people were there, people felt good here at same vibe. People are excited to be in person. You get all your partners here. You guys have had had an amazing year. Congratulations. We did a couple awards show with you guys. But I think the big story is the amazon services for the partners. Public sector has been a real game changer. I mean we talked about it before, but again, it continues to happen. What's the update? >>Yeah, well we had, so there's lots of announcements. So let me start out with some really cool growth things because I know you're a big growth guy. So we announced here at the conference yesterday that our government competency program for partners is now the number one industry in AWS for are the competency. That's a huge deal. Government is growing so fast. We saw that during the pandemic, everybody was moving to the cloud and it's just affirmation with the government competency now taking that number one position across AWS. So not across public sector across AWS and then one of our fastest growing areas as well as health care. So we now have an A. T. O. Authority to operate for HIPPA and Hi trust and that's now our fastest growing area with 85% growth. So I love that new news about the growth that we're seeing in public sector and all the energy that's going into the cloud and beyond. >>You know, one of the things that we talked about before and another Cuban of you. But I want to get your reaction now current state of the art now in the moment the pandemic has highlighted the antiquated outdated systems and highlighted help inadequate. They are cloud. You guys have done an amazing job to stand up value quickly now we're in a hybrid world. So you've got hybrid automation ai driving a complete change and it's happening pretty quick. What's the new things that you guys are seeing that's emerging? Obviously a steady state of more growth. But what's the big success programs that you're seeing right now? >>Well, there's a few new programs that we're seeing that have really taken off. So one is called proserve ready. We announced yesterday that it's now G. A. And the U. S. And a media and why that's so important is that our proserve team a lot of times when they're doing contracts, they run out of resources and so they need to tap on the shoulder some partners to come and help them. And the customers told us that they wanted them to be pro served ready so to have that badge of honor if you would that they're using the same template, the same best practices that we use as well. And so we're seeing that as a big value creator for our partners, but also for our customers because now those partners are being trained by us and really helping to be mentored on the job training as they go. Very powerful program. >>Well, one of the things that really impressed by and I've talked to some of your MSP partners on the floor here as they walk by, they see the cube, they're all doing well. They're all happy. They got a spring in their step. And the thing is that this public private partnerships is a real trend we've been talking about for a while. More people in the public sector saying, hey, I want I need a commercial relationship, not the old school, you know, we're public. We have all these rules. There's more collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that evolving? Because now the partners in the public sector are partnering closer than ever before. >>Yeah, it's really um, I think it's really fascinating because a lot of our new partners are actually commercial partners that are now choosing to add a public sector practice with them. And I think a lot of that is because of these public and private partnerships. So let me give you an example space. So we were at the space symposium our first time ever for a W. S at the space symposium and what we found was there were partners, they're like orbital insight who's bringing data from satellites, There are public sector partner, but that data is being used for insurance companies being used for agriculture being used to impact environment. So I think a lot of those public private partnerships are strengthening as we go through Covid or have like getting alec of it. And we do see a lot of push in that area. >>Talk about health care because health care is again changing radically. We talked to customers all the time. They're like, they have a lot of legacy systems but they can't just throw them away. So cloud native aligns well with health care. >>It does. And in fact, you know, if you think about health care, most health care, they don't build solutions themselves, they depend on partners to build them. So they do the customer doesn't buy and the partner does the build. So it's a great and exciting area for our partners. We just launched a new program called the mission accelerator program. It's in beta and that program is really fascinating because our healthcare partners, our government partners and more now can use these accelerators that maybe isolate a common area like um digital analytics for health care and they can reuse those. So it's pretty, I think it's really exciting today as we think about the potential health care and beyond. >>You know, one of the challenge that I always thought you had that you guys do a good job on, I'd love to get your reaction to now is there's more and more people who want to partner with you than ever before. And sometimes it hasn't always been easy in the old days like to get fed ramp certified or even deal with public sector. If you were a commercial vendor, you guys have done a lot with accelerating certifications. Where are you on that spectrum now, what's next? What's the next wave of partner onboarding or what's the partner trends around the opportunities in public sector? >>Well, one of the new things that we announced, we have tested out in the U. S. You know, that's the amazon way, right, Andy's way, you tested your experiment. If it works, you roll it out, we have a concierge program now to help a lot of those new partners get inundated into public sector. And so it's basically, I'm gonna hold your hand just like at a hotel. I would go up and say, hey, can you direct me to the right restaurant or to the right museum, we do the same thing, we hand hold people through that process. Um, if you don't want to do that, we also have a new program called navigate which is built for brand new partners. And what that enables our partners to do is to kind of be guided through that process. So you are right. We have so many partners now who want to come and grow with us that it's really essential that we provide a great partner, experienced a how to on board. >>Yeah. And the A. P. M. Was the amazon partner network also has a lot of crossover. You see a lot a lot of that going on because the cloud, it's you can do both. >>Absolutely. And I think it's really, you know, we leverage all of the ap in programs that exist today. So for example, there was just a new program that was put out for a growth rebate and that was driven by the A. P. N. And we're leveraging and using that in public sector too. So there's a lot of prosecutes going on to make it easier for our partners to do business with us. >>So I have to ask you on a personal note, I know we've talked about before, your very comfortable the virtual now hybrid space. How's your team doing? How's the structure looks like, what are your goals, what are you excited about? >>Well, I think I have the greatest team ever. So of course I'm excited about our team and we are working in this new hybrid world. So it is a change for everybody uh the other day we had some people in the office and some people calling in virtually so how to manage that, right was really quite interesting. Our goals that we align our whole team around and we talked a little bit about this yesterday are around mission which are the solution areas migration, so getting everything to the cloud and then in the cloud, we talk about modernization, are you gonna use Ai Ml or I O T? And we actually just announced a new program around that to to help out IOT partners to really build and understand that data that's coming in from I O T I D C says that that idea that IOT data has increased by four times uh in the, during the covid period. So there's so many more partners who need help. >>There's a huge shift going on and you know, we always try to explain on the cube. Dave and I talked about a lot and it's re platform with the cloud, which is not just lift and shift you kind of move and then re platform then re factoring your business and there's a nuance there between re platform in which is great. Take advantage of cloud scale. But the re factoring allows for this unique advantage of these high level services. >>That's right >>and this is where people are winning. What's your reaction to that? >>Oh, I completely agree. I think this whole area of modernizing your application, like we have a lot of folks who are doing mainframe migrations and to your point if they just lift what they had in COBOL and they move it to a W S, there's really not a lot of value there, but when they rewrite the code, when they re factor the code, that's where we're seeing tremendous breakthrough momentum with our partner community, you know, Deloitte is one of our top partners with our mainframe migration. They have both our technology and our consulting um, mainframe migration competency there to one of the other things I think you would be interested in is in our session yesterday we just completed some research with r C T O s and we talked about the next mega trends that are coming around Web three dato. And I'm sure you've been hearing a lot about web www dot right? Yeah, >>0.04.0, it's all moving too fast. I mean it's moving >>fast. And so some of the things we talked to our partners about yesterday are like the metaverse that's coming. So you talked about health care yesterday electronic caregiver announced an entire application for virtual caregivers in the metaverse. We talked about Blockchain, you know, and the rise of Blockchain yesterday, we had a whole set of meetings, everybody was talking about Blockchain because now you've got El Salvador Panama Ukraine who have all adopted Bitcoin which is built on the Blockchain. So there are some really exciting things going on in technology and public sector. >>It's a societal shift and I think the confluence of tech user experience data, new, decentralized ways of changing society. You're in the middle of it. >>We are and our partners are in the middle of it and data data, data data, that's what I would say. Everybody is using data. You and I even talked about how you guys are using data. Data is really a hot topic and we we're really trying to help our partners figure out just how to migrate the data to the cloud but also to use that analytics and machine learning on it too. Well, >>thanks for sharing the data here on our opening segment. The insights we will be getting out of the Great Sandy. Great to see you got a couple more interviews with you. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you And thanks for all your support. You guys are doing great. Your partners are happy you're on a great wave. Congratulations. Thank you, john appreciate more coverage from the queue here. Neither is public sector summit. We'll be right back. Mhm Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm robert Herjavec. People obviously know you from shark tank

(high intensity music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit live in D.C. We're in-person, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube. I'm here with Max Peterson, the Head of Public Sector, Vice President. Max, great to see you in in-person event. >> Great to be here. We're in-person and we're also live streaming. So, we're here, however customers, however partners want to participate. >> I got to say, I'm very impressed with the turnout. The attendance is strong. People excited to be here. We're not wearing our masks cause we're on stage right now, but great turnout. But it's a hybrid event. >> It is. >> You've got engagement here physically, but also digitally as well with theCube and other live streams everywhere. You're putting it everywhere. >> It's been a great event so far. We did a pre-day yesterday. We had great participation, great results. It was about imagining education. And then today, from the executive track to the main tent, to all of the learning, live streaming 'em, doing things in person. Some things just don't translate. So, they'll won't be available, but many things will be available for viewing later as well. So all of the breakout sessions. >> The asynchronous consumption, obviously, the new normal, but I got to say, I was just on a break. I was just walking around. I heard someone, two people talking, just cause I over walk pass them, over hear 'em, "Yeah, we're going to hire this person." That's the kind of hallway conversations that you get. You got the programs, you got people together. It's hard to do that when you're on a virtual events. >> Max: It's hard. The customers that we had up on stage today, the same sort of spontaneity and the same sort of energy that you get from being in-person, it's hard to replicate. Lisa from State of Utah, did a great job and she got an opportunity to thank the team back home who drove so much of the innovation and she did it spontaneously and live. You know, it's a great motivator for everybody. And then Lauren from Air force was phenomenal. And Suchi, our "Imagine Me and You" artist was just dynamite. >> I want to unpack some of that, but I want to just say, it's been a really change of a year for you guys at Public Sector. Obviously, the pandemic has changed the landscape of Public Sector. It's made it almost like Public-Private Sector. It's like, it seems like it's all coming together. Incredible business performance on your end. A lot of change, a lot of great stuff. >> We had customers we talked today with SBA, with VA, with NASA, about how they just embraced the challenge and embraced digital and then drove amazing things out onto AWS. From the VA, we heard that they took tele-health consultations. Get this from 25,000 a month to 45,000 a day using AWS and the Cloud. We heard SBA talk about how they were able to turn around the unemployment benefits programs, you know, for the unemployed, as a result of the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks. And then, scaled their systems up just to unbelievable heights as President Biden announced the news. >> You had a lot of announcement. I want to get to a couple of them. One of them was the health equity thing. What is that about? Take us through that announcement. >> So the pandemic, it was hard. It was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory, but one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else where the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action. And in particular, in the space of health, healthcare equity. We saw simply communities that didn't have access and weren't included in the same sorts of responses that the rest of the community may have been included in. And so we launched this global initiative today to power health equity solutions. It's a $40 million program. Lasts for three years. And it's open to customers or it's open to partners. Anybody who can contribute to three different areas of health equity. It's people who are leveraging data to build more equal, more sustainable health systems. Is people that are using analytics to do greater study of socioeconomic and social situational conditions that contribute to health inequities. And then finally, it's about building systems that deliver more equitable care to those who are underserved around the world. >> So, just to get this right, 40 million. Is that going to go towards the program for three years and are you going to dolo that out or as funding, or is that just a fund the organization? >> It's actually very similar to the development diagnostic initiative that we ran when COVID hit. We've launched the program. We're welcoming applications from anybody who is participating in those three developmental areas. They'll get Cloud credits. They'll get technical consulting. They may need professional services. They'll get all manner of assistance. And all you have to do is put in an application between now and November 15th for the first year. >> That's for the health equity? >> For the health equity. >> Got it. Okay, cool. So, what's the other news? You guys had some baseline data, got a lot of rave reviews from ACORE. I interviewed Constance and Thompson on the Cube earlier. That's impressive. You guys really making a lot of change. >> Well, you're hundred percent right. Sustainability is a key issue from all of our customers around the world. It's a key issue for us, frankly, as inhabitants of planet earth, right? >> John: Yeah. >> But what's really interesting is we've now got governments around the world who are starting to evaluate whether they're not their vendors have the same values and sustainability. And so that the AWS or the Amazon Climate Pledge is a game changer in terms of going carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of most sort of other programs of record. And then with ACORE, we announced the ability to actually start effecting sustainability in particular parts around the world. This one's aim at that. >> But the key there is that, from what I understand is that, you guys are saying a baseline on the data. So, that's an Amazonian kind of cultural thing, right? Like you got to measure, you can't know what you're doing. >> The world is full of good intentions, but if you want to drive change at scale, you've got to figure out a way to measure the change. And then you've got to set aggressive goals for yourself. >> That's really smart. Congratulations! That's a good move. Real quick on the announcement at re:Invent, you've talked about last re:Invent, you're going to train 29 million people. Where are you on that goal? >> Well, John, we've been making tremendous progress and I'm going to use theCube here to make a small teaser. You know, stay tuned for our re:Invent conference that comes up shortly because we're actually going to be sharing some more information about it. But we've done digital trainings, self-training, online skills workshops. We just took a program called re/Start, which serves an unemployed or underemployed individuals. We launched that around the world and we're really excited. Today, we announced we're bringing it to Latin America too. So we're expanding into Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. And the amazing thing about that re/Start program, it's a 12 week intensive program. Doesn't require skills in advance. And after 12 weeks, 90% of the people graduating from that course go right onto a job interview. And that's the real goal, not just skills, but getting people in jobs. >> Yeah. The thing about the Cloud. I keep on banging the drum. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the level up, you don't need to have a pedigree from some big fancy school. The Cloud, you can be like top tier talent from anywhere. >> And you heard it from some of our speakers today who said they literally helped their teams bootstrap up from old skills like COBOL, you know, to new skills, like Cloud. And I will tell you, you know, right now, Cloud skills are still in a critical shortage. Our customers tell us all the time they can use every single person we can get to 'em. >> I'm going to tell my son, who's a sophomore in CS. I'm like, "Hey, work on COBOL Migration to AWS. You'll be a zillionaire." (John and Max laughs) No one knows what the passwords of the COBOL. I love that 80s jazzy jokes from two re:Invents ago. (John laughs) I got to ask you about the National-Local Governments, how they're monetizing Cloud of the past 18 months. What have you seeing at that level? >> Yeah. National and Local Governments, of course, were tremendously impacted first by the pandemic itself and the health concerns around it, but then all of the secondary effects, you know, unemployment. And immediately, you needed to put into action unemployment benefits systems. We work with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 15 other States across the U.S. You know, to have those systems in place in like weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then you saw things progress, to the point where we had States across the country, standing up call centers on Amazon Connect. Instantly, they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce, as opposed to their old call center technology. So, across the U.S. we saw those. And in fact, around the world, as governments mobilized to be able to respond to citizens. But the final thing that I think is really incredible, is though is the way that the AWS teams and partners sprung into action to work with National Governments around the world. Over 26 National Governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The largest to date, being in India, where in a single day, the vaccine management system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations. Which is more than the population of New York State in one week and one day. >> Wow. That's good. That's great progress. I got to say, I mean, that kind of impact is interesting. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier, talking about the Virginia impact with the Amazon $220 million being spread over a few Counties just in one year. The partnership between business... and governments with the Cloud, so much more agility. This really strikes at the core of the future of government. >> Max: I think so. People have talked about private-public partnerships for a long time. I'm really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team is doing around the world in those types of public private partnerships. Whether they're in skilling and workforce with partnerships, like eight different States across the U.S. to deliver skills, training through community college based systems. Whether it's with healthcare systems. Like NHS or GEL over in the UK, to really start applying cloud-scale analytics and research to solve the problems that eventually you're going to get us to personalized healthcare. >> That's a great stuff. Cloud benefits are always good. I always say the old joke is, "You hang around the barbershop long enough, you'll get a haircut." And if you get in the Cloud, you can take advantage of the wave. If you don't get on the wave, your driftwood. >> And States found that out, in fact. You'd have customers who were well on their journey. They were really able to turn on a dime. They pivoted quickly. They delivered new mission systems with customers. Those who hadn't quite progressed to the same state, they found out their legacy. IT systems were just brittle and incapable of pivoting so quickly to the new needs. And what we found, John, was that almost overnight, a business, government, which was largely in-person and pretty high touch had to pivot to the point where their only interaction was now a digital system. And those who- >> John: Middle of the day, they could have race car on the track, like quickly. >> Well, we've got it. We do have race cars on the track, right? Every year we've got the artificial intelligence powered Amazon DeepRacer and Red River on the track. >> I can see it. Always a good showing. Final question. I know you got to go on and I appreciate you coming on- >> It's been great. >> with all your busy schedule. Looking ahead. What tech trends should we be watching as Public Sector continues to be powered by this massive structural change? >> Well, I think there's going to be huge opportunity in healthcare. In fact, this afternoon at four o'clock Eastern, we're talking with Dr. Shafiq Rab from Wellforce. He and folks at Veterans Affairs to tell you telehealth and telemedicine are two, the areas where there's still the greatest potential. The number of people who now are serviced, and the ability to service a population far more broadly dispersed, I think has dramatic potential in terms of simply making the planet more healthy. >> Like you said, the pandemics have exposed the right path and the wrong path. And agility, speed, new ways of doing things, telemedicine. Another example, I interviewed a great company that's doing a full stack around healthcare with all kinds of home, agents, virtual agents, really interesting stuff. >> It is. I think it's going to change the world. >> John: Max Peterson, Head of Public Sector. Thank you for coming on theCube, as always. >> John, it's my pleasure. Love the cube. We've always had a good time. >> Yeah. Great stuff. >> Peter: We'll keep on making this difference. >> Hey, there's too many stories. We need another Cube here. So many stories here, impacting the world. Here at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>mhm >>Hello welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo alto California and john for with the cube we had a great conversation around the rise of the cloud and the massive opportunities and challenges around analytics data ai suggestion. Air ceo of thought spot is here with me for conversation. Great to see you. Welcome back to the cube. How are you? >>Well john it is so good to be back. I wish that we could do one of those massive set up that you have and do this face to face but zoom is not bad. >>You guys are doing very well. We have been covering you guys been covering the progress um great technology enabled business. You're on the wave of this cloud analytics you're seeing, we've seen massive changes and structural changes for the better. It's a tailwind for anyone in the cloud data business. And you also on the backdrop of all that the Covid and now the covid is looking at coming out of covid with growth strategies. People are building modern or modernizing their infrastructure and data is not just a department, it's everywhere. You guys are in the middle of this. Take us through what's the update on thought spot. What are you guys doing? What do you see the market right now? Honestly, delta variants coming coming strong but we think will be out of this soon. Where where are >>we look I think it all starts with the users like you said the consumers are demanding more and more from the business they are interacting with. You're no longer happy with being served like uh I'm gonna put you all in a bucket and then Delaware services to you. Everyone's like look look at me, I have likes and dislikes that is probably going to be different from someone that you think are similar to me. So unless you get to know me and deliver bespoke services to me, I'm gonna go somewhere else who does that And the call that the way you do that is through the data that I'm giving to you. So the worst thing you can do is to take my data and still treat me like an average and numbers and what's happening with the cloud is that it is now possible and it wasn't okay. So I grew up in India where newspapers will always have stock market summary on like one full page full of takers and prices and the way it used to work is that you wake up in the morning you look at the newspaper, I don't know if you have had the same thing and then you call your broker is based on in place of that. Can you imagine doing that now? I mean the information is at your fingertips. Hurricane IDa either is actually going to enter in Louisiana somewhere. What good is it? Yesterday morning state on this morning state if I'm trying to make a decision on whether I should pack my stuff and move away or you know finding to from home depot supply chain manager. I shouldn't figure out what should I be doing for Louisiana in the next two days, this is all about the information that's available to you. If you plan to use it and deliver better services for your consumer cloud makes it possible. >>You know, it's interesting you mentioned that the old way things were it seems so slow, then you got the 15 minute quotes, then there's now a real time. Everything has to be real time. And clearly there's two major things happening at the same time which makes exciting the business model and the competitive advantages for leaders and business to use data is critical but also on the developer side where apps are being developed if you don't have the data access, the machine learning won't work well. So as machine learning becomes really courted driving ai this modern analytics cloud product that you guys announced brings to bear kind of two major lifts the developer app modernization as well as competitive advantage for the companies that need to deploy this. So you guys have announced this modern approach analytics cloud, so to speak. What are some of the challenges that companies are having? Because you gotta, if you hit both of those you're gonna right a lot of value. What are some of the challenges for people who want to do this modern cloud? >>I think the challenge is basically all inside in the company. If you ask companies why are they failing to modernize? They will point to what's inside, it's not outside the technology is there the stack is the vendors are there, It is sometimes lack of courage at the leadership level which is a huge problem. I'll give an example. Uh, we have recently announced what we call thoughts part everywhere, which is our way of looking at how to modernize and bring the data inside that you're looking forward to where you are because Lord knows we all have enough apps on our Octa or a single sign on. The last thing you need is one more how no matter how good it is, they don't want to log into yet under their tool, whether it's thought spot or not. But the insights that you are talking about needs to be there when you need. And the difference is uh, the fundamental approach of data analytics was built on embedded model. You know what we are proposing is what we call data apps. So the difference between data apps and the typical dashboard being embedded into your analytics model is sort of like think of it. Uh newspapers telephones and the gap in between. So there is newspapers radio that is walkie talkie and telephone. They're all different and newspapers get printed and it comes to you and you read in the morning, you can talk back to it, you can drag and drop, you can change it right walkie talkies on the other hand, you know, you could have one conversation then come back to that. Whereas phone, you can have true direction conversation? They're all different if you think of embedding it is sort of like the newspaper, the information that you can't talk back. So somebody resembling something that came out monday, you're going to a board meeting on Wednesday and you look at that and make decisions. That is not enough in the new world, you just can't do that. It's not about what a lot of tools can actually answer what the real magic the real value for customers are unlocked when you ask three subsequent questions and answer them and they will come down to when you hear what you have to know. So what? Right and then what if and then the last is what next Imagine you can answer those three questions every business person every time no matter how powerful the dashboard is, they will always have the next question. What? So what? Okay the business customers are turning so what is it good, is it bad? Is it normal or the next question is like now what what do I do with it two, the ability to take all these three questions so what and what a fun. Now what? That requires true interactivity, you know, start with an intent and with an action and that is what we are actually proposing with the data apps which is only possible if you're sitting on top of a snowflake or red shift kind of really powerful and massive cloud data warehouse where the data comes and moves with agility. >>So how has this cloud data model rewritten the rules of business? Because what you're bringing up is essentially now full interactivity really getting in, getting questions that are iterating and building on context to each other. But with all this massive cloud data, people are really excited by this. How is it changing business than the rules of business? >>Yeah. So think about, I mean topical things like there is a hurricane able to enter, hit the cost of the United States. It's a moving target. No one knows exactly where it is going to be. There is only 15 models from here. 10, 10 models from Europe that's going to predict which way it's going to take every millimeter change in that map is going to have significant consequences for lives and resources and money. Right. This is true for every business. What cloud does this? Uh you have your proprietary data for example, let's say you're a bank and you have proprietary data, you're launching a new product And the propriety data was 2025 extremely valuable. But what what's not proprietary but what is available to you? Which could make that data so much more relevant if you layer them on top census data, this was a census here. The census data is updated. Do you not want that vaccination leader? We clearly know that purchasing power parity will vary based on vaccinations and county by county. But is that enough? You need to have street by street is county data enough. If you're going to open startup, Mr Starbucks? No, you probably want to know much more granular data. You wanna know traffic. Is the traffic picking up business usually an office space where people are not coming to office or is it more of a shopping mall where people are still showing all of these data is out there for you? What cloud is making it possible? Unlike the old era where you know, your data is an SFP oracle or carry later in your data center, it's available for you with a matter of clicks. What thought sport modern analytics. Cloud is a simple thing. We are the front end to bring all of this data and make sense of it. You can sit on top of any cloud data and then interact with a complete sort of freedom without compromising on security, compliance or relevance. And what happens is the analysts, the people who are responsible for bringing the data and then making sure that it is secure and delivered. They are no longer doing incremental in chart updates and dashboard updates. What they're doing is solving business problems, business people there freely interacting and making bigger decisions. That actually adds value to their consumers. This is what your customers are looking for, your users are looking for and if you're not doing it, your competitor will do that. So this is why cloud is not a choice for you. It's not an option for you. It is the only way and if you fail to take that back the other way is taking the world out of a cliff. >>Yeah, that's I love it. But I want to get this uh topic of thoughts about anywhere, but I want to just close out on this whole idea of modern cloud scale analytics. What technology under the hood do you guys see that customers should pay attention to with thought spot and in general because the scale there. So is it just machine learning? We hear data lakes, you know, you know different configurations of that. Machine learning is always thrown around like a buzzword. What new technology capability should every executive by your customer look for when it comes to really doing analytics, modern in the cloud >>analytics has to be near real time, Which means what two things speed at scale, make sure it's complex, it can deal with complexity in data structure. Data complexity is a huge problem. Now imagine doing that at scale and then delivering with performance. That means you have to rethink Look Tableau grew out of excellent worksheets that is the market leader, it is a $40 billion dollar market with the largest company having only a billion dollars in revenue. This is a massive place where the problems need to be solved differently. So the underlying technology to me are like I said, these three things, number one cannot handle the cloud scale, you will have hundreds of billions of rows of data that you brought. But when you talk about social media sentiment of customers, analysis of traffic and weather patterns, all of these publicly available valuable data. We're talking trillions of rows of data. So that is scale. Now imagine complexity. So financial sector for example, there is health care where you know some data is visible, some data is not visible, some some is public assumption not or you have to take credit data and let it on top of your marketing data. So it becomes more complex. And the last is when you answer ask a question, can you deliver with absolute confidence that you're giving the right answer With extremely high performance and to do that you have to rebuild the entire staff. You cannot take your, you know, stack that was built in 1990s and so now we can do search So search that is built for these three things with the machine learning and ai essentially helping at every step of the way so that you're not throwing all this inside directly to a human, throw it to a i engine and the ai engine curates what is relevant to you, showing it to you. And then based on your interaction with that inside, I improve my own logic so that the next interaction, the next situation is going to be significantly better. My point is you cannot take a triple a map and then try to act like this google maps. One is built presuming and zoom out and learn from you. The other one is built to give you rich information but doesn't talk back. So the staff has to be fundamentally rebuilt for the club. That's what he's doing. >>I love I love to buy direction. I love the interactivity. This topic of thought spot everywhere, which you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you mentioned data apps which by the way I love that concept. I want to do a drill down on that. Uh I saw data marketplace is coming somewhat working but I think it's going to get it better. I love that idea of an app um, and using as developers but you also mentioned embedded analytics. You made a comment about that. So I gotta ask you what's the difference between data apps and embedded analytics? >>Embedded analytics means that uh you know the dashboards that you love but the one that doesn't talk back to you is going to be available inside the app that you built for your other So if a supply chain app that was built by let's say accenture inside that you haven't had your dashboard without logging into tablet. Great. But what you do, what's the big deal? It is the same thing. My point is like I said every time a business user sees a chart. The questions are going to come up. The next 10 question is where the values on earth for example on Yelp imagine if you will piece about I'm hungry. I want to find a restaurant and it says go to this burrito place. It doesn't work like that. It's not good enough. The reason why yell towards is because I start with an intent. I'm hungry. Okay show me all restaurants. Okay I haven't had about it for a while. Let me see the photos. Let me read the reviews. Let me see if my friends have eaten, let me see some menu. Can I walk there? I do all of this but just what underneath it. There is a rich set of data that probably helped have their own secret source and reviews and then you have google map powering some of them. But I don't care all of that is coming together to deliver a seamless experience that satisfies my hunger. Which will be very different from if you use the same map at the same place you might go to an italian place. I go to bed right. That is the power of a data app in business people are still sitting with this. I am hungry. I gotta eat burrito. That's not how it should be in the new world. A business user should have the freedom to add exactly what the customers require looking for and solve that problem without delay. That means every application should be power and enriched with the data where you can interact and customized. That is not something that enterprise customers are actually used to and to do that you need like I said a I and search powering like the google map underneath it, but you need an app like a yelp like app, that's what we deliver. So for example, uh just last week we delivered a service now app on snowflake. You know, it just changes the game. You are thinking about customer cases. You're a large company, you have support coming from Philippines and India some places the quality is good. Some places bad dashboards are not good enough saying that okay, 17% of our customers are unhappy but we are good. That's not the world we live in. That is the tyranny of >>average, >>17% were unhappy. You got to solve for them. >>You mentioned snowflake and they had their earnings. David and I were commenting about how some of the analysts got it all wrong. And you bring up a really good point that kind of highlights the real trend. Not so much how many new customers they got. But there do what customers are doing more. Right? So, so what's happening is that you're starting to see with data apps, it does imply Softwares in there because it's it's application. So the software wrapping around data. This is interesting because people that are using the snowflakes of the world and thought spot your software and your platform, they're doing more with data. So it's not so much. I use snowflake, I use snowflake now I'm going to do more with it. That's the scale kicking. So this is an opportunity to look at that more equation. How do you talk >>with >>when you see that? Because that's the real thing is like, okay, that's I bought software as a service. But what's the more that's happening? What do you see >>that is such an important point? Even I haven't thought about it that john but you're absolutely right. That is sometimes people think of snowflake is taking care of it and no. Yeah, yes, Sarah later used to store once and zeros and they're moving it into club. That is not the point. Like I said, marketplace as an example when you are opening it up for for example, bringing the entire world's data with one click accessible to you securely. That is something you couldn't do on number two. You can have like 100 suppliers and all of a sudden you can now take a single copy of data and then make it available to all of them without actually creating multiple copies and control it differently. That's not something without cloudy, potentially could do. So things like that are fundamentally different. It is much more than like one plus one equals two. It is one plus one is 33. Like our view is that when you are re platform ng like that, you have to think from customer first. What does the customer do? The customer care that you meant from Entre into cloud or event from Teradata snowflake. No, they will care if their lives are better. Are they able to get better services are able to get it faster. That's what it is. So to me it is very simple. The destiny of an insight or data information is action, right? Imagine you're driving a car and if your car updates the gas tank every monday morning, imagine how you know, stressful your life will be for the whole week. I have to wait until next monday wanting to figure out what, whether I have enough gas or not, that's not the new world, that information is there, you need to have it real time and act on it. If you go through the Tesla you realize now that you know, I'm never worried about mileage because it is going to take me to the supercharger because it knows what I need to get to, it knows how long it is going to be, how bad the traffic is. It is synthesizing all of that to give me peace of mind. >>So this is a great >>conversation. That's a >>great question. It's a great conversation because it's really kind of brings in kind of what's happening, you see successful companies that are working with cloud scale and data like you're talking about, it's you get in there, you get the data, the data apps and all of a sudden you hit it, you hit the value equation and it's like almost like discovering oil all of a sudden you have a gusher and then people just see massive increase in value. It's not like the outcome, it's kind of there, you've got to kind of get in there and this is the scale piece and you see people having strategies to do that, they say okay we're gonna get in there, we're going to use the data to iterate but also watch the data learn where's that value, This is that more trend and and there's a successful of the developing. So I have to ask you when you, when you talk about people and culture, um that's not the way it used to be, used to be like okay I'm buying an outcome. I deployed some software mechanisms and at the end of the day there's some value there. Maybe I write it off maybe I, you know, overtime charges and some accounting thing. All changed the culture and the people in charge now are transforming the management techniques. What do you see as a successful mindset for a customer as they managed through these new paradigms and new new success formulas. >>I see a fork in leadership when it comes to courage. There are people with the spine and there are people without the spine and the ones with the spine are absolutely killing it. They are unafraid. They are not saying, look, I'm just going to stick with the incumbents that I've known for the last 20 years. Look, I used to drive a Toyota forever because I love the Toyota. And then you know after Nutanix IPO went to Lexus still Toyota because it's reliable. I don't, I'm not a huge card person. It works. But guess what? I knew they were missing Patrick and I care about the environment. I don't want to keep pushing hydrocarbons out there. It's not politics. I just don't like burning stuff into the earth atmosphere. So when Tesla came out, it's not like I love the quality I don't personally like alone mask, you know after that Thailand fiasco of cave rescue and all of that. But I can clearly see that Toyota is not going to catch up to Tesla in the next 10 years. And guess what? My loyalty is much more to doing the right thing for my family and to the world. And I switched this is what business leaders need to know. They can't simply say, well, tabloid as search to. They're not as good as thought sports. We'll just stick with them because they have done with us. That's what weak leaders do and customers suffer for that. What I see like the last two weeks ago when I was in new york. I met with them. A business leader for one of the largest banks in the world with 25,000 people reporting to him. The person walks into the room wearing shorts and t shirts uh, and was so full of energy and so full of excitement. I thought I'm going to learn from him and he was asking questions about how we do our business in bed and learning from me. I was humbled, I was flawed and I realized that's what a modern business leader looks like. Even if it is one of the largest and oldest banks in the world, that's the kind of people are making big difference and it doesn't matter how all the companies, how old their data is they have mainframes or not. I hear this excuses all the type of er, mainframes, we can't move, we have COBOL going on. And guess what? You keep talking about that and hear leaders like him are going to transform those companies And next thing you know, there are some of the most modern companies in the world. >>Well certainly they, we know that they don't have any innovation strategy or any kind of R and D or anything going on that could be caught flat footed in the companies that didn't have that going on, didn't have the spine or the, the, the vision to, to at least try the cloud before Covid when Covid hit, those companies are really either going out of business or they're hurting the people who were in the cloud really move their teams into the cloud quicker to take advantage of uh, the environment that they had to. So this became a skill issue. So, so this is a big deal. This is a big deal. And having the right skills are people skilled, it will be a, I both be running everything for them. What is your take on that? >>This is an important question. You can't just say you got to do more things or new things and not take care of all things. You know, there's only 89, 10 hours so you can work in their uh, analysts in the Atlantic species constantly if your analysts are sitting there and making incremental dashboards and reports change every day and then backlog is growing for 56 days and the users are unhappy because you're not getting answers and then you ask them to go to new things. It's just not going to be enough and you can hire your way out of it. You have to make sure that if you say that I have 20 100 x product already, I don't want 21st guess what? Sometimes to be five products, you need to probably go to 21 you got to do new things to actually take away the gunk off the old and in that context, the re skilling starts with unburdening, unburdening of menial task, unburned routine task. There is nothing more frustrating than making reports and dashboards that people don't even use And 90% of the time analysts, they're amazing experiences completely wasted when they're making incremental change to tabloid reports. I kind of believe thought spot and self service on top of cloud data takes away all of that without compromising security and then you invest the experienced people. Business experience is so critical. So don't just go and hire university students and say, okay, they'll go come and quote everything the experience that they have in knowing what the business is about and what it matters to their users, that domain experience and then uplevel them res kill them and then bring fresh energy to challenge that and then make sure there is a culture that allows that to happen. These three things. That's why I said leadership is not just about hiring event of firing another, it's about cultivating a culture and living that value by saying, look if I am wrong, call me, call me out in public because I want to show you how I deal with conflict. So this is I love this thing because when I see these large companies where they're making these massive changes so fast, it inspires you to say you know what if they can do it, anyone can do it. But then I also see if the top leadership is not aligned to that. They are just trying to retire without the stock tanking too much and let me just get through two more years. The entire company suffers. >>So that's great to chat with you got great energy, love your business, love the energy, love the focus. Um it's a new wave you're on. It's a big wave um and it's it's relevant, it's cool and relevant and it's the modern way and people have to have a spine to be successful if not for the faint of heart, but the rewards are there if you get this right. This is what I I love about this new environment. Um so I gotta ask you just to kind of close it out. How would you plug the company for the folks watching that might want to engage with you guys. What's the elevator pitch? What's the positioning? How would you describe thought spot in a bumper sticker or in a positioning statement. Take a minute to talk about that. >>Remember martin Anderson said that software is eating the world, I think it is now time to update that data is eating everything including software. If you don't have a way to turn data into bespoke action for your customers. Guess what? Your customers are gonna go somewhere where they that's happening right? You may not be in the data business but the data company is going to take your business. Thought spot is very simple. We want to be the friend tent for all cloud data when it comes to structured because that's where business value numbers is world satisfaction and dissatisfaction for reduces allying it is important to move data to action and thought Spot is the pioneer in doing that through search and I >>I really think you guys want something very powerful. Looking forward to chatting with you at the upcoming eight of a startup showcase. I think data is a developer mindset. It's an app, it's part of everything. It will. Everyone's a data company, everyone is a media company. Data is everything you guys are on something really big and people got a program it with it, make experiences whether it's simple scripts, point and click. That is a new kind of developer out there. You guys are tapping into it. Great stuff. Thank >>you for coming on. Thank you john it's good to talk to you. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto California were remote. We're virtual. That's the cube virtual. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

>>Welcome back to Vienna on 2021 you're watching the Cube and my name is Dave Volonte. You know, the last 10 years of cloud, they were largely about spinning up virtualized compute infrastructure and accessing cheap and simple object storage and some other things like networking. The cloud was largely though a set of remote resources that simplify deployment and supported the whole spate of native applications that have emerged to power the activity of individuals and businesses the next decade, however, promises to build on the troves of data that live in the cloud, make connections to on premises applications and support new application innovations that are agile, iterative, portable and span resources in all in all the clouds, public clouds, private clouds, cross cloud connections all the way out to the near and far edge. In a linchpin of this new application development model is container platforms and container orchestration, which brings immense scale and capability to technology driven organizations, especially as they have evolved from supporting stateless applications to underpinning mission critical workloads as such containers bring complexities and risks that need to be addressed, not the least of which is protecting the massive amounts of data that are flowing through these systems. And with me to discuss these exciting and challenging trends or Danny Allen, who's the ceo of in and Niraj Tolia, the president at Kasten Bivins gentlemen welcome to the cube. >>Thank you delighted to be here with you Dave. >>Likewise, very excited to be a Dave. >>Okay, so Danny big M and a move. Great little acquisition. You're now seeing others try to make similar moves. Why what did you see in cast in? What was the fit? Why'd you make that move? >>Well, I think you nailed it. Dave's. We've seen an evolution in the infrastructure that's being used over the last two decades. So if you go back 20 years, there was a massive digital transformation to enable users to be self service with digital applications. About 2000 or so, 2010, everything started being virtualized. I know virtualization came along before that but virtualization really started to take off because it gave return on investment and gave flexibility all kinds of benefits. But now we're in a third wave which is built on containers. And the amazing thing about containers is that as you said, it allows you to connect multi cloud, hybrid cloud the edge to the core. And they're designed for the consumption world. If you think about the cloud, you can provision things deep provisions things. That's the way that containers are designed the applications and so because they're designed for a consumption based world because they are designed for portability across all of these different infrastructures, it only made sense for us to invest in the industry's leading provider of data protection for kubernetes. And that of course is costume, >>there's some garage, I mean take us back. I mean, you know, container has been around forever. But then, you know, they started to, you know, hit go mainstream and and and and at first, you know, they were obviously ephemeral, stateless apps, kind of lightweight stuff. But but you at the time you and the team said, okay, these are gonna become more complex microservices. Maybe so micro, but you had to have the vision and you made a bet uh maybe take us back to sort of how you saw that and where where's containers have have come from? >>Sure. So let's rewind the clock right. As you said, containers, old technology in the same way virtualization started with IBM mainframes, right, containers in different forms have been around for a while. But I think when the light bulb went off for me was very early days in 2015 when my engineering team, a previous company started complaining. And the reason they were complaining about different other engineering groups and the reason they were complaining was because the right things, things were coming together sooner. We're identifying things sooner. And that's when I said, this is going to be the next wave of infrastructure. The same way watch a light virtualization revolutionized how people built deployed apps. We saw that with containers and in particular in those days we made that bet on commodities. Right? So we said from first Principles and that's where you know, you had other things like Docker, swarm esos, etcetera and we said community, that's going to be the way to go because it is just so powerful and it is, you know, at the end of the day, what we all do is infrastructure. But what we saw was that containers optimizing for the developer, they were optimizing for the people that really build applications, deliver value to all of their and customers. And that is what made us see that even though the initially we only saw stateless applications state will was going to happen because there's just so much momentum behind it And the writing for us at least was on the wall. And that's how we started off on this journey in 2017. >>What are the unique nuances and differences really in terms of protecting containers from a, from a technical standpoint, what what's different? >>So there are a couple of subtle things. Right again, the jokers, you know, I say, is that I'm a recovering infrastructure person have always worked in infrastructure systems in the past and recovering them. But in this case we really had to flip things around right. I've come at it from the cloud disks volumes. VMS perspective, in this case to do the right thing by the customer needed a clean slate approach of coming out from the application down. So what we look at is what does the application look like? And that means protecting, not just the stuff that sits on disk, what your secrets in networking information, all those hundreds of pieces that make up a cloud native application and that involves scale challenges, work, visualisation challenges for admins, KPI So all of that shifts in a very dramatic way. >>So Danny, I mean typically VM you guys haven't done a ton of acquisitions, uh, you've grown organically. So now you, you, you poppin cast in, what does that mean for you from a platform perspective? You know, IBM has this term blue washing when they buy a company did you green wash cast and how did that all work? And again, what does what does it mean from the, from the platform perspective? >>Well, so our platform is designed for this type of integration and the first type of integration we do with any of our technologies because we do have native technologies, if you think about what we do being back up for AWS for Azure, for G C p, we have backup for Acropolis Hyper Visor. These are all native purpose built solutions for those environments and we integrate with what we call being platform services. And one of the first steps that we do of course is we take the data from those native solutions and send it into the repository and the benefit that you get from that is that you have this portable, self describing format that you can move around the vein platform. And so the platform was already designed for this Now. We already showed this at demon. You saw this on the main stage where we have this integration at a data level but it goes beyond that beam platform services allows us to do not just day one operations, but day two operations. Think about um updating the components of those infrastructures or those software components that also allows reporting. So for example you can report on what is protected, what's not protected. So the platform was already designed for this integration model. But the one thing I want to stress is we will always have that stand alone product for kubernetes for uh you know, for the container world. And the reason for that is the administrator for Kubernetes wants their own purpose build solution. They want it running on kubernetes. They want to protect the uniqueness of their infrastructure. If you think about a lot of the container based systems there, They're using structured data. Non structured data. Sure. But they're also using object based storage. They're using message queues. And so they have their nuances. And we want to maintain that in a stand alone product but integrated back into the Corvin platform. >>So we do these we have a data partner called GTR Enterprise Technology Research. They do these quarterly surveys and and they have this metric called net score is a measure of spending momentum and for the last, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 quarters the big four have been robotic process automation. That's hot space. Cloud obviously is hot and then A I of course. And but containers and container orchestration right up there. Those are the Big four that outshine everything else, even things like security and other infrastructure etcetera. So that's good. I mean you guys skating to the puck back in 2015 rush, you've made some announcements and I'm and I'm wondering sort of how they fit into the trends in the industry. Uh, what what's, what's significant about those announcements and you know, what's new that we need to know about. >>Sure. So let me take that one day. So we've made a couple of big interesting announcement. The most recent one of those was four dot release after casting by women platform, right? We call it kitten and right. We've known rate since a couple of weeks colonial pipeline ransom. Where has been in the news in the US gas prices are being driven up because of that. And that's really what we're seeing from customers where we are >>seeing this >>increase in communities adoption today. We have customers from the world's largest banks all the way to weakly connected cruise ships that one could burn. It is on them. People's data is precious. People are running a large fleet of notes for communities, large number of clusters. So what we said is how do you protect against these malicious attacks that want to lock people out? How do you bring in mutability so that even someone with keys to the kingdom can't go compromise your backups and restores, right? So this echoes a lot of what we hear from customers and what we hear about in the news so well protected that. But we still help through to some of the original vision behind cast. And that is, it's not just saying, hey, I give you ransomware protection. We'll do it in such an easy way. The admin barely notices. This new feature has been turned on if they wanted Do it in a way that gives them choice right. If you're running in a public cloud, if you're running at the edge you have choice of infrastructure available to you and do it in a way that you have 100% automation when you have 100 clusters when you deploy on ships, right, you're not going to be able to have we spoke things. So how do you hook into CHED pipelines and make the job of the admin easier? Is what we focused on in that last >>night. And and that's because you're basically doing this at the point of writing code and it's essentially infrastructure as code. We always talk about, you know, you want to you don't want to bolt on data protection as an afterthought, but that's what we've done forever. Uh This you can't >>so in fact I would say step before that day, right are the most leading customers we work with. Right to light up one of the U. S. Government's largest contractors. Um Hey do this before the first line of code is written right there on the scalp cloud as an example. But with the whole shift left that we all hear the cube talks a lot about. We see at this point where as you bring up infrastructure, you bring up a complete development environment, a complete test environment. And within that you want to deploy security, you want to deploy backup your to deploy protection at day zero before the developer in so it's the first line of cordon. So you protected every step of the journey while trying to bolt it on the sound. Seemingly yes, I stitched together a few pieces of technology but it fundamentally impacts how we're going to build the next generation of secure applications >>Danny, I think I heard you say or announced that this is going to be integrated into Wien backup and replication. Um can you explain what that took? Why? That's important. >>Yeah. So the the timeline on this and when we do integrations from these native solutions into the core platform, typically it begins with the data integration, in other words, the data being collected by the backup tool is sent to a repository and that gives us all the benefits of course of things like instant recovery and leveraging, de doop storage appliances and all of that step to typically is around day to operations, things like pushing out updates to that native solutions. So if you look at what we're doing with the backup for AWS and Azure, we can deploy the components, we can deploy the data proxies and data movers. And then lastly there's also a reporting aspect to this because we want to centralize the visibility for the organization across everywhere. So if your policy says hey I need two weeks of backups and after two weeks and I need weekly backups for X amount of time. This gives you the ability to see and manage across the organization. So what we've demonstrated already is this data level integration between the two platforms and we expect this to continue to go deeper and deeper as we move forward. The interesting thing right now is that the containers team often is different than the standard data center I. T. Team but we are quickly seeing the merge and I think the speed of that merging will also impact how quickly we integrate them within our platform. >>Well I mean obviously you see this for cloud developers and now you're bringing this to any developers and you know, if I'm a developer and I'm living in an insurance company, I've been, you know, writing COBOL code for a while, I want to be signed me up. I want to get trained on this, right? Because it's gonna I'm gonna become more valuable. So this is this is where the industry is headed. You guys talk about modern data protection. I wondered if you could you could paint a picture for us of sort of what what this new world of application development and deployment and and data protection looks like and how it's different from the old world. >>Mhm. So I think that if you mentioned the most important word, which is developer, they come first, they are the decision makers in this environment, the other people that have the most bull and rightly so. Oh, so I think that's the biggest thing at the cultural level that is, developers are saying this is what we want and this is what we need to get the job done, we want to move quickly. So some of the things are let's not slow them down. Let's enable them, let's give them any P I to work with. Right? No. Where in bulk of production, use will be api based versus EY base. Let's transparently integrate into the environment. So therefore protection for security, they need zero lines have changed code. Mm So those are some of the ways we approach things. Now when you go look at the requirements of the developers, they said I have a Ci cd pipeline to integrate into that. I have a development pipeline to integrate into that. I deploy across multiple clouds sometimes. Can you integrate into that and work seamlessly across all those environments? And we see those category of us coming up over and over again from people. >>So the developer rights once and it doesn't have to worry about where it's running. Uh it's got the right security, there are a protection and those policies go with it, so that's that's definitely a different world. Um Okay, last question. Uh maybe you guys could each give your opinion on sort of where we're headed, uh what we can expect from the the acquisition, the the integration, what should we look forward to and what should we pay attention to? >>Well, the one obvious thing that you're going to see is tremendous growth on the company's side and that's because Kubernetes is taking off cloud is taking off um SaAS is taking off and so there's obvious growth there. And one of the things that were clearly doing is um we're leveraging the power of of, you know, a few 1000 sales people to bring this out to market. Um, and so there is emerging of of sales and marketing activities and leveraging that scale. But what you shouldn't expect to see anything different on is this obsessive focus on the product, on quality, on making sure that we're highly differentiated that we have a product that the company that our customers and companies actually need no garage. >>Yeah. So I'll agree with everything down, he said. But a couple of things. Excite me a lot. Dave we've been roughly eight months or so since acquisition and I particularly love how last what in this quarter have gone in terms of how we focuses on solving customer problems. All right. So we'll always have that independent support for a cloud date of customers, but I'm excited about not just working with the broadest side of customers and as we scale the team that's going to happen, but providing a bridge to all the folks that grew up in the virtualization world, right? Grew up in the physical wall of physical service, etcetera and saying, how do we make it easy for you to come over to this new container Ization world? What is the on ramps bridging that gap serving as the on ramp? And we're doing a lot of work there from the product integration and independent product features that just make it easy. Right? And we're already seeing feel very good feedback for that from the field right now. >>I really like your position. I just dropped my quarterly cloud update. I focused, I look at the Big Four, the Big Four last year, spent $100 billion on Capex. And I always say that is a gift to companies like yours because you can be that connection point between the virtualization crowd, the on prem cloud, any cloud. Eventually we'll be, we'll be more than just talking about the Edge will actually be out there, you know, doing real work. Uh, and I just see great times ahead for you guys. So thanks so much for coming on the cube explaining this really exciting new area. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you everybody for watching this day. Volonte for the Cube and our continuous coverage of the mon 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there. >>Mm mm mm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for Several decades but We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. A year ago, I'm looking for Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those end expectations is really at the heart of The modernization and part of that's Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that Can be positive if done right. We do see that as A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)

(soothing music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2021. This is theCUBE's continuous virtual in-depth coverage of the people, processes, and technologies that are changing our world. Right now we're going to talk about modernization and the Synergy with Cloud. And we're pleased to welcome Doug Armbrust, who's the VP GTS Cloud Synergy. Hey Doug, how you doing? >> Great, Dave. I'm excited to be on theCUBE, thanks for having me. >> It's our pleasure. Hey, let's talk a little bit of tech. What are some of the technologies that your clients are applying on their path to modernization? >> Sure. I'll give you three examples and three that we're seeing a lot of interest in from a services standpoint. One is automation. Automation is an area that's been a focus for... Several decades but... We're seeing a renewed excitement around the opportunity for automated operations. Really, I'll talk about two other technologies but the extension of automation and to some of the newer cloud technologies. So that's one. Two is cloud. Cloud has been a terminal industry for a while now and folks have been at various points of a journey to cloud-centric models and technologies. We're seeing an even accelerated transition to not just public cloud but also private cloud technologies, and in particular, need to interconnect those with one another and with a traditional environments. The last one, I think there's been a bit of a referendum on the technology over the last year is around containers, specifically Kubernetes, as a standard for that space. A cementing of direction around containers. Clearly, people are different stages of implementation and experimentation with the technology but I do see a referendum on this being a fundamental part of future technology and direction. >> So, okay. So automation, cloud, and containers. I'm going to ask you a follow up on containers because it's clear that when you look at all the data, it's off the charts in terms of adoption and ultimately our scenario is okay, it gets subsumed into the stack. But where... Where the customers ultimately want to go? Obviously, they're upskilling but what's the outcome that they're trying to achieve? >> Yeah, it's a good question. General question of the ask a modernization. I like modern things. We'd like to live in a modern house, my wife likes a farmhouse so guess where we live. (laughs loudly) We live in a farm house with... Modernized appliances and infrastructure. >> New cost to live with. (laughs loudly) >> Ultimately, enterprises, they're working back from an objective, and that objective, had this term digital transformation for about a decade. Underneath that umbrella, it's about being able to move and respond quickly. It's about being able to create innovation and accelerate innovation. I think probably most important is deliver on a customer experience and end customer experience. 10 years ago, what I expected when I went to a restaurant was a... If I could look them up on the internet and find their location, use my GPS, get there, I was good to go. I'm looking for... Use an app, them to remember my favorite place to sit. Very different expectations and that pressure on enterprise, to meet those annex and expectations is really at the heart of... The modernization and part of that's... Infrastructure modernization containers is interesting because it brings together, not just infrastructure, brings together how application development cycles are being implemented. It has implications for security that... Can be positive if done right. We do see that as... A key area to meet the end and business objectives. It's going to take some time. IDC, I think is the most bullish. They took like 80% of workloads. By 2023, we'll shift to containers. I believe that for newly created workloads. I think developers have got this in their hands and they understand the efficiencies for their own work as well as when this moves to production. This sort of DevSecOps model, kind of comes with containers if done right. There's a legacy that's going to be around a long time, helping customers understand those operating models and how to live with them both is going to be important over the next five to 10 years. >> You're talking about those drivers responsiveness, the innovation, et cetera. I live in an old house too and there's another component here which is that 80%, reasonable people could discuss that, because there's a risk component, right? I can modernize my house but I could jack up one into the house but it might mess up something that I just did. And so, CIO is obviously a risk-averse, they want to modernize but at the same time, they want to get from point a to point b with minimum disruption. To that end, I wonder if you could talk about what you saw during the pandemic. We're still in the pandemic but you had a reduction in budgets, virtually across the board, minus four, minus 5% in spending, had a shift toward work from home, whatever, VDI, laptops, rushed endpoint security, that whole thing. A lot of organizations try to do both. They said, "Hey, we're actually going to double down on digital transformation." We see this as a lean and opportunity. We got liquidity. How did COVID influence modernization initiatives in your client base? >> It impacted different clients in different ways. Some, as you mentioned, I almost view it as very Darwinian in the sense that those who had modernized and had capabilities, more deeply automated were ready for the transition that they had to go through so they were able to quickly shift to work from home. They were able to deliver on new client experiences, the analogy before in digital transformation, those pressures never went away, but COVID just brought new ones, and they expected all of those things but now they expected the restaurant... They expect the restaurant to bring that food to my door and do it in a safe manner. The challenges it brought on organizations were... In many cases, new. Some who were in a good position could accelerate work in place and leverage that. Others had a harder time, right? Those who couldn't translate technology to immediate returns, to kind of fuel that ongoing progress, had to make some hard decisions. I would say that's probably the single trend, projects are very carefully reviewed. There's that view of... "Will this help me now and into the future?" That's always present but it's present in a stronger manner than we would've have seen it for some time. In that envelope, can I come back to within those three technologies? Automation has certainly... We've seen a jump because of its nature. What we see in automation projects is... A faster time to implement and achieve some of the agility and flexibility that cloud provides but can take a longer timeframe if you haven't gotten far along in your cloud journey. Containers, even longer timeframe. So a lot of folks are looking at automation projects, particularly those that weren't as well positioned for sort of a quick turn and then taking that automation work and extending it into cloud and containers, as those initiatives progress. >> There are definitely some historical parallels and I could even go back to Y2K and look at all the application rationalization exercises that were going on back then. The technologies were different. You didn't have the modern cloud, containers have been around forever but not in the form of Kubernetes. The automation was scary back then but nonetheless, people were trying to use scripts or whatever they could do. But now, it's almost like an automation mandate, if you were in a digital business, you were out of business. So what are the... What are some of the learnings that you've seen from these modernization journeys that you're taking customers on that you might be able to share. >> Let me comment on automation first, I'll say it more generally. I think automation, you're right, we're not finding enterprises that are doing things manually. Everybody's gotten at least to kind of that scripting point. And then we see... That has its own journey. Then there's centralization and folks trusting the automation to enable self-service. That's sort of a... Kind of a tipping point to who is ready for COVID and who wasn't. Those who had hardened their automation to enable self-service generally could then call on that self service to meet the new demands that they were facing. The next stage and we see less folks there, we get into this sort of... Infrastructure as code. We talk about areas of intelligence in your automation. You talk about trust, not as many have progressed to where they trust their automation to... Proactively, maybe sometimes reactively respond to a situation or set of... You have to be very integrated at that point and you have to really believe in your automation. You then talk about integrating AI to sense, respond, make decisions and bring those back into your automation technologies. I'd say, that's still very future but folks are very intrigued by that. Your more general question, what's sort of some of the learnings. Really goes back to... Modernization needs to have a business school. That's become maybe more clear than it was a year and a half ago. In the absence of that, IT projects have always had some degree of failure. It's just the evidence of that failures, probably a little bit more poignant. Related to that, is there needs to be a strategic plan and in particular with modernization, it's easy to get caught up with the modern side. And Dave, you were kind of alluded to this before. If you're not thinking about the old, the connection to the legacy, that's a very common kind of failure signature. It's a marching ahead with the modernization, without a strategic plan and connect those things and an ability to kind of tackle a piece at a time. Sometimes budgets go away and that's a problem. Each step in the journey is really the third lesson. Needs to have incremental value. It needs to kind of pay back something to help fund the next stage of modernization. I'd say the last one and it's self-serving for us as a services company. It's helpful to have a partner on these journeys. In my particular area of focus, in a year and a half, we've had... 1,600 engagements. A lot of those engagements are people coming to us after making what they now view as mistakes. Some of the three areas I just mentioned. And being able to bring somebody in with experience with maybe some complimentary skills that can partner within an enterprise can be very helpful to avoid some of the pitfalls. >> I think, your point is right on. I've seen horror stories where people... Literally, we're going to go off the mainframe. They got decades old COBOL code that's working just fine and they literally risked their business trying to brute force migrate off and they never could... We're not going to freeze the code. It's just horror stories. But today's different, you can actually build an abstraction layer, leverage cloud services, and Kubernetes, and the like, use microservices to actually connect the old to the new. And that's the hardest part, again, old house analogies. I've done a lot of connecting the old to the new, that's the hardest part. You got to be really careful but today the technologies are enabling to do that and one of them is... Obviously, things like OpenShift. The definition of open, again, a little history here, it used to be... Unix was open and then Windows and then Linux, the LAMP stack. But really... That piece of your portfolio is a critical part to enable these types of moves. >> Absolutely. It's exciting that technologies are there and there's a path forward. And it's great to... Great to work with a partner, who's maybe, done that 10 or 15 times, or more and have them help guide you on that path. But the good news is there is... Enabling technologies to transform in a number of ways, depending on what the business objectives are for an enterprise. >> Cool. All right, Doug, we've got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you. >> Okay, same Dave. >> All right. >> Appreciate it. >> Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching IBM Think 2021. The virtual edition covered on theCUBE. (bouncy music)