(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

(gentle music) >> Okay, we're back with Mark Hill who's the director of IT operations at Digital River. Mark, Welcome to "The Cube." Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Hey, tell us a little bit more about Digital River, people know you as a payment platform. >> You've got marketing expertise. >> Yeah. >> How do you differentiate from other e-commerce platforms? >> Well, I don't think people realize it, but Digital River was founded about 27 years ago primarily as a one-stop shop for e-commerce, right? And so we offered site development, hosting, order management, fraud, expert controls, tax, physical and digital fulfillment as well as multilingual customer service, advanced reporting and email marketing campaigns, right? So it was really just kind of a broad base for e-commerce. People could just go there. Didn't have to worry about anything. What we found over time as e-commerce has matured, we've really pivoted to a more focused API offering specializing in just a global seller services. And to us that means payment, fraud, tax and compliance management. So our global footprint allows companies to outsource that risk management and expand their markets internationally very quickly and with the low cost of entry. >> Yeah, it's an awesome business. And, you know, to your point, you were founded way before there was such a thing as the modern cloud, and yet you're a cloud native business. >> Yeah. >> Which I think talks to the fact that incumbents can evolve, they can reinvent themselves from a technology perspective. I wonder if you could first paint a picture of how you use the cloud, you use AWS, you know, I'm sure you got S3 in there. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, exactly. So when I think of a cloud native business, you kind of go back to the history. Well, 27 years ago, there wasn't a cloud, right? There wasn't any public infrastructure. We basically started our own data center up in a warehouse. And so over our history, we've managed our own infrastructure and co-located data centers over time through acquisitions and just how things works, you know, those are over 10 data centers globally for us. For us it was expensive, well from a software, hardware perspective, as well as, you know, getting the operational teams and expertise up to speed too. And it was really difficult to maintain and ultimately not core to our business, right? Nowhere in our mission statement does it say that our goal is to manage data centers. (laughing) So, about five years ago we started the journey from our host into AWS. It was a hundred percent lift and shift plan and we were able to complete that migration a little over two years, right? Amazon really just fit for us, it was a natural, a natural place for us to land in and they made it really easy here for us to, not to say it wasn't difficult, but once in the public cloud, we really adopted a cloud first vision, meaning that we'll not only consume their infrastructure as the service, but we'll also purposely evaluate and migrate to software as a service. So, I come from a database background. So an example would be migrating from self deployed and manage relational databases over to AWS RDS, relational database service. You know, you're able to utilize the backups, the standby and the patching tools auto magically, you know, with a click of a button. And that's pretty cool. And so we moved away from the time consuming operational task and really put our resources into revenue and generating the products, you know, like pivoting to an API offering. I always like to say that we stopped being busy and started being productive. (laughing) >> I love that. >> And that's really what the cloud has done for us. >> Is that what you mean by cloud native? I mean, being able to take advantage of those primitives and native API. So what does that mean for your business? >> Yeah, exactly. I think, well, the first step for us was just to consume the infrastructure, right? But now we're looking at targeted services that they have in there too. So, you know, we have our data stream of services. So log analytics, for example, we used to put it locally on the machine. Now we're just dumping into an S3 bucket the way you're using Kinesis to consume that data and put it in elastic and go from there. And none of the services are managed by Digital River. We're just realizing the capabilities that AWS has there too. >> And as an e-commerce player, retail company, were you ever concerned about moving to AWS as a possible competitor, or did you look at other clouds? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, and so, I think e-commerce is really mature, right? And so we got squeezed out by the Amazons of the world. It's just not something that we were doing, but we had really a good area of expertise with our global seller services. So we evaluated Microsoft, we evaluated AWS as well as Google and, you know, back when we did that, Microsoft was Windows-based. Google was just coming into the picture, really didn't fit for what we're doing, but Amazon was just a natural fit. So, we made a business decision, right? It was financially really the best decision for us. And so we didn't really put our feelings into it, right? We just had to move forward and it's better than where we're at and we've been delighted actually. >> Yeah, makes sense, best cloud, the best tech. >> Yeah. >> You know, I want to talk about Chaos Search. A lot of people describe it as a data lake for log analytics. Do you agree with that? You know, what does that even mean? >> Yeah, well, from our perspective because the self-managed solutions are costly and difficult to maintain. You know, we had older versions of self deployed using Splunk, other things like that too. So over time, we made a conscious decision to limit our data retention in generally seven days. But in a lot of cases, it was zero. We just couldn't consume that log data because of the cost, intimidating in itself, because of this limit, you know, we've lost important data points, use for incident triage problem management, trending and other things too. So, Chaos Search has offered us a manageable and cost-effective opportunity to store months or even years of data that we can use for operations as well as trending automation. And really the big thing that we're pushing into is in the event of an architecture so that we can proactively manage our services. >> Yeah, you mentioned elastic. So I know I've talked to people who use the Elk Stack. They say, yes, this is exponential growth in the amount of data. So you have to cut it off at whatever. I think you said seven days, >> Yeah. >> Or less, you're saying you're not finding that with Chaos Search? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was one of the huge benefits here too. So, you know, we we're losing out if there was, you know, a lower priority incident for example and people didn't get to it until eight, nine days later. Well, all the bread crumbs are gone. So it was really just kind of a best guess or the incident really wasn't resolved. We didn't find a root cause. >> Yeah, like my video camera's down you know, by your other house, is that when somebody breaks in, I don't find out for two weeks and then the video's gone, kind of like same thing. >> Yeah. >> So, how do you, can you give us some more detail on how you use your data lake and Chaos Search specifically? >> Yeah, yeah. Yep and so there's many different areas, but what we found is we were able to easily consolidate data from multiple regions into a single pane of glass to our customers. So internal and externally, you know, it really does serve that operational support for the data extract transformation load process, right? It offered us also a seamless transition for the users who were familiar with elastic search, right? It wasn't difficult to move over. And so all these are a lot of selling points benefits. And so now that we have all this data that we're able to capture and utilize, it gives us an opportunity to use machine learning, predictive analysis. And like I said, you know, driving to an event driven architecture. >> Okay. >> So that's really what is offered and it's been a huge benefit. >> So you're saying you can speak the language of elastic. You don't have to move the data out of an S3 bucket and you can scale more easily. Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is so for us just because running in multiple regions to drive more high availability, having that data available from multiple regions in a single pane of glass or a single way to utilize it is a huge benefit as well, just to, you know, not to mention actually having the data. >> What was the initial catalyst to sort of rethink what you were doing with log analytics? Was it cost, was it flexibility scale? >> There was, I think all of those went into it. One of the main drivers, so last year we had a huge project, so we have our Elk Stack and it's probably from a decade ago, right? And, you know, a version point or two or something, you know, anyways, it's very old and we went through a whole project to get that upgraded and migrated over. And it was just, we found it impossible internally to do, right? And so this was a method for us to get out of that business, to get rid of the security risks and support risk and have a way for people to easily migrate over. And it was just a nightmare here consolidating the data across regions. And so that was a huge thing. But yeah, it has also been the cost, right? We're finding that cheaper to use Chaos Search and have more data available versus what we were doing currently in AWS. >> Got it, I wonder if you could share maybe any stories that you have or examples that underscore the impact that this approach to analytics, >> Yeah >> Is having on your business, maybe your team's everyday activities, any metrics you can provide, >> Yeah. >> Or even just anecdotal information? >> Yeah, yeah. And and I think, you know, one, coming from an Oracle background here, so Digital River historically has been an Oracle shop, right? And we've been developing a reporting and analytics environment on Oracle and that's complicated and expensive, right? We had to use advanced features in Oracle like partitioning materialized views and bringing other supporting software like Informatic, Hyperion, Essbase, right? And all of these require a large team with a wide set of expertise into the separate focus areas, right? And the amount of data that we were pushing at the KF search would simply have overwhelmed this legacy method for data analysis than a relational database, right? In that dimension, the human toll of the stress of supporting that Oracle environment than a 24 by seven by 365 environment, you know, which requires literal or no downtime. So just that alone, it was a huge thing. So, it's allowed us to break away from Oracle, it's allowed us to use new technologies that make sense to solve business solutions. >> You know, Chaos Search is just a really interesting company to me, I'm sure like me, you see a lot of startups. I'm sure they're knocking on your door every day. And I always like to say, "Okay, where are they going after? "Are they going after a big market? "How are they getting product market fit?" And it seems like Chaos Search has really looked that hard at log analytics and sort of maybe disrupting the Elk Stack. But I see, you know, other potential use cases, you know, beyond analyzing logs. I wonder if you agree, are there other use cases that you see in your future? >> Yeah, exactly. So, I think there's one area would be Splunk for example. We have that here too. So we use Splunk versus, you know, flat file analysis or other ways to capture that data just because from a PCI perspective, it needs to be secured for our compliance and certification, right? So Chaos Search allows us to do that. There's different types of authentication, really a hodgepodge of authentication that we used in our old environment, but Chaos Search has a more easily usable one, one that we could set up, one that can really segregate the data and allows to satisfy our PCR requirements too. But Splunk, I think really, deprecating all of our elastic search environments are homegrown ones, but then also taking a hard look at what we're doing with relational databases, right? 27 years ago, there was only relational databases, Oracle and SQL server. So we've been logging into those types of databases and that's not cost-effective, it's not supportable. And so really getting away from that and putting the data where it belongs and that is easily accessible in a secure environment and allowing us to push our business forward. >> And when you say where the data belongs, it sounds like you're putting it in the bit bucket S3, leaving it there, >> Yeah. >> And this is the most cost-effective way to do it and then sort of adding value on top of it. That's what's interesting about Chaos Search to me. >> Yeah, exactly, yup, yup versus the high price storage, you know, that you have to use for a relational database, you know, and not to mention the standbys, the backups. So, you know, you're duplicating, triplicating all this data in here too in expensive manner. So yeah. >> Yeah, copy creating, moving data around and it gets expensive. It's funny when you say about databases, it's true. But database used to be such a boring market now it's exploded. Then you had the whole no SQL movement and SQL became the killer app, you know, it's like full circle. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> Well, anyway, good stuff Mark, really, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" and sharing your perspectives. We'd love to have you back in the future. >> Oh yeah, yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts on getting more value out of your growing data lakes. You're watching "The Cube," you're leader in high-tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier with The Cube, we're here in Palo Alto, California for a remote interview and session for The Cube presents AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI security in life sciences. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great segment on cloud. Next big thing in Cloud with Chaos Search, Thomas Hazel, Chief Technology and Science Officer of Chaos Search joined by Jeremy Foran, the head of data analytics, the bad boy of data analyst as they say, but BAI communications, Jeremy Thomas, great to have you on. >> Great to be here. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about applying large scale log analytics to building the future of the transit industry. Obviously Telco's a big part of that, smart cities, you name the use case self-driving trucks, cars, you name it, everything's now edge. That the edge is super valuable, it's a new kind of last mile if you will, it's moving fast, it's mobile. This is a huge deal. Let's get into it, Thomas. What's this big story around this, this session? >> Well, we provide unique ability to take all that edge data and drive it into a data lake offering that we provide data analytics, both in logs, BI and coming out with ML there this year into next. So our unique play is transforming customers' cloud outer storage into an analytical platform. And really, I think with BIA is a log analytics specifically where, you know there's a lot of data streams from all those devices going into a lake that we transform their lake into analytics for driving, I guess, operational analysis. >> You know, Jeremy, I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the edge was the remote switch or campus hub or something. And then even on the Telco side, there was no wifi back in 2000 and you know, someone was driving in a car and you got any signal, you're lucky. Now you got, you know, no perimeter you have unlimited connectivity everywhere. This has opened up more of an Omni channel data problem. How do you see that world? Because you still got more devices pushing out at this edge and it's getting super local, right? Even on the body, even on people in the car. So certainly a lot of change on the infrastructure side. What does that pose for data challenge? >> Yeah, I, I would say that, you know users always want more, more bandwidth, more performance and that requires us to create more systems that require more complexity to deliver that user experience that we're, we're very proud of. And with that complexity means, you know exponentially more data. And so one of the wifi networks we offer in the Toronto subway system, T-connect, you know we see a 100-200,000 unique users a day and you can imagine just the amount of infrastructure to support that so that everyone has a seamless experience and can get their news and emails and even stream media while they're waiting for the subway. >> So you guys provide state of the art infrastructure for cell, wifi, broadcast, radio, IP networks, basically I mean, I call it the smart city kind of go-to. But that's basically anything involving kind of that edge piece. This is a huge thing. So as smart cities are on the table, which and you seeing 5G being called more of an enterprise app where there's feeding large dense areas of people this is now a new modern version of what I would call the, the smart city blueprint. What's changed in your mind on this whole modernization of this smart city infrastructure concept? What's new? What's cutting edge? >> Yeah. I would say that, you know there was an explosion of data and a lot of our insights aren't coming from one system anymore. It's coming from collecting data from all of the different pieces, the different infrastructure whether that's your fiber infrastructure or your wireless infrastructure, and then to solve problems you need to correlate data across those systems. So we're seeing more and more technologies that allow you to do that correlation. And that's really where we're finding tons of value, right? >> Thomas, take us through what you guys do as a, as a, as a product, a value proposition, the secret sauce, and and why I'm here with Jeremy? Why is this conversation important for the folks watching? What's the connection between Chaos Search and BAI communication? >> Well, it's data, right? And lots of it. So our unique platform allows people like Jeremy to stream all this data, right? In you know, today's world terabytes go to petabytes really easily, billions go to trillion really easily, and so providing the analysis of that data for their operations is challenging particularly based on technology and architectures that have been around for a long time. So what we do here at Chaos Search is the ability for BIA to stream all these devices, all these services into one centralized data lake on their cloud outer storage, where we connect to that cloud outer storage and transform it into an analytical database to do, in this case log analytics and do it seamlessly, easily where a new workload a new stream just streams into that lake. And we, as a service take over, we discover we index it and publish well-known open API and visualization so that they can focus on their business, not all the operational data pipeline, database and data engineering type work that again, at these types of scales is is frankly a nightmare. >> You know, one of the things that we've always observed on The Cube when you see new things come out that are really cool groundbreaking products like you guys are doing it's always a challenge to manage the cost and complexity of bringing in the new. So Jeremy, take us through this tech stack here because you know, it's, sometimes it might be unwieldy just in from a tech stack perspective, nevermind the business logic or the business processes that got to be either unwound or changed. Can you take us through the IT stack that's critical to support your, your area? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with all the various different equipment you know, to provide our public wifi and and our desks, carrier agnostic, LT and 5G networks, you know, we need to be able to adhere to PCI compliance and ISO 27,000, so that, you know, requires us to keep a tremendous amount of our data. And the challenge we were facing is how do we do that cost effectively, and not have to make any sort of compromises on how we do that? A lot of times you'll find you don't know the value of your data today until tomorrow. An example would be COVID. You know, we, when we were storing data two years ago we weren't planning for a pandemic, but now that we were able to retain that data and look back we can see a tremendous amount of value with trying to forecast how our systems will recover when things get back to normal. And so when I met Thomas and we were sort of talking about how we were going to solve some of these data retention problems, he started explaining to me their compression in some of the performance metrics of their profession. And, you know, I said, oh, middle out compression. And it was a bit, it's been a bit of a running joke between me and him and I'm sure others, but it's incredibly impressive the amount of data we're able to store at the kind of cost, right? >> What, what problem does, did he solve for you? Because I mean, these guys, honestly, you know the startups have a lot and the Cloud's enabling more value now, we're seeing this, but when you look at this what was your, what was your core problem that you had? >> Yeah, so we, when you we want to be able to, I mean, primarily this is for our CIS log server. And CIS long servers today aren't what they were 10, 15 years ago where you just sort of had a machine and if something broke you went and looked, right? Now, they're very complex, that data is feeding to various systems and third-party software. So, you know, we're actively looking for changes in patterns and we have our, you know security teams auditing these from, for penetration testing and such. And then the getting that data to S3 so that we could have it in case, you know, for two, three years of storage. Well, the problem we were facing is all of that all of these different systems we needed to feed and retain data, we couldn't do that on site. We wanted to do use S3 but when we were doing some projections, it's like, we, we don't really have the budget for all of these places. Meeting Thomas and, and working with Chaos Search, you know, using their compression brought those costs down drastically. And then as we've been working with them the really exciting thing is they we're bringing more and more features to that surface or offering. So, you know, first it was just storing that data away. And now we're starting to build solutions off of that sitting in storage. So that's where it gets really exciting because you know, there, it's nothing to start getting anomaly detection off those logs, which, you know originally it was just, we need to store them in case somebody needs them two, three years from now. >> So Thomas Thomas, if I get this right then what I'm hearing is obviously I've put aside the complexity and the governing side the regulations for a minute just generally. Data retention as, as a key value proposition and having data available when you need it and then to do that and doing it in a very cost-effective simple way. It sounds like what you guys are offering. Is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, one key aspect of our solution is retention, right? Those are a lot of the challenges, but at the same time we provide real time notification like a classic log analytic type platform, alerting, monitoring. The key thing is to bringing both those worlds together and solving that problem. And so this, you know, middle in middle out, well, to be frank, we created a new technology called what we call Chaos Index that is a database index that is wonderfully small as as we're indicating, but also provides all the features that makes Cloud object storage, high performance. And so the idea is that use this lake offering to store all your data in a cost effective way but our service allows you to analyze it both in a long retention perspective as well as real-time perspective and bringing those two worlds together is so key because typically you have Silo Solutions and whether it's real-time at scale or retention scale the cost complexity and time to build out those solutions I know Jeremy knows also, well, a lot of folks come to us to solve those problems because you know when you're dealing with, you know terabytes and up, you know these things get complicated and to be frank, fall over quite often. >> Yeah. Let me, let me just ask you the question that's probably on everyone's mind who's watching and you guys probably have both heard this many times, because a lot of people just throw the data lake solution around like it's, you know why they whitewash their kind of old legacy solutions with data lake, store it on data lake. It's been called a data swamp. So people are fearful that, okay. I love this idea of a data lake, who doesn't like throwing data into a repository, having it available at will with notifications, all this secret magic beans that just magically create value. But I doubt that, I don't want to turn into a data swamp. So Thomas and Jeremy, talk about that, that concern. How do you mitigate that? How do you talk to that? Because if done properly, there's huge value in having a control plane or some sort of data system that is going to be tied in with signals and just storage retention. So I see the value. How do you manage the concern that people might say, Hey, I don't want to date a swamp? >> Yeah, I'll jump into that. So, you know, let's just be frank, Hadoop was a great tool for a very narrow scenario. I think that data swamp came out because people were using the tooling in an incorrect way. I've always had the belief that data lakes are the future. You just have the right to have the right service the right philosophy to leverage it. So what we do here at Chaos Search is we allow you to organize it, discover it, automatically index that data so that swamp doesn't get swampy. You know, when you stream data into your lake how do you organize it, such that it's has a nice stream? How do you transform that data into a value? So with our service we actually start where the storage begins, not a end point, not an archive. So we have tooling and services that keep your lake from being swampy to be, to be clear. And, but the key value is the benefits of the lake, the cost effectiveness, the reliability, security, the scale, those are all the benefits. The problem was that no one really made cloud offer storage a first-class citizen and we've done that. We've dressed the swamp nature but provided all the value of analysis. And that cost metrics, that scale. No one can touch cloud outer storage, it just, you can't. But what we've done is cracked the code of how you make it analytical. >> Jeremy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, on your side I mean, as a practitioner and customer of, of of these solutions, you know, the concern is am I missing anything? And I've been a big proponent of data retention for many, many years. You know, Dave Alondra in our Cube knows all know that I bang on the table all the time, store your data, be a data hoarder, because it's going to come back and be valuable. Costs are going down so I'm a big fan of data retention. But the fear might be on, what am I missing? Because machine learning starts to come in down the road you got AI, the more data you have that's accessible in real time, the more machine learning is effective. Do you, do you worry about missing anything or do you just store everything? >> We, we store everything. Sometimes it's, it's interesting where the value and insights come from your data. Something that see, might seem trivial today down the road offers tremendous, tremendous value. So one of the things we do is provide because we have wifi in the subway infrastructure, you know taking that wifi data, we can start to understand the flow of people in and out of the subway network. And we can take that and provide insights to the rail operators, which get them from A to B quicker. You know, when we built the wifi it wasn't with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster. But that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data in terms of, you know, Thomas's solution, I think one of the reasons we we engaged him in the first place is because I didn't believe his compression. It sounded a little too good to be true. And so when it was time to try them out, you know all we had to do was ship data to an S3 bucket. You know, there's tons of, of solutions to do that. And, and data shippers right out of the box. It took a few, you know, a few minutes and then to start exploring the data was in Cabana, which is or their dashboard, which is, you know, an interface that's easy to use. So we were, you know, within a two days getting the value out of that data that we were looking for which is, you know, phenomenal. We've been very happy. >> Thomas, sounds like you've got a great, great testimonial here and it's not like an easy problem that he's living in there. I mean, I think, you know, I was mentioning this earlier and we're going to get into it now. There's regulations and there's certain compliance issues. First of all, everyone has this now problem now, it's not just within that space. But just the technical complexities of packets moving around I got on my wifi and the stop here, I'm jumping over here, and there's a ton of data it's all over the place, it's totally unstructured. So it's a tough, tough test for you guys, Chaos Search. So yeah, it's almost like the Mount Everest of customer testimonials. You've got to, it's a big, it's a big use case here. How does this translate to other clients? And talk about this governance and security controls because I know this highly regulated and you got there's penalties involved on his side of the world and Telco, the providers that have these edge devices there's actually penalties and, and whatnot so, not just commercial, it's maybe a, you know risk management, but here there's actually penalties. >> Absolutely. So, you know centralizing your data has a real benefit of of not getting in trouble, right? So you have one place, you store one place that's a good thing, but what we've done and this was a key aspect to our offering is we as Chaos, Chaos Search folks, we don't own the customer's data. We don't own BIA's data. They own the data. They give us access rights, very standard way with Cloud App storage roll on policies from Amazon, read only access rights to their data. And so not owning a customer's data is a big selling point not only for them, but for us for compliance regulatory perspective. So, you know, unlike a lot of solutions where you move the data into them and now they are responsible, actually BIA owns everything. We, they provide access so that we could provide an analysis that they could turn off at any point in time. We're also SOC 2 type 1 and type 2 compliant you got to do it, you know, in this, this world, you know when we were young we ran at this because of all of these compliance scenarios that we will be in, but, you know, the long as short of it is, we're transient service. The storage, cloud storage is the source of truth where all data resides and, you know, think about it, it's architecturally smart, it's cost effective, it's secure, it's reliable, it's durable. But from a security perspective, having the customer own their own data is a big differentiation in the market, a big differentiation. >> Jeremy, talk about on your end the security controls surrounding the log management environments that span across countries with different regulations. Now you've got all kinds of policy dimensions and technical dimensions and topology dimensions. >> Yeah, absolutely. So how we approach it is we look at where we have offerings across the globe and we figure out what the sort of highest watermark level of adherence we need to hit. And then we standardize across that. And by shipping to S3, it allows us to enforce that governance really easily and right to Tom's point you know, we manage the data, which is very important to us and we don't have to be worried about a third party or if we want to change providers years down the road. Although I don't think anyone's coming out with 81% compression anytime soon (laughs). But yeah, so that's, for us, it's about meeting those high standards and having the technologies that enable us to do it. And Chaos Search is a very big part of that right now. >> All right let me ask you a question, for the folks watching that are like really interested in this topic, what would you say to them when evaluating Chaos Search obviously, your use case is complex, but so are others as enterprises start to have an edge, obviously the security posture shifts, everything shifts. There's no more perimeter and the data problem becomes acute to them. So the enterprises are going to start seeing what you've been living for in your world. What's your advice to people watching? >> My advice would be to give them a try. You know, it's it's has been really quite impressive. The customer service has been hands-on and we've been getting, you know, they've been under-promising and over-delivering, which when you have the kind of requirements to manage solutions in these very complex environment, cloud local, you know various data centers and such, you know that kind of customer service is very important, right? It enables us to continue to deliver those high quality solutions. >> So Thomas give us the, the overview of the secret sauce. You've got a great testimonial here. You got people watching, what's different now in the world that you're going after, what wave are you on? Talk to the people who are watching this and saying, okay why Chaos Search? Why are you relevant? Obviously there's some cool things you're doing. I love that. What's cool, and what's relevant and why what's in it for them if they work with you? >> Yeah. So you know, that that whole Silicon Valley reference actually got that from my patent attorney when we were talking. But yeah, no, we, we, you know, focus on if we can crack this code of making data, one a face small, store small, moves small, process small. But then make it multimodal access make it virtual transformation. If we could do that, and we could transform cloud outer storage into a high-performance medical database all these heavy, heavy problems, all that complexity that scaffolding that you build to do these type of scales would be solved. Now what we had to focus on and this has been my, I guess you say life passion is working on a new data representation. And that's our secret sauce that enables a new architecture a new service that where the customer folks on their tooling, their APIs, their visualizations that they know and love, what we focus is on taking that data lake, and again, to transform it into an analytical database, both for log analytics think of like elastic search replacement, as well as a BI replacement for your SQL warehousing database. And coming out later this year into 2022, ML support on one representation. You don't have the silo your information you don't have to re index your data, both. So elastic search CQL and actually ML TensorFlow actions on the exact same representation. So think about the data retention, doing some post analysis on all those logs of data, months, years, and then maybe set up some triggers if you see some anomaly that's happening within your service. So you think about it, the hunt with BI reporting, with predictive analysis on one platform. Again, it sounds a little unicorn, I agree with Jeremy, maybe it didn't sound true but it's been a life's work. So it didn't happen overnight. And you know, it's eight years, at least in the in the making, but I guess the life journey in the end. >> Well, you know, the timing is great. You know, all the database geeks out there who have been following the data industry know that, you know there's a good point for structured data but when you start getting into mechanisms and they become a bottleneck or a blocker to innovation, you know you starting to see this idea of a data lake being let the data kind of form, let it be. You know, I hate the word control plane but more of a, a connective tissue between systems is become an interesting thing. So now you can store everything so you know, no worries there, no blind spots and then let the magic of machine learning in the future, come around. So Jeremy, with that, I got to ask you since you're the bad boy of data analytics at BAI communications head of data analytics, what does that, what do you look for in the future as you start to set this up because I can almost imagine and connecting the dots here in the interview, you got the data lake you're storing everything, which is good. Now you have to create more insights and get ahead of the curve and provide some prescriptive and automated ways to do things better. What's your vision? >> First I would just like to say that, you know when astrophysicists talk about, you know, dark dark energy, dark matter, I'm convinced that's where Thomas is hiding the ones and zeros to get that compression, right? I don't don't know that to be fact but I know it to be true. And then in terms of machine learning and these sort of future technologies, which are becoming available you know, starting from scratch and trying to build out you know, models that have value, you know that takes a fair amount of work. And that landscape keeps changing, right? Being able to push our data into an S3 bucket and then you know, retain that data and then get anomaly detection on top of it. That's, I mean, that's something special and that unlocks a lot of ability for you know, our teams to very easily deliver anomaly detection, machine learning to our customers, without having to take on a lot of work to understand the latest and greatest in machine learning. So, I mean, it's really empowering to our team, right? And, and a tool that we're going to. >> Yeah, I love and I love the name, Chaos Search, Thomas. I got to say, you know it brings up the inside baseball around chaos monkey which everyone knows was a DevOps tool to create kind of day two simulate day two operations and disruptions in DevOps. But what you're really getting at is your whole new architecture that's beyond DevOps movement, it's like next gen architecture. Talk about that to the people watching who have a lot of legacy and want to transform over to a more enabling platform that's going to give them some headroom for their data. What, what do you say to them? How do they get started? What, how should they, how what's their mindset? What they, what are some first principles you can share? >> Well, you know, I always start with first principles but you know, I like to say we're the next next gen. The key thing with the Chaos Search offering is you can start today with B, without even Chaos Search. Stream your data to S3. We're going to make hip and cool data lakes again. And actually it's a, Google it now, data lakes are hip and cool. So start streaming now, start managing your data in a well-formed centralized viewpoint with security governance and cost effectiveness. Then call Chaos Search shop, and we'll make access to it easily, simply to ultimately solve your problems. The bug whether your security issue, the bug, whether it's more performance issues at scale, right? And so when workloads can be added instantaneously in your data lake it's, it's game changing it's mind changing. So from the DevOps folks where, you know, you're up all night trying to say, how am I going to scale from terabyte, you know one today to 50 terabytes, don't. Stream it to S3. We'll take over, we'll worry about that scale pain. You worry about your job of security, performance, operations, integrity. >> That really highlights the cloud scale the value proposition as, as apps start to be using data as an input, not just as a a part of a repo repo, so great stuff. Thomas, thanks for sharing your life's work and your technology magic. Jeremy, thanks for coming on and sharing your use cases with us and how you are making it all work. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. >> Okay. This is The Cubes, coverage and presenting AWS this time showcase the next big thing here with Chaos Search. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon angle. The cube on cloud continues. We're here with Anna Pinza, who is the chief development officer and Anna Plan. We've been unpacking the future of Cloud. We've heard from a number of CEOs how they're thinking about Cloud in the coming decade. And first of all, Anna, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks for participating. It's great to see you again. >>It's great to see you, Dave. And I'm so excited to be here with you again, so hopefully we'll be doing this soon. >>I hope in 2021 will be able to be face to face everybody. Oh, no. A lot of respect. You think about the CEO role, something that you're intimately familiar with its unique because she or he has a very wide observation space across the company. You know, where is the GM or a business line manager there, You know, most concerned with their respective business, the CEO, they're gonna worry about the whole enchilada. And we've heard a lot in this program about digital transformation. We've heard a lot, of course, in the past couple of years, a lot of it was lip service, but but digital transformation, it's no longer optional. What's changed, in your view, in the way that businesses air going about it? >>You know, Dave, I mean, from my perspective, it's interesting. And this year in particular has been really telling for us, right? So I think before many companies were thinking about Hey, I wanna be online, I wanna grow my revenues, you know, with with digital I wanna have a presence. But what's happened actually this year with covert in particular, is that it's gone from being kind of a good to have, you know, to really ah, fundamental necessity. We must have it. And so when I talked to CEOs today, they're really thinking about different kinds of things than before, not just going digital, but how do I enable um, my people toe work remotely right? I've got to enable that how doe I bring the agility and the flexibility that I need in our business, especially with these new ways of working right? How do I look at business resiliency? You know, not just from a you know, something happens, and then how do I recover from it? But also how do I help our, You know, our company and our people then actually spring forward and grow from where we are. So it's gone from a a topic that was happening at the CEO, maybe at the business level. But now it's really also a fundamental CEO and board conversation. And so now we're seeing the CEO is having to present two boards. You know, what is our digital transformation? Are our digital strategy. So I wonder what >>you've seen in that regard. I'm interested in what role cloud plays and supporting those digital initiatives. But more specifically, you know, cloud migration came, you know, off the charts in terms of interest because of co vid. But you had those that that were, you know, deep into cloud had a lot of experience of those maybe not as much. Are you seeing any kind of schism in the marketplace where there's maybe a great advantage to those who really had years of experience on may be a disadvantage to those who didn't or is there kind of an equilibrium you're seeing in the market place? How do you see that playing out? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, What I'm seeing is that I think there used to be a spectrum of CEOs and effect, you know, the ones that were kind of a little bit, you know, you know, forward, ahead on the cloud, both on cloud infrastructure as well, Assassin. Right. And what are the services that we have? And then there were some that were really, um, you know, trying to think about what's the security, you know, implications of the cloud. And, you know, is it more expensive? And you know, So there was this spectrum of CEOs and I think now what's happened is there's such a business imperative that I think CEO s air saying, Look, I'm either gonna survive, you know, in this new world with the agility and the flexibility that I need And so cloud, you know, I'm seeing a lot of CEO is really saying Okay, Cloud is not just fashionable, but it z in and a necessity, right? And we must on we must do it. And I think frankly, the c e. O. S that don't embrace the cloud and that level of agility are going to struggle, right? It's a it's really a personal imperative. for a CEO in addition to sort of for the company. So >>a lot of times we talk about, you know, the three dimensions of people, process and technology, and I'm interested in your thoughts on how cloud has affected those traditional structures and the value chains. I mean, you've got some people are really good a text. Some people are really good at people. Some people are really good at process. Has the cloud affected that is, it upended? It changed it in any way. >>Yeah. I mean, let's let's, like, unpack that a little bit. You know, Dave, because if you think about process, I mean, one of the interesting things about the cloud is that And if you think about the cloud as going all the way from, like I as their sort of infrastructure all the way up the stack toe, actually providing business processes embedded, you know, in in a fast service, then from a process perspective and for CEOs, it's really upended how they think about business process reengineering in their companies. Um, if I think even, you know, five years ago, where you would have ah whole organization, that's, you know, focused on business process reengineering You do that? It takes a long time. You know, you get a consultant, maybe to help you, and then you work through that process. If you look at a SAS service like Anna plan today, where we our goal is, for example, toe orchestrate business performance. We were assassin business planning platform. We've incorporated into our platform that business process. Right. So the role of the CEO relative to business process and effect changes Right now, it's about how the leverage, ah, cloud infrastructure, and then how do you enable the customization is on top of that. But generally speaking, that's a lot easier than having to think about re engineering the whole company. Um, if you think about the technology stock, obviously the cloud, uh, embeds a lot of technology, you know, in the cloud. Right. So you have a lot of native services that are available to you. Um, that is awesome from a talent perspective, you know, because before, maybe you need to have, you know, needed to have database experts or, you know, kubernetes experts. And not that we don't need those today. But many of those capabilities come native in the cloud today. So, in effect, how it helps the CEO is to provide sort of this ecosystem of talent kind of embedded in what the cloud provider does. Right? So >>I wondered. So stay on that for a minute. So remember, before Amazon announced a W s and whether 2006 it was CEO said to me, >>Yeah, I'm thinking >>about maybe I don't need to run my own email, right? So because you have to have seen the SAS ification of of of businesses, which to your point, you know, makes things, uh, simpler and that I can focus on other areas and not to worry about, you know, managing infrastructure to support APS. At the same time you've had this proliferation of cloud you mentioned, of course, that you're with Anna Plan. You see, you got work day, you got Salesforce. You've got service now Oracle, APS and and people struggle. Okay, how do I get these things Talking to whether there's that worried about that data layer. So there's this new level of complexity. How do you see that playing out in the next decade? >>Yeah. You know, we used to say that, you know, we sort of, um, shift. What we do at a certain level and now is an organization we start to look at kind of higher value outcomes, right. And so I see that happening. And you're absolutely right. The conversations that I have with customers now are Hey, um, you know, there's things that are enabled by the cloud, and then on top of that, you need a set of a P i s or connectors or ways to get data in and out, you know, in and out of a particular system or ways to link. In our case, we're linking with Salesforce toe, Anna plan, toe workday or other tools, right? And so you start to think more about the business outcome that you want. The CEO needs to be focused on that, um, instead of maybe, uh, sort of the fundamentals of the technology. Those come, you know, those come for you, and then it's really more about the partnership with the business side. Right to say Okay, what is it that you're trying to do and can I enable that through my you know, cloud architectures, the work days, you know, the adobes or or the sales forces of the world. So I think the conversation is changing. And from my perspective, what's really cool about that is, um it brings the CEO Thio, you know, really makes the CEO of business and thought leader a strategic leader, right, Because, uh, the I t shop is not just talking tech, you know, the top shop has toe talk a lot more about the outcome that they're trying to deliver. >>So I mean, in the early days of cloud, I just wanna pick up on what you just said. I mean, a lot of people in I t's saw the cloud is a threat to their livelihood. And e think I'm inferring from your statements that were largely through that dynamic. And the CEO is now really trying to make the cloud platform for transformation and monetization or whatever other organizational goal might be saving lives or better government. Is >>that sort >>of how you see it, that the role has changed to that? >>I know. I mean, I talked to so many companies, and it's still we're still going through that transition, so I don't think we're completely over the hump of, you know, cloud all day everywhere but a same time. Um, I think what the CEO so really focused on these days is really around business, agility and business outcomes for their partners. By the way, that's one of the things. The second thing, especially these days, is around people, you know, collaboration, communication. How do we, you know, facilitate interaction of people, whether inside or outside of the company on DSO? You know, that's, um that's a very different conversation for the CEO. It doesn't mean that we're not still having the basic conversation of how safe is the cloud. What security do you have built into the cloud, Right, Andi? But I think, frankly, Dave, that we've across the chasm where before it used to be. Hey, I'm a lot more secure on Prem and, you know, given the tremendous focus of the cloud providers and says companies have put on security, um, I see many more companies, you know, feeling very at ease and in fact, telling their organizations right, we actually need to switch to the cloud, including large. Um, you know, large companies that have compliance issues, you know, or like large financial companies. Many of those are making that switch as well. Well, >>it's interesting talk about security, but I think it's kind of a two edged sword, right? Because I think a lot of frankly, I think a lot of executives early days used security as a way to sort of kick the can >>down the road. But >>the reality was cloud, you know better. Worse you could make that argument is different. And so, you know, different concerns people. But it's still a the end of the day. Bad security practices Trump, >>you >>know, good security. And so that's what we've seen so many times that shared responsibility model on DSO. People are still >>learning there, so >>so security is almost this beast in and of itself. I'm interested in your thoughts on on the priorities. I mean, >>our >>customers are they streamlining their their tech investments? I mean, the major focus, as you pointed out on Cloud, has been it's a driver of agility and shifting. Resource is as we talked about. But there's this constant cost pressure, you know, the procurement. Looking at the Amazon Bill, Uh, do you see ah lot of the same going forward? Or do you think the value equation is shifting such that there'll be Maybe, you know, I t is less cost pressure is always gonna be cost pressure. I know, but But more value producer, >>I think I think you're right. I mean, I see it and I see it. Over the last six months, I've seen it really accelerate where CEOs are thinking about three things and one is business resiliency. When I talk about business resiliency, I talk about the ability to recover from crap that happens. You know, where you know, whether it's pandemics or, you know, global events and shifts that companies have to accommodate. Right? So that's one thing that I see them thinking about. The second one that we talked about a little bit is just agility. You know, I see them really focused on that. And the cloud enables that. And, you know, the third one in conversations is really speed innovation, because, um, you know, when companies air talking to cloud providers and particularly SAS cos what I see them talking about is Look, I've got this particular need and it would take me, you know, two years to do it with a legacy player because of, you know, I've got to do this on Prem. But you have the fundamentals built in. And I think I could do it with you in three months. So I think, you know, business Resiliency both to grow and toe recover from stuff. Um, agility and innovation are really three fundamental levers that I see for movement, uh, movement to the cloud. Right? Andi, any one of those that these days I mean, it's funny, uh, depending on who you talk Thio. Any one of those can propel a CEO to make a choice to make that choice. And when they have all of that together, um, they have a lot more, um, lift in effect As a CEO, they have a lot more leverage, right in terms of what they could do for their companies. Well, >>let's stay on innovation. I mean innovation. I've said many times in tech, >>you >>know, for decades it came, came from Moore's Law, it seems, seems so nineties to even say that it's true. So what's going to drive innovation in the in the coming years? I'm interested in your perspective on how machine intelligence and a I n m l on cloud, of course, play into that innovation agenda. >>Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting, You know, I see it a lot in our business with Anna plan. Um, innovation comes from the ability to bring instead of what you do internally and match it with what's available in the external world. Right? And you mentioned it earlier. Data, You know, data is like the new currency. That's that's, like software, you know, eats the world. Now we talk about data, right? And, um and I think what's really going to drive innovation is being able to have access to the world's data once the company builds this digital DNA, You know, this digital foundation and puts, you know and is able to have access to that data, Then you start to make decisions. You know, you start Thio offer services. Um, you start thio, bring intelligence. Um, that wasn't available before, right? And, um, that's a really powerful thing for any company, whether you're doing, you know, forecasting. And you need to sort of bring the world's data. Whether you're a agricultural company, we talking. And in these days, um, innovation comes in the form of speed, you know, being able to just deliver something new to an audience faster. So to me, the cloud enables, You know, all of that the ability Thio bring in data. And then on top of that, I mean, think about all the A i m l innovation that's happening around the world. We we just launched an offer, actually, um, to be able to dio forecasting intelligent forecasting on top of the cloud we partner with with a W s forecast for that, Um, if we didn't have a cloud platform, you know, to do that and instead of a p i s you know, being digital that way really enables us, uh, the opportunity Thio toe match. You know, one plus one equals one, you know, 100. Really? And bringing the power of that to get to companies together to be ableto enable that type of innovation. >>Well, that that that's interesting. It reminds me of my friends. Ed Walsh is the CEO of a startup called Chaos Search. And you use the statement. He said, where we're standing on the shoulders of the giants, you know what you know, trying not trying to recreate it. And I think you know, you got what you just said is the same thing. You're sort of relying on others to build out cloud infrastructure. So there's a totally left field question. When you hear all the talks about breaking up big tech I >>want Is that a >>relevant to you? Because you figured okay, the clouds gonna be there. It's maybe more about search or it's about, you know, Facebook or, you know, Amazon's dominance. Interestingly, Microsoft's really not in those discussions anymore. They were the center of it >>back. No, no. >>But as a head of development for a company, does that even factor into the equation? And you're kind of not worry about that? >>No. I mean, I'll be honest for me personally. What I do is I compartmentalize my world, right. In a sense, I view I view the partnerships and we have partnerships with Google and AWS and Microsoft and others, Right? So, um, I view those as part of a non opportunity to really provide on ecosystem set of solutions right to customers and those air very powerful. I think those partnerships enable companies like ours, like Sasse companies, to innovate faster, right? And so I compartmentalize and I say those things are are wonderful. I don't know why you would want to break up those companies at the same time. Um, you know, part of what you're referring Thio, you know, has to do with, um more the social and the consumer elements of what's going on. But as a business leader, um, I really I really focused on what the power is, particularly in the enterprise. What is it that we can do for global enterprise companies? And at least in my mind, those two things tend to be separate. >>Couple of things, you said they're triggered my mind. One was ecosystems. We've been talking about data. One of our guests on this program, Alan Nance, has been talking about ecosystems and the power of ecosystems. And I definitely see Cloud is a platform to allow data sharing across those those clouds and then to form ecosystems and share data in ways that we really couldn't have, you know, half a decade or even you no longer ago. And that seems to be where ah lot of the innovation is going to occur. Some of the people talk about the flywheel effect, but it's the power of many versus the resource is of, you know, a few. >>And I'm such a big believer in the ecosystem play. And part of that is because, um, frankly, even over the last 20 years, that the skills that are required and the knowledge that required that is required is so specialized. Dave, you know, if you think about, you know, a I m l and all the algorithms that we need to know when the innovation that's happening there. And so I really don't think that there's any one company that can serve a customer alone, right? And if you think about it from a customer perspective, you know they're made up of their business is made up of needs from a lot of different parties that they're putting together, you know, to accommodate their business outcome. And so the only way to play right now in tech is is in a collaborative way in an ecosystem way. I think the mawr that companies like ours worked with other companies on these partnerships. And frankly, by the way, I think in the past, many companies that have made bold announcements and they would say, Oh, you know, I'm partnering with so and so and I've got this great partner, you know, partnership. And then nothing would happen. You know, like it was just a lot of, you know, talk. But I think what's actually happening now and it's enabled by the cloud, is, um, we have much more of a show me culture, right? We can we can actually say. Okay, well, let's say, uh, Anna plan is partnering with Google. Show me. You know, show me what you're actually doing. And I see our customers, um, asking for references of how these ecosystem partnerships air playing. Um, and, uh, because these stories air out there mawr, I think partnerships are actually much more feasible and and really and pragmatic. Yeah. >>Anna, we call those Barney deals, you know, I love you. You love me, would do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. >>That's right. That's right. And I think that Z that's not gonna work. Going forward day, right? People are asking for a lot more transparency. And so when we think about ecosystems, they really want the meat on the bone, right? They don't want just, uh, announcements that don't really help their business move forward. Yeah, >>And you know the other thing to the come back to data. It's always comes back to data, right? Every conversation. But the data that's created out of that ecosystem is gonna throw off, you know, new capabilities and new data products, data services. And that, to me, is a really exciting, you know, new chapter, I think of cloud. >>Yeah, and it's interesting. You know, the conversations I'm having now are are about data and believe it or not, also about metadata, right? Because people are trying to analyze what's happening with the cloud. You know, among cloud providers what our customers doing with the data, right? How are they using data? How often are they accessing data? Um, security. You know, from that perspective, looking at who's accessing? Accessing what? So, um, the data conversation in the metadata conversation are truly enabled by the cloud and their their key. And they weren't that easy to do in a prior, you know, legacy sort of environment. There's >>a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, because legacy, environment, all the all that metadata that data about the data is locked inside of these systems. And if you're gonna go across clouds and you're gonna have it secure and govern. You've gotta have that metadata visibility and a point of control that actually can see that and and can manage it. So thank you for that at that point. And thank you for coming on the on the Cuban participating. The Cuban cloud has been great having you. >>Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. >>Alright, Keep it right there. Everybody mawr from the Cuban cloud right after this short break.

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hello, and welcome back to the cube live coverage of reinvent 2020 virtual. We're not there this year. It's the cube virtual. We are the cube virtual. I'm your host, John fro with Dave Alante and analyzing our take on the partner day. Um, keynotes and leadership sessions today was AWS APN, which is Amazon partner network global partner network day, where all the content being featured today is all about the partners and what Amazon is doing to create an ecosystem, build the ecosystem, nurture the ecosystem and reinvent what it means to be a partner. Dave, thanks for joining me today on the analysis of Amazon's ecosystem and partner network and a great stuff today. Thanks for coming on. >>Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, watch the keynote this morning. I mean, partners are critical to AWS. Look, the fact is that when, when AWS was launched, it was the developers ate it up. You know, if you're a developer, you dive right in infrastructure is code beautiful. You know, if you're mainstream it, this thing's just got more complex with the cloud. And so there's, there's a big gap right between how I, where I am today and where I want to be. And partners are critical to help helping people get there. And we'll talk about the details of specifically what Amazon did, but I mean, especially when John, when you look at things like smaller outposts, you know, going hybrid, Andy Jassy redefining hybrid, you need partners to really help you plan design, implement, manage at scale. >>Yeah. You know, one of the things I'm always, um, you know, saying nice things about Amazon, but one of the things that they're vulnerable on in my opinion is how they balanced their own SAS offerings and with what they develop in the ecosystem. This has been a constant, um, challenge and, and they've balanced it very well. Um, so other vendors, they are very clear. They make their own software, right. And they have a channel and it's kind of the old playbook. Amazon's got to reinvent the playbook here. And I think that's, what's key today on stage Doug Yom. He's the, uh, the leader you had, um, also Dave McCann who heads up marketplace and Sandy Carter who heads up worldwide public sector partners. So Dave interesting combination of three different teams, you had the classic ISV partners in the ecosystem, the cohesiveness of the world, the EMCs and so on, you had the marketplace with Dave McCann. That's where the future of procurement is. That's where people are buying product and you had public sector, huge tsunami of innovation happening because of the pandemic and Sandy is highlighting their partners. So it's partner day it's partner ecosystem, but multiple elements. They're moving marketplace where you buy programs and competencies with public sector and then ISV, all of those three areas are changing. Um, I want to get your take because you've been following ecosystems years and you've been close to the enterprise and how they buy your, >>And I think, I think John, Oh, a couple of things. One is, you know, Dave McCann was talking a lot about how CIO is one of modernize applications and they have to rationalize, and it will save some of that talk for later on, you know, Tim prophet on. But there's no question that Amazon's out to reinvent, as you said, uh, the whole experience from procurement all the way through, and, you know, normally you had to, to acquire services outside of the marketplace. And now what they're doing is bundling the services and software together. You know, it's straightforward services, implementation services, but those are well understood. The processes are known. You can pretty much size them and price them. So I think that's a huge opportunity for partners and customers to reduce friction. I think the other thing I would say is ecosystems are, are critical. >>Uh, one of the themes that we've been talking about in the cube as we've gone from a product centric world in the old days of it to a platform centric world, which has really been the last decade has been about SAS platforms and cloud platforms. And I think ecosystems are going to be a really power, the new innovation in the coming decade. And what I mean by that is look, if you're just building a service and Amazon is going to do that same service, you know, you got to keep innovating. And one of the ways you can innovate is you can build on ecosystems. There's all this data within industries, across industries, and you can through the partner network and through customer networks within industry start building new innovation around ecosystems and partners or that glue, Amazon's not going to go in. And like Jandy Jesse even said in the, uh, in his fireside chat, you know, customers will ask us for our advice and we're happy to give it to them, but frankly partners are better at that nitty gritty hardcore stuff. They have closer relationships with the customers. And so that's a really important gap that Amazon has been closing for the last, you know, frankly 10 years. And I think that to your point, they've still got a long way to go, but that's a huge opportunity in that. >>A good call out on any Jess, I've got to mention that one of the highlights of today's keynote was on a scheduled, um, Andy Jassy fireside chat. Uh, normally Andy does his keynote and then he kind of talks to customers and does his thing normally at a normal re-invent this time he came out on stage. And I think what I found interesting was he was talking about this builder. You always use the word builder customer, um, solutions. And I think one of the things that's interesting about this partner network is, is that I think there's a huge opportunity for companies to be customer centric and build on top of Amazon. And what I mean by that is, is that Amazon is pretty cool with you doing things on top of their platform that does two things serves the customer's needs better than they do, and they can make more money on and other services look at snowflake as an example, um, that's a company built on AWS. I know they've got other clouds going on, but mainly Amazon Zoom's the same way. They're doing a great solution. They've got Redshift, Amazon, Amazon's got Redshift, Dave, but also they're a customer and a partner. So this is the dynamic. If you can be successful on Amazon serving customers better than Amazon does, that's the growth hack. That's the hack on Amazon's partner network. If you could. >>I think, I think Snowflake's a really good example. You snowflake you use new Relic as an example, I've heard Andy Jess in the past use cloud air as an example, I like snowflake better because they're, they're sort of thriving. And so, but, but I will say this there's a, they're a great example of that ecosystem that we just talked about because yes, not only are they building on AWS, they're connecting to other clouds and that is an ecosystem that they're building out. And Amazon's got a lot of snowflake, I guess, unless you're the Redshift team, but, but generally speaking, Snowflake's driving a lot of business for Amazon and Andy Jesse addressed that in that, uh, in that fireside chat, he's asked that question a lot. And he said, look, we, we, we have our primary services. And at the same time we want to enable our partners to be successful. And snowflake is a really good example of that. >>Yeah. I want to call out also, uh, yesterday. Um, I had our Monday, I should say Tuesday, December 1st, uh, Jesse's keynote. I did an interview with Jerry chin with gray lock. He's investing in startups and one of the things he observed and he pointed out Dave, is that with Amazon, if you're, if you're a full all-in in the cloud, you're going to take advantage of things that are just not available on say on premises that is data patterns, other integrations. And I think one of the things that Doug pointed out was with interoperability and integration with say things like the SAS factor that they put out there there's advantages for being in the cloud specifically with Amazon, that you can get on integrations. And I think Dave McCann teases that out with the marketplace when they talk about integrations. But the idea of being in the cloud with all these other partners makes integration and interoperability different and unique and better potentially a differentiator. This is going to become a huge deal. >>I didn't pick up on that because yesterday I thought I wasn't in the keynote. I think it was in the analyst one-on-one with, with Jesse, he talked about, you know, this notion that people, I think he was addressing multi-cloud he didn't use that term, but this notion of an abstraction layer and how it does simplify things in, in his basic, he basically said, look, our philosophy is we want to have, you know, the, the ability to go deep with the primitives and have that fine grain access, because that will give us control. A lot of times when you put in this abstraction layer, which people are trying to do across clouds, you know, it limits your ability to really move fast. And then of course it's big theme is, is this year, at the same time, if you look at a company who was called out today, like, like Octa, you know, when you do an identity management and single sign-on, you're, you're touching a lot of pieces, there's a lot of integration to your point. >>So you need partners to come in and be that glue that does a lot of that heavy lifting that needs to needs to be done. Amazon. What Jessie was essentially saying, I think to the partner network is, look, we're not going to put in that abstraction layer. You're going to you, you got to do that. We're going to do stuff maybe between our own own services like they did with the, you know, the glue between databases, but generally speaking, that's a giant white space for partner organizations. He mentioned Okta. He been talked about in for apt Aptio. This was Dave McCann, actually Cohesity came up a confluent doing fully managed Kafka. So that to me was a signal to the partners. Look, here's where you guys should be playing. This is what customers need. And this is where we're not going to, you know, eat your lunch. >>Yeah. And the other thing McCann pointed out was 200 new Dave McCann pointed out who leads these leader of the, of the marketplace. He pointed out 200 new ISP. ISV is out there, huge news, and they're going to turn already. He went, he talked with his manage entitlements, which got my attention. And this is kind of an, um, kind of one of those advantage points that it's kind of not sexy and mainstream to talk about, but it's really one of those details. That's the heavy lifting. That's a pain in the butt to deal with licensing and tracking all this compliance stuff that goes on under the covers and distribution of software. I think that's where the cloud could be really advantaged. And also the app service catalog registry that he talked about and the professional services. So these are areas that Amazon is going to kind of create automation around. >>And as Jassy always talks about that undifferentiated heavy lifting, they're going to take care of some of these plumbing issues. And I think you're right about this differentiation because if I'm a partner and I could build on top of Amazon and have my own cloud, I mean, let's face it. Snowflake is a born in the cloud, in the cloud only solution on Amazon. So they're essentially Amazon's cloud. So I think the thing that's not being talked about this year, that is probably my come up in future reinvents is that whoever can build their own cloud on top of Amazon's cloud will be a winner. And I, I talked about this years ago, data around this tier two, I call it tier two clouds. This new layer of cloud service provider is going to be kind of the, on the power law, the, the second wave of cloud. >>In other words, you're on top of Amazon differentiating with a modern application at scale inside the cloud with all the other people in there, a whole new ecosystem is going to emerge. And to me, I think this is something that is not yet baked out, but if I was a partner, I would be out there planning like hell right now to say, I'm going to build a cloud business on Amazon. I'm going to take advantage of the relationships and the heavy lifting and compete and win that way. I think that's a re redefining moment. And I think whoever does that will win >>And a big theme around reinventing everything, reinvent the industry. And one of the areas that's being reinvented as is the, you know, the VAR channel really well, consultancies, you know, smaller size for years, these companies made a ton of dough selling boxes, right? All the, all the Dell and the IBM and the EMC resellers, you know, they get big boats and big houses, but that business changed dramatically. They had to shift toward value, value, value add. So what did they do? They became VMware specialists. They came became SAP specialists. There's a couple of examples, maybe, you know, adding into security. The cloud was freaking them out, but the cloud is really an opportunity for them. And I'll give you an example. We've talked a lot about snowflake. The other is AWS glue elastic views. That's what the AWS announced to connect all their databases together. Think about a consultancy that is able to come in and totally rearchitect your big data life cycle and pipeline with the people, the processes, the skillsets, you know, Amazon's not going to do that work, but the upside value for the organizations is tremendous. So you're seeing consultancies becoming managed service providers and adding all kinds of value throughout the stack. That's really reinvention of the partnership. >>Yeah. I think it's a complete, um, channel strategy. That's different. It doesn't, it looks like other channels, but it's not, it's, it's, it's driven by value. And I think this idea of competing on value versus just being kind of a commodity play is shifting. I think the ISV and the VARs, those traditional markets, David, as you pointed out, are going to definitely go value oriented. And you can just own a specialty area because as data comes in and when, and this is interesting. And one of the key things that Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat want to ask directly, how do partners benefit when asked about his keynote, how that would translate to partners. He really kind of went in and he was kind of rambling, but he, he, he hit the chips. He said, well, we've got our own chips, which means compute. Then he went into purpose-built data store and data Lake data, elastic views SageMaker Q and QuickSight. He kind of went down the road of, we have the horsepower, we have the data Lake data, data, data. So he was kind of hinting at innovate on the data and you'll do okay. >>Well, and this is again, we kind of, I'm like a snowflake fan boy, you know, in the way you, you like AWS. But look, if you look at AWS glue elastic views, that to me is like snowflakes data cloud is different, a lot of pushing and moving a date, a lot of copying data. But, but this is a great example of where like, remember last year at reinvent, they said, Hey, we're separating compute from storage. Well, you know, of course, snowflake popularized that. So this is great example of two companies thriving that are both competitors and partners. >>Well, I've got to ask you, you know, you, you and I always say we kind of his stories, we've been around the block on the enterprise for years. Um, where do you Mark the, um, evolution of their partner? Because again, Amazon has been so explosive in their growth. The numbers have been off the charts and they've done it well with and pass. And now you have the pandemic which kind of puts on full display, digital transformation. And then Jassy telegraphing that the digital global it spend is their next kind of conquering ground, um, to take, and they got the edge exploding with 5g. So you have this kind of range and they doing all kinds of stuff with IOT, and they're doing stuff in you on earth and in space. So you have this huge growth and they still don't have their own fully oriented business model. They rely on people to build on top of Amazon. So how do you see that evolving in your opinion? Because they're trying to add their own Amazon only, we've got Redshift that competes with others. How do you see that playing out? >>So I think it's going to be specialized and, and something that, uh, that I've talked about is Amazon, you know, AWS in the old day, old days being last decade, they really weren't that solution focused. It was really, you know, serving the builders with tooling, with you, look at something like what they're doing in the call center and what they're doing at the edge and IOT there. I think they're, so I think their move up the stack is going to be very solution oriented, but not necessarily, you know, horizontal going after CRM or going after, you know, uh, supply chain management or ERP. I don't think that's going to be their play. I think their play is going to be to really focus on hard problems that they can automate through their tooling and bring special advantage. And that's what they'll SAS. And at the same time, they'll obviously allow SAS players. >>It's just reminds me of the early days when you and I first met, uh, VMware. Everybody had to work with VMware because they had a such big ecosystem. Well, the SAS players will run on top. Like Workday does like Salesforce does Infour et cetera. And then I think you and I, and Jerry Chen talked about this years ago, I think they're going to give tools to builders, to disrupt the service now is in the sales forces who are out buying companies like crazy to try to get a, you know, half, half a billion dollar, half a trillion dollar market caps. And that is a really interesting dynamic. And I think right now, they're, they're not even having to walk a fine line. I think the lines are reasonably clear. We're going up to database, we're going to do specialized solutions. We're going to enable SAS. We're going to compete where we compete, come on, partner ecosystem. And >>Yeah, I, I, I think that, you know, the Slack being bought by Salesforce is just going to be one of those. I think it's a web van moment, you know, um, you know, where it's like, okay, Slack is going to go die on Salesforce. Okay. I get that. Um, but it's, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just old school thinking. And I think if you're an entrepreneur and if you're a developer or a partner, you could really reinvent the business model because if you're, dis-aggregating all these other services like you can compete with Salesforce, Slack has now taken out of the game with Salesforce, but what Amazon is doing with say connect, which they're promoting heavily at this conference. I mean, you hear it, you heard it on Andy Jessie's keynote, Sandy Carter. They've had huge success with AWS connect. It's a call center mindset, but it's not calling just on phones. >>It's contact that is descent, intermediating, the Salesforce model. And I think when you start getting into specialists and specialism in channels, you have customer opportunity to be valuable. And I think call center, these kinds of stories that you can stand up pretty quickly and then integrate into a business model is going to be game changing. And I think that's going to going to a lot of threat on these big incumbents, like Salesforce, like Slack, because let's face it. Bots is just the chat bot is just a call center front end. You can innovate on the audio, the transcriptions there's so much Amazon goodness there, that connect. Isn't just a call center that could level the playing field and every vertical >>Well, and SAS is getting disrupted, you know, to your, to your point. I mean, you think about what happened with, with Oracle and SAP. You had, you know, these new emerging players come up like, like Salesforce, like Workday, like service now, but their pricing model, it was all the same. We lock you in for a one-year two-year three-year term. A lot of times you have to pay up front. Now you look at guys like Datadog. Uh, you, you look at a snowflake, you look at elastic, they're disrupting the Splunks of the world. And that model, I think that SAS model is right for disruption with a consumption pricing, a true cloud pricing model. You combine that with new innovation that developers are going to attack. I mean, you know, people right now, they complain about service now pricing, they complain about Splunk pricing. They, you know, they talk about, Oh, elastic. We can get that for half the price Datadog. And so I'm not predicting that those companies service now Workday, the great companies, but they are going to have to respond much in the same way that Oracle and SAP had to respond to the disruption that they saw. >>Yeah. It's interesting. During the keynote, they'll talk about going out to the mainframes today, too. So you have Amazon going into Oracle and Microsoft, and now the mainframes. So you have Oracle database and SQL server and windows server all going to being old school technologies. And now mainframe very interesting. And I think the, this whole idea of this SAS factory, um, got my attention to Cohesity, which we've been covering Dave on the storage front, uh, Mo with the founder was on stage. I'm a data management as a service they're part of this new SAS factory thing that Amazon has. And what they talk about here is they're trying to turn ISV and VARs into full-on SAS providers. And I think if they get that right with the SAS factory, um, then that's going to be potentially game changing. And I'm gonna look at to see if what the successes are there, because if Amazon can create more SAS applications, then their Tam and the global it market is there is going to, it can be mopped up pretty quickly, but they got to enable it. They got to enable that quickly. Yeah. >>Enabling to me means not just, and I think, you know, when Jesse answered your question, I saw it in the article that you wrote about, you know, you asked them about multi-cloud and it, to me, it's not about running on AWS and being compatible with Azure and being compatible with Google. No, it's about that frankly abstraction layer that he talked about, and that's what Cohesity is trying to do. You see others trying to do it as well? Snowflake for sure. It's about abstracting that complexity away and adding value on top of the cloud. In other words, you're using the cloud for scale being really expert at taking advantage of the native cloud services, which requires is that Jessie was saying different API APIs, different control, plane, different data plane, but taking that complexity away and then adding new value on top that's white space for a lot of players there. And, and, and I'll tell you, it's not trivial. It takes a lot of R and D and it takes really smart people. And that's, what's going to be really interesting to see, shake out is, you know, can the Dell and HPE, can they go fast enough to compete with the, the Cohesity's you've got guys like CLU Mayo coming in that are, that are brand new. Obviously we talked about snowflake a lot and many others. >>I think there's going to be a huge change in expectations, experience, huge opportunity for people to come in with unique solutions. We're going to have specialty programming on the cube all day today. So if you're watching us here on the Amazon channel, you know that we're going to have an all of a sudden demand. There's a little link on our page. On the, on the, um, the Amazon reinvent virtual event platform, click here, the bottom, it's going to be a landing page, check out all the interviews as we roll them out all day. We got a great lineup, Dave, we got Nutanix pure storage, big ID, BMC, Amazon leaders, all coming in to talk today. Uh, chaos search ed Walsh, Rachel Rose, uh, Medicar Kumar, um, Mike Gill, flux, tons of great, great, uh, partners coming in and they're going to share their story and what's working for them and their new strategies. And all throughout the day, you're going to hear specific examples of how people are changing and reinventing their business development, their partnership strategies on the product, and go to market with Amazon. So really interesting learnings. We're going to have great conversations all throughout the day. So check it out. And again, everything's going to be on demand. And when in doubt, go to the cube.net, we have everything there and Silicon angle.com, uh, for all the great coverage. So >>I don't think John is, we're going to have a conversation with him. David McCann touched on this. You talked about the need for modernization and rationalization, Tim Crawford on, on later. And th this is, this is sort of the, the, uh, the call-out that Andy Jassy made in his keynote. He gave the story of that one. CIO is a good friend of his who said, Hey, I love what you're doing, but it's not going to happen on my watch. And, and so, you know, Jessie's sort of poking at that, that, uh, complacency saying, guys, you have to reinvent, you have to go fast, you have to keep moving. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about what, what does that mean to modernize applications, why the CIO is want to rationalize what is the role of AWS and its ecosystem and providing that, that, that level of innovation, and really try to understand what the next five to seven years are gonna look like in that regard. >>Funny, you mentioned, uh, Andy Jesuit that story. When I had my one-on-one conversation with them, uh, he was kind of talking about that anonymous CIO and I, if people don't know Andy, he's a big movie buff, too, right? He loves it goes to Sundance every year. Um, so I said to him, I said, this error of digital transformation, uh, is kind of like that scene in the godfather, Dave, where, um, Michael Corleone goes to Tom Hagen, Tom, you're not a wartime conciliary. And what he meant by that was is that, you know, they were going to war with the other five families. I think now I think this is what chassis pointed out is that, that this is such an interesting, important time in history. And he pointed this out. If you don't have the leadership chops to lean into this, you're going to get swept away. >>And that story about the CIO being complacent. Yeah. He didn't want to shift. And the new guy came in or gal and they, and they, and they lost three years, three years of innovation. And the time loss, you can't get that back. And during this time, I think you have to have the stomach for the digital transformation. You have to have the fortitude to go forward and face the truth. And the truth is you got to learn new stuff. So the old way of doing things, and he pointed that out very aggressively. And I think for the partners, that same thing is true. You got to look in the mirror and say, where are we? What's the opportunity. And you gotta gotta go there. If not, you can wait, be swept away, be driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say, or lean in and pick up a, pick up a shovel and start digging the new solution. >>You know what the other interesting thing, I mean, every year when you listen to Jassy and his keynotes and you sort of experienced re-invent culture comes through and John you're live in Silicon Valley, you talked to leaders of Silicon Valley, you know, well, what's the secret of success though? Nine times out of 10, they'll talk about culture, maybe 10 times out of 10. And, and, and so that's, that comes through in Jesse's keynotes. But one of the things that was interesting this year, and it's been thematic, you know, Andy, you know, repetition is important, uh, to, to him because he wants to educate people and make sure it sticks. One of the things that's really been he's been focused on is you actually can change your culture. And there's a lot of inertia. People say, well, not on my watch. Well, it doesn't work that way around here. >>And then he'll share stories about how AWS encourages people to write papers. Anybody in the organization say we should do it differently. And, and you know, they have to follow their protocol and work backwards and all of those stuff. But I believe him when he says that they're open to what you have a great example today. He said, look, if somebody says, well, it's 10 feet and somebody else says, well, it's, it's five feet. He said, okay, let's compromise and say it's seven and a half feet. Well, we know it's not seven and a half feet. We don't want to compromise. We either want to be a 10, Oh, we want to be at five, which is the right answer. And they push that. And that that's, he gives examples like that for the AWS culture, the working backwards, the frequently asked questions, documents, and he's always pushing. And that to me is very, very important and fundamental to understanding AWS. >>It's no doubt that Andy Jassy is the best CEO in the business. These days. If you look at him compared to everyone else, he's hands down, more humble as keynote who does three hour keynotes, the way he does with no notes with no, he memorize it all. So he's competitive and he's open. And he's a good leader. I think he's a great CEO. And I think it will be written and then looked back at his story this time in history. The next, I think post COVID Dave is going to be an error. We're going to look back and say the digital transformation was accelerated. Yes, all that good stuff, people process technology. But I think we're gonna look at this time, this year and saying, this was the year that there was before COVID and after COVID and the people who change and modernize will build the winners and not, and the losers will, will be sitting still. So I think it's important. I think that was a great message by him. So great stuff. All right. We gotta leave it there. Dave, the analysis we're going to be back within the power panel. Two sessions from now, stay with us. We've got another great guest coming on next. And then we have a pair of lb talk about the marketplace pricing and how enterprises have CIO is going to be consuming the cloud in their ecosystem. This is the cube. Thanks for watching..