>>Welcome back. Everyone live here at the I'm John Fur, host of the Cube. We got a special insertion here off the program. Jerry Chen Greylock, 10 years with the Cube coming on. 10 years ago when the cube first came here, Jerry, you were in the hallway. We didn't have any guess list. He was like, Hey, you wanna come up in the cube so much. Now we got three sets. We're gonna do hundreds of interviews already. We're gonna have probably over 200 streaming live. Love it Shorts, Instagram reels, data lake. The cubes expanded. You've been there from the whole >>Time. Its like the, its like the, the mcu, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Cube Cinematic universe. You know, it's, its a whole franchise. Congratulations and happy early birthday, John. Thank you very much. Thanks >>For having me. Yeah, you know, I was just graduated high school when I first came to aws. Look, I wanna get your thoughts on, we're gonna do a quick segment here before AMD comes on. Got some great interviews with those guys. You've been here 10 years, you're out in the trenches. Just Andy, Adam Celski, just talked to the VCs, the investment thesis economy. Yeah. This headwinds, tailwinds, depending on which side you're on, you're gonna have a tailwind or headwind. What's the outlook? What's your take of reinvent this year? Aws, the ecosystem and the investment market. >>You know, I think it's, it is a great rebound. The energy's back when it was like pre covid, right? We're saying last year was kind of half the size and you know, be postcode. But I think the show, the energy's great. And Amazon just amazing, right? It's in this economy, what's going on right now in the world. They're still growing, still kicking butt. I think you're gonna see a lot of both enterprise customers and startups start to worry about cost, right? Because I think Amazon's gonna focus like, Hey, how can they help the customers? But the economy for the next year, I think we're gonna see some headwinds. So I think a lot of startups, a lot of customers are gonna worry about cost. >>You're on the board of a lot of startups that are in the cloud, rock sets. One we've covered. I think they're gonna come on here too tomorrow or today. What's your advice on the board level? Go to market. Dial up. Dial down. Sure. What's the strategy marketplace? I mean, how do you give the advice to start? What's the, what's the north star? What's the, what's the advice as the investor? >>Two or three things for most startups, hard roi, like how can you save money? So all the kinda fluffy marketing value you gotta have hard dollar savings, right? Number one, if can save money, you'll do well. Number two, to your point, the marketplace is becoming the channel for startups. These lot of large customers have deals with Amazon through the marketplace. So startup can sell through the marketplace to customers. These lot of CFOs are doing no new vendors, right? It's getting hard, hard to get approved as a startup. So the marketplace become a bigger, bigger deal. >>What about existing ecosystem partners that have been around for the past 10 years? They're independent. They may have their toe in the marketplace, may not, some of them not making their numbers, they're starting to hear things like maybe they'll be re pivoting. People are tooling up. What's the advice for the existing ecosystem partners? Because they're either gonna be like the next data bricks or kind of like maybe >>Everyone's looking for the next data bricks, right? You know, I think for existing partners, you're seeing what's happened. John deals are getting smaller, taking longer to close, right? It's just the reality of what's happening right now. And so for those partners are saying, Hey, focus on the heart roi, be okay with the smaller land and just expand in 23, 24. So just get kind of creative of how you work with customers. And I, like you said, I think Marketplace is is kind of a, a go-to light >>Book. So today, Aruba, the new leader of the, of the partner network, they've merged eight PN with the marketplace. They've now won Coherent organization, not fragmented, I was talking to them last night. They have more startups than ever before coming on board. So the velocity of new venture creation is up, up and to the right still, even in this economy. And as they always say, best time to invest is in a down market. That's like BC 1 0 1, entrepreneurship 1 0 1. What's your advice right now for builders out there looking for that round, trying to get some traction. The agility with the cloud still is there. You can still get time to value. You can still get traction fast. That doesn't go away. What's your advice for the startups? >>Narrow, narrower wedge, right. So I think with like 5,000 startups every single year, there's so much noise. John, look across the floor, a lot of great companies. B, a lot of noise. So I think the more focused wedge you have as a startup and how you can land deliver value, the better land, the very, very sharp wedge expand over time. But just be very specific how you land. >>Awesome. Jerry, great to have you on. I know we wanna make some room on appreciate AMD for squeezing a couple minutes out of their hour and the next hour we're gonna spend with them for your Sage advice final kind of new Insta challenge that Savannah put together, A new host instant challenge, instant challenges. If you had to do an Instagram reel right now, oh, about reinvent this year, what would that Instagram reel be right now? >>I would, I would do the expos scavenger hunt, right? We would have a race of different VCs. You give me a list of five companies, the VCs find the first five companies on the list wins. The wins the race. I think that would be a great challenge. >>All right. What's the most important story this year at Reinvent that you could share with the folks that you could share in terms of what's important, what they should pay attention to, or what's not being told? >>Well, I, I think you talked about your interview with Adam Slosky is the solutions and the what you call the next gen cloud. These high level services. What AWS is doing around these services, it's super interesting. They kind of don't say lead the way, but the responded customers. So they lead the way by kind of following where the customer's going and if, when Slutsky and AWS are doing these solutions, supply chain, et cetera, that tells you kind of where the market's >>Headed. Next Gen Cloud, Jerry, Chad, thanks. Coming on, you're watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. I'm John Furrier. Will be right back with more cube coverages. Day two, day three, here at Reinvent at the short break.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage, day one wrap-up. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We have Jerry Chen, special guest who's been with us every year on theCUBE since inception. Certainly every AWS re:Invent, nine years straight. Jerry Chen, great to see you for our guest analyst's wrap up VC general partner, Greylock partners, good to see you. >> John, Dave, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for having me again. It wouldn't be re:Invent without the three of us sitting here and we missed last year, right, because of COVID. So we have to make up for lost time. >> John: We did a virtual one- >> Dave: we did virtual stuff= >> John: wasn't the same as in-person. >> Dave: Definitely not the same. >> Jerry: Not the same thing. So, it's good to see you guys again in person, and less than 6 feet apart. >> Cheers, yeah. >> And 7,000 people here, showing that the event's still relevant. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Some people would kill for those numbers, it's a bad year for Amazon, down from 60,000. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> So, ecosystem's booming. Okay, let's get to it. Day one in the books, new CEO, new sheriff in town, his name's Adam Selipsky. Your take? >> Well, Adam's new, but he's old, right? Something, you know, like something new, something old, something blue, right? It's so, Adam was early Amazon, so he had that founding DNA. Left, you know, CEO of Tableau, acquired by Salesforce, came back few months ago. So I think it was a great move, because one, he's got the history and culture under Jassy, so he's definitely the Bezos Jassy tree of leadership, but yet he's been outside the bubble. Right? So he actually knows what it means to run a company not on the Amazon platform. So, I think Adam's a great choice to lead AWS for what we call it, like maybe act two, right? Act one, the first X years with Jassy, and maybe this is the second act under Adam. >> Yeah. And he's got- and he was very technical, hung around all the techies, James Hamilton, DeSantis, all the engineers, built that core primitives. Now, as they say, this cloud next gen's here, act two, it's about applications. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Infrastructure as code is in place. Interesting area. Where's the growth come from? So, look, you know, the ecosystem has got to build these super clouds, or as you say, Castles on the Cloud, which you coined, but you brought this up years ago, that the moats and the value has to be in there somewhere. Do you want to revise that prediction now that you see what's coming from Selipsky? >> Okay, well, so let's refresh. Greylock.com/castles has worked out, like we did, but a lot of thought leadership and the two of you, have informed my thinking at Castles in the Cloud, how to compete against Amazon in the cloud. So you'd argue act one, the startup phase, the first, you know, X years at Amazon was from 2008 to, you know, 2021, the first X years, building the platform, digging the moats. Right? So what did you have? You have castle the platform business, economies of scale, which means decreasing marginal costs and natural network effects. So once the moat's in place and you had huge market share, what do you for act two, right? Now the moats are in place, you can start exploring the moats for I think, Adam talked about in your article, horizontal and verticals, right? Horizontal solutions up the stack, like Amazon Connect, CRM solutions, right? Horizontal apps, maybe the app layer, and verticals, industrials, financials, healthcare, et cetera. So, I think Jassy did a foundation of the castle and now we're seeing, you know, what Adam and his generation would do for act two. >> So he's, so there's almost like an act one A, because if you take the four hyperscalers, they're about, maybe do 120 billion this year, out of, I don't know, pick a number, it's many hundreds of billions, at least in infrastructure. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And those four hyperscalers growing at 35% collectively, right? So there's some growth there, but I feel like there's got to be deeper business integration, right? It's not just about IT transformation, it's about deeper- So that's maybe where this Connect like stuff comes, but are there enough of those? You know, I didn't, I haven't, I didn't hear a lot of that this morning. I heard a little bit, ML- >> Jerry: Sure. >> AI into Connect, but where's the next Connect, right? They've got to do dozens of those in order to go deeper. >> Either, Dave, dozens of those Connects or more of those premise, so the ML announcement was today. So you look at what Twilio did by buying Segment, right? Deconstruct a CRM to compete against Adam Selipsky's old acquire of Salesforce.com. They bought Segment, so Twilio now has communicates, like texting, messaging, email, but all the data come from Segment. >> Dave: With consumption-based pricing. >> With consumption-based pricing. So, right? So that's an example of kind of what the second act of cloud looks like. It may not look like full SaaS apps like Salesforce.com, but these primitives, both horizontally vertically, because again, what does Amazon have as an asset that other guys don't? Install based developers. Developers aren't going to necessarily build or consume SaaS apps, but they're going to consume things like these API's and primitives. And so you look around, what's cloud act two look like? It may not be VM's or containers. It may be API's like Stripe and Billing, Twilio messaging, right? Concepts like that. So, we'll see what the next act at cloud looks like. And they announced a bunch of stuff today, serverless for the data analytics, right? So serverless is this move towards not consuming raw compute and storage, but APIs. >> What about competition? Microsoft is nipping at the heels of AWS. >> Dave: John put them out of business earlier today. [John and Dave Laugh] >> No, I said, quote, I'll just- let me rephrase. I said, if Amazon goes unchecked- >> Jerry: Sure. >> They'll annihilate Microsoft's ecosystem. Because if you're an ISV, why wouldn't you want to run on the best platform? >> Jerry: Sure. >> Speeds and feeds matter when you have these shifts of software development. >> Jerry: You want them both. >> So, you know, I mean, you thought about the 80's, if you were at database, you wanted the best processor. So I think this Annapurna vertical integrated stacks are interesting because if my app runs better and I have a platform, prefabricated or purpose-built platform, to be there for me, I'm going to build a great SaaS app. If it runs faster and it cost less, I'm going to flop to Amazon. That's just, that's my prediction. >> So I think better changes, right? And so I think if you're Amazon, you say cheaper, better, faster, and they're investing in chips, proprietary silicon to run better, faster, their machine learning training chips, but if you're Azure or Google, you got to redefine what better is. And as a startup investor, we're always trying to do category definition, right? Like here's a category by spin. So now, if you're Azure or Google, there are things you can say that are better, and Google argued their chips, their TensorFlow, are better. Azure say our regions, our security, our enterprise readiness is better. And so all of a sudden, the criteria "what's better" changes. So from faster and cheaper to maybe better compliance, better visibility, better manageability, different colors, I don't know, right? You have to change the game , because if you play the same game on Amazon's turf, to your point, John, it- it's game over because they have economies of scale. But I think Azure and Google and other clouds, the superclouds, or subclouds are changing the game, what it means to compete. And so I think what's going on, just two more seconds, from decentralized cloud, being Web 3 and crypto, that's a whole 'nother can of worms, to Edge compute, what Cloudflare are doing with R2 and storage, they're trying to change the name of the game. >> Well, that's right. If you go frontal against Amazon, you're got to get decimated. You got to move the goalposts for better. And I think that's a good way to look at it, Dave. What does better mean? So that's the question that's on the table. What does that look like? And I think that's an unknown, that's coming. Okay, back to the start-ups. Category definition. That's an awesome term. That to me is a key thing. How do you look at what a category is on your sub- on your Castles of the Cloud, you brought up how many categories of- >> Jerry: 33 markets and a bunch of submarkets, yeah. >> Yeah. Explain that concept. >> So, we did Castle in the Clouds where my team looked at all the services offered at Azure, Google, and Amazon. We downloaded the services and recategorized them to like, 30 plus markets and a bunch of submarkets. Because, the reason why is apples to apples, you know, Amazon, Google, Azure all have databases, but they might call them different things. And so I think first things first is, let's give developers and customers kind of apples to apples comparisons. So I think those are known markets. The key in investing in the cloud, or investing in general, is you're either investing in budget replacement, replacing a known market, cheaper, better database, to your point, or a net new market, right? Which is always tricky. So I think the biggest threat to a lot of the startups and incumbents, the biggest threat by startups and incumbents, is either one, do something cheaper, better in a current market, or find a net new market that they haven't thought about yet. And if you can win that net new market before the rest, then that's unbelievable. We call it the, you know, the blue ocean strategy, >> Dave: Is that essentially what Snowflake has done, started with cheaper, better, and now they're building the data cloud? >> Jerry: I think there's- it's evolution, correct. So they said cheaper, better. And the Castle in the Cloud, we talked about, they actually built deep IP. So they went a known category, data warehouses, right? You had Teradata, Redshift, Snowflake cheaper, better, faster. And now let's say, okay, once you have the customers, let's change the name of the game and create a data cloud. And it's TBD whether or not Snowflake can win data cloud. Like we talked about Rockset, one of my investments that's actually move the goalpost saying, oh, data cloud is nice, but real time data is where it's at, and Snowflake and those guys can't play in real time. >> Dave: No, they're not in a position to play in real time data. >> Jerry: Right. >> Dave: I mean, that's right. >> So again, so that's an example of a startup moving the goalpost on what previously was a startup that moved the goalpost on an incumbent. >> Dave: And when you think about Edge, it's going to be real-time AI inferencing at the Edge, and you're right, Snowflake's not set up well at all for that. >> John: So competition wise, how do the people compete? Because this is what Databricks did the same exact thing. I have Ali on the record going back years, "Well, we love Amazon. We're only on Amazon." Now he's talking multicloud. >> So, you know, once you get there, you kind of change your tune cause you've got some scale, but then you got new potential entrants coming in, like Rockset. >> Jerry: Correct. >> So. >> Dave: But then, and if you add up the market caps of just those two companies, Databricks and Snowflake, it's much larger than the database market. So this, we're defining new markets now. >> Jerry: I think there's market cap, especially Snowflake that's in the public market, Databricks is still private, is optimism that there's a second or third act in the database space left to be unlocked. And you look at what's going on in that space, these real-time analytics or real-time apps, for sure there's optimism there. But, but to John's point, you're right, like you earn the right to play the next act, but it's tricky because startups disrupt incumbents and become incumbents, and they're also victims their own success, right? So you're- there's technical debt, there's also business model debt. So you're victims of your own business model, victims of your own success. And so what got you here may not get you to the next phase. And so I think for Amazon, that's a question. For Databricks and Snowflake, that's a question, is what got them here? Can they play to the next act? And look, Apple did it, multiple acts. >> John: Well, I mean, I think I- [Crosstalk] >> John: I think it's whether you take shortcuts or not, if you have debt, you make it a little bit of a shortcut bet. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Okay. That's cool. But ultimately what you're getting at here is beachhead thinking. Get a beachhead- >> Jerry: Correct. >> Get in the market, and then sequence to a different position. Classic competitive strategy, 101. That's hard to do because you want to win the beachhead- >> I know. >> John: And take a little technical debt and business model debt, cheat a little bit, and then, is it not fortified yet? So beachhead to expansion is the question. >> Jerry: That's every board meeting, John and Dave, that we're in, right? It's called you need a narrow enough wedge to land. And it is like, I don't want the tip of the spear, I want the poison on the tip of a spear, right? [Dave and John Laugh] >> You want, especially in this cloud market, a super focused wedge to land. And the problem is, as a founder, as investor, you're always thinking about the global max, right? Like the ultimate platform winner, but you don't get the right to play the early- the late innings if you don't make it out of the early innings. And so narrow beachhead, sharp wedge, but you got to land in a space, a place of real estate with adjacent tan, adjacent markets, right? Like Uber, black cars, taxi's, food, whatever, right? Snowflake, data warehouse, data cloud. And so I think the key with all startups is you'll hit some ceiling of market size. Is there a second ramp? >> Dave: So it's- the art is when to scale and how fast to scale. >> Right. Picking when, how fast, in which- which best place, it was tough. And so, the best companies are always thinking about their second or third act while the first act's still going. >> John: Yeah. And leveraging cloud to refactor, I think that's the key to Snowflake, was they had the wedge with data warehouse, they saw the position, but refactored and in the cloud with services that they knew Teradata wouldn't use. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And they're in. From there, it's just competitive IP, crank, go to market. >> And then you have the other unnatural things. You have channel, you have installed base of customers, right? And then you start selling more stuff to the same channel, to the same customers. That's what Amazon's doing. All the incumbent's do that. Amazon's got, you know, 300 services now, launching more this week, so now they have channel distribution, right? Every credit card for all the developers, and they have installed base of customers. And so they will just launch new things and serve the customers. So the startups had to disrupt them somehow. >> Well, it's always great to chat with Jerry. Every year we discover and we riff and we identify, in real time, new stuff. We were talking about this whole vertical, horizontal scale and kind of castles early on, years ago. And now it's happened. You were right. Congratulations. That's a great thesis. There's real advantages to build on a cloud. You can get the- you can build a business there. >> Jerry: Right. >> John: That's your thesis. And by the way, these markets are changing. So if you're smart, you can actually compete. >> Jerry: I think you beat, and to Dave's earlier point, you have to adapt, right? And so what's the Darwin thing, it's not the strongest, but the most adaptable. So both- Amazon's adapt and the startups who are the most adaptable will win. >> Dave: Where are you, you guys might've talked about this, where do you stand on the cost of goods sold issue? >> Jerry: Oh, I think everything's true, right? I think you can save money at some scale to repatriate your cloud, but again, Wall Street rewards growth versus COGS, right? So I think you've got a choice between a dollar of growth versus a dollar reducing COGS, people choose growth right now. That may not always be the case, but at some point, if you're a company at some scale and the dollars of growth is slowing down, you definitely have to reduce the dollars in cost. And so you start optimizing cloud costs, and that could be going to Amazon, Azure, or Google, reducing COGS. >> Dave: Negotiate, yeah. >> John: Or, you have no visibility on new net new opportunities. So growth is about new opportunities. >> Correct. >> If you repatriating things, there's no growth. >> Jerry: It's not either, or- >> That's my opinion. >> Jerry: COGS or growth, right? But they're both valid, definitely, so you can do both. And so I don't think- it's what's your priorities, you can't do everything at once. So if I'm a founder or CEO or in this case investor, and I said, "Hey, Dave, and John, if you said I can either save you 25 basis points in gross margin, or I can increase another 10% top line this year", I'm going to say increase the top line, we'll deal with the gross margin later. Not that it's not important, but right now the early phase- >> Priorities. >> Jerry: It's growth. >> Yeah. All right, Jerry Chen, great to see you. Great to have you on, great CUBE alumni, great guest analyst. Thanks for breaking it down. CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for re:Invent, back in person. Of course, it's a virtual event, we've got a hybrid event for Amazon, as well as theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching the leader in worldwide tech coverage. Thanks for watching. (Gentle music)

(electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture and our coverage of this great event continues. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests with me here to talk about Amazon Connect. Please welcome from Hawaiian Airlines, Will Van Devender, Senior Director of IT Engineering. Will, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me here. >> And from Accenture, Erich Chen is here as well, the Hawaii Regional Lead at Accenture. Erich, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be here. >> I feel very overdressed. You can tell I'm on the mainland with my turtleneck and you guys are on Oahu, which is fantastic. And I'm excited that I have a seat on Hawaiian Airlines in just a few weeks. So you guys, let's talk about this technology solution that you put together. Will, I want to start with you. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Hawaiian Airlines was having prior to working with Accenture and Amazon. >> Well, nothing really unique to us. We had the challenges that everybody had with the pandemic and scaling out to work from home, as well as an old legacy stack that had been around for a long, long time. The specific ones that drove us to launch this particular project was we had been running into some talent acquisition issues. We're not of size where we have a huge telecom team that can specialize in IDRs and other things like that. So we need folks that can play a lot of different spaces. And in this particular case, we had a situation where we had really old technology and the people we were bringing in were a lot more savvy on Cloud and those kinds of things. And so AWS Connect was a way for us to take talent that traditionally wasn't inside the telephony space and use them and bring them to bear for that business need. So it kept us from having to scale up to do this. The other thing we had was a big issue with work from home that actually predated COVID. So we had been, we're in a hurricane zone, we had been doing hurricane preparedness exercises and we realized that we had a difficult time scaling our environment to large scale work from home. So even prior to COVID, we had been started looking at the technologies that we had, which ones worked well outside of an office for a distributed workforce. And we had been moving technology in that direction. And so telephony was one of the ones that we had to beef up. And so it was nice to have a good leg up on it when the pandemic hit us. >> Absolutely. I can't imagine how advantageous that was when it struck. And of course we all know how much the airlines were affected. Talk to me about an interesting catalyst for this solution in terms of challenge with talent acquisition and work from home. Interesting impetus for this solution. Talk to me about, are you long time partners, Hawaiian Airlines with Accenture? Talk to me about how you went about looking for the right solution with them as a partner. >> Ah, okay. So Hawaiian Airlines and Accenture had been partnering for many years, but in a much bigger way in 2019, when we solidified a new managed services deal. So Accenture came in to help us out with our day to day operations. And one of the big reasons for that was actually cloud adoption. So we needed a partner that was much more up to date technology wise. And as we started ramping up our engineering and architecture designs and releasing things on new stacks, we needed folks in the operation side that could keep up with that. And not only that, actually enable and push us in those directions. And so when we went out to RFP, Accenture kind of stood out in that area and that's been a good thing. We've had very little friction as we've been going out and acquiring new technology with being able to bring that out to our run and operation space. >> That's critical, especially given the tumultuous times in which we are still living. Erich, let's go ahead and bring you into the conversation. Now, talk to me about you guys at Accenture developed and deployed this solution quickly. We're talking an eight week timeframe. Talk to me about the solution that you architected, about that delivery, and what some of the challenges were along the way that you tackled and mitigated. >> Yeah. Thanks Lisa. I mean, it was, you know, eight weeks when you look back on it, it's hard to believe we did complete it in that timeframe, but, you know, we were able to do it with some strong experts from our side. Some of the challenges we ran into along the way were probably at the very beginning, just securing the right team for Hawaiian to deliver the kind of the proper designs and development upfront, and then helping to kind of manage through the delivery process itself. You know, they were great. They had some great people with some deep expertise, kind of from a business process side of things, kind of paired with our technical and then also industry knowledge of the airlines as well. It made for a really nice, you know, strong partnership where we could get it through in eight weeks. So it was pretty amazing. >> And then walk me through the actual, oh Will, sorry. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that, that was exactly what we were looking for was that sort of wholesale partner. So when we went out to modernize our entire telephony stack, it wasn't just call centers. It was the conference rooms, it was the telephony, we went to new phone providers and circuit providers, we moved everyone off of Skype over on to Teams, all the desk phones. And so there was this scope of work that was simply larger than our team. And so what we were looking for from a partner was one, who's done this before, and then two, could you manage the whole piece of work? And so what was nice for Accenture, because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked, they found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing. So it was just a very minimal lift from the Hawaiian Airlines side. And since they ran our operations, they then moved it over to the run space. And it was just very few man hours on the Hawaiian Airlines side expended for that outcome. >> Wow. It sounds fairly seamless. Erich, how did you guys accomplish that? >> I mean, that's a type of experience and partnership we like to have with our clients, more of an all-inclusive type service. But we're sometimes accused of not having the cheapest prices on the block, but you know, you do get a great, you know, a pretty holistic experience with us and we do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring kind of the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps. >> Well, one of the things, Will, that you mentioned is we were looking for a partner that had done this before, where there's actual proof in the pudding, especially given the, like I mentioned before, the tumultuous market. Erich talk to me about, if we look at Hawaiian Airlines as an example, as a template here, how common or how often are you seeing these same challenges with respect to talent acquisition and work from home? Is that something that really skyrocketed in the last year and a half? >> Sure. I mean, it's maybe a blessing in the type of business that we're in, right. But whenever there are, you know, big, you know, kind of market issues and kind of pandemics as an example, right. Our clients do turn to us for, you know, support to help them through, you know, smaller times of need. And, you know, maybe very compressed issues. So we're very happy to, you know, reach into our larger organization to make sure that we can bring the best of Accenture to them and help them get through these tough times. >> Will, let's talk about how this solution is helping employees, agents get through these tough times. As we know, Hawaii had some really strict travel restrictions on COVID. And of course, one of the things that a lot of people lost during this time, was patience. Talk to me about how the workforce is improving, the employees, the agents, now that you have this solution implemented and a leg up probably on your competitors. >> Yeah, the whole pandemic hit us in a hard way. So we found ourselves, you know, all of a sudden one day waking up and finding that our customer facing support desks couldn't be staffed. People couldn't get into the office and actually get there. At the same time, as you and everyone else knows, flights were getting canceled and customers were calling at a level we'd never seen before trying to reschedule their flights or get credit back or get money back. And so AWS Connect was interesting in that it was one of the things we could ramp up new call centers very quickly. And so we knew we wanted something that was consumption-based because we didn't know how long it was going to last. And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out. So it was a good win there. What wasn't talked about much was the reliability aspect of it. Being on a really old system, our telephony was pretty stable, but our call center internal business facing ones were not. We had a series of outages out there and those outages directly impact our ability to get planes out in the air. There's the sort of customers calling about tickets and about help with flights, but there's also things like cruise, trying to get cruise scheduling done, trying to get staffing to a plane, trying to get things moved around in an airport. And there's a lot of internal desks that deal with those kinds of things. And having that on an incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us. And so we were able to get Connect deployed, and we were also able to front that with a number of other technologies that allowed us to have DR plans. So even if we lost that desk, how can we quickly move that over to manual calls and desk phones and those kinds of things. And so that's been, that part has been very well received. That has helped us out a lot. Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago. And so thank you all very much for your assistance in getting us to this point. >> Getting that stability and that reliability during a time of chaos that's, and also in a time that can really affect brand reputation, it sounds to me like IT is really helping drive the business forward. This is something that you did in partnership with the business side, because of course during the last year and a half, so many brands have had challenges with reputation and the ability to not do things. Talk to me about that business IT relationship. And was this a facilitator of making that even better? >> Well, it's certainly better. Yeah, we have far better conversations internally than I can ever remember in my time here in Hawaiian Airlines. But you know, when these kinds of emergencies hit, I don't think about it as IT or business. I mean, there's a problem and you got to go fix it. And so we're all in there and IT is one piece of that. How do we get a solution stood up almost overnight in this, you know, very, very difficult pandemic business time? But you know, the business is trying to get talent together and trying to get agents trained and being able to do things like handle these customer calls is very, very skill intensive. So there's a lot of partnership coming in and getting solutions, demoing with the business, dialing them in back and forth, and a lot of collaboration there. And so that builds stronger teams. And that's one of the outcomes I like more than anything else, is we're working together and dialing in the IT and the business needs very much in unison. >> That's probably one of the best outcomes you can hope for. Erich, talk to me about, are you seeing similar things with customers in other industries? Are you seeing that business IT coming together, especially during these challenging times we've been living through? >> Yeah, to varying degrees, you know, that's always the crux of, you know, a successful IT department, right. You know, you're there to serve and support the business side of things, right. We don't do technology for technology sake. But yeah, I think the better ones are getting better, better at, you know, being more fully integrated and it's not a business or IT decision, right, it's a collective kind of team decision. And I think as long as you have people who respect and understand the other side of the coin sometimes, easier the conversation will go. And I think that's what our team was able to do is express, you know, very clearly and concisely kind of what the decisions they had to make were and they could make a decision a little bit easier that way. >> And talk to me, Erich, about the solution, what impressed you? What are you most excited about in terms of what Accenture has helped to accomplish for Hawaiian Airlines? >> Yeah, I was really happy that even, you know, within a short eight week period itself, you know, things always come up as you go throughout a project. And I think the business team was getting excited about the possibilities once they saw kind of the potential of the platform. And so some, you know, requests came up in the middle of the way, you know, in flight. And, you know, our team was able to accommodate a number of the kind of minor enhancements or tweaks to the system to make it even better and serve the business in a better fashion there. >> Gotcha. Will, what is next for Hawaiian Airlines, besides my flight on it in a few weeks? Talk to me about where you guys are going from an IT perspective. >> Well we've rolled out a solution quickly 'cause we needed to, but there's a lot still to be done to dial it in for the business. Where reliability and speed were key, we got those done, but there was some aspects of the old system that were still a little easier. For those call centers where people needed to dial in, get ahold of an agent, and then pass it onto an internal employee, there's still a disconnect between our call center technology, AWS Connect, and the internal collaboration, Microsoft Teams. And that's because Teams really wasn't up to all of the call center technology needs at the time we started this. Things like call recording and things like that just weren't there at the time. So we've got some of our internal desks that still need to be tweaked and integrated more seamlessly between the two platforms or maybe as Teams gets ready, moved back over onto that. So that's, again, the part of it, being able to have this deep conversation with the business, understand their needs, having a partner where you can quickly go respond and go dial it in. And so we don't look at it as our telephony migration is complete. We look at it as we got our first big hurdle done, moving off decades old tech onto our modern stack. And now we're looking at refining it with our partners over the future. >> Right. Phase one, it's always that journey that we talk about. Erich, last question for you. What are some of the things that are coming up next as you help Hawaiian Airlines to continue on this modernization journey? >> Yeah, so more broadly we're really excited because this effort was one of the first or probably more platform centric system integration type projects we've done for Hawaiian. We've been on the operation side, we've done some business consulting worked with them for various business functions already, but this was really more on the application modernization side of things. And, you know, we see that Hawaiian has a number of areas that they're looking to kind of modernize and improve along the way. And we're very excited about, you know, being a strong partner for them in that journey coming up. >> Awesome guys, great work. Congratulations on a huge transformation accomplished during a very chaotic world time period and done so quickly. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, and look forward to seeing what you dial in next. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> For Will Van Devender and Erich Chen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture. (soft music)

(peaceful music) >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am delighted to welcome back to the cube, cube veteran, Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering from Google. Chen, welcome back to the cube. >> Hey Dave, super happy to be here. >> Absolutely delighted to have you here. Let's dive right into this conversation. There was a, there was a blog post this week, talking about Google Cloud putting a lot of weight behind this idea of principles for software development. What are those principles and why are they important? >> The three principles that we put in that blog post is open, easy, and transformative. And I think what's really important to recognize with the three principles that those are not new principles, not for Google Cloud, and definitely not for me. I joined Google about, a little bit over five years ago. Right when just Kubernetes started to lead Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes engine team. And we immediately recognized, the idea of open and the importance of flexibility and choice is a foundation to the idea of Kubernetes and portability workloads. But pretty early on, it was clear that it's not enough just to have portability and flexibility because it creates a lot of complexity. So how can we still have that without creating a trade-off or tension for our customers? So really making sure that everything is also easy. You know, and one of the things, I use, I like to say it's not just portability of workloads, but also portability of skills and you achieve that through consistent experience, right? A lot of automation. And when you bring all of those things together, what I love about Google Cloud is that, you know, I'm an infrastructure person. I've always been infrastructure person. And what excites me the most is seeing others take this innovation and, and really empowers developers to make amazing, or, you know, unique ideas, a reality. And that's really the foundation principles for Google Cloud. >> So how does that translate into, from a customer perspective? >> So I would just start with some customer examples, right? Starting from, their perspective. So when we think about open, this is actually part of the, our customers cloud strategy, right? You say cloud, you immediately think only about public cloud, but from our customer perspectives, right? They think about public clouds, right? Most of them have more than one cloud, but they also think about the private cloud, you know, IOT edge and having that openness and flexibility to choose where they can run their workload, is critical. It's critical for them. What I hear mostly is of course, innovation, managing costs, and also making sure that they are not locked out of innovation that happens for example, in any cloud or, or somewhere else. So that's a really a key consideration for our customers when they think about their cloud strategy. The second thing that open matters is that it's really hard to hire talent that is expert and has the right skills. And we see that by using a leveraging open source technologies, it actually makes it easier to our customers to hire the best talent there is in the industry. At one of the previous Google Cloud Next sessions, we had the Loblaw for example, which is the biggest grocery in Canada. And, you know, we were joking on stage, that even though at our hiring for grocery shop, they still can hire the best talent because they are using the best technologies out there in the industry. So that's one, if you think about the importance of easy, I would just call out Western Digital that we've just announced how they decided to standardize on Anthos for their cloud strategy, right? Both of course, Google cloud platform, but On Prem and the Edge. And for them what's important is that when they have all of their amazing developers and operators, how can they provide them reach experience, right. We don't want our developers or operators to spend time on things that can be automated or managed by others. So having a smooth, intuitive experience is really critical. And we we've been announcing some new stuff like a, a Google Cloud deploy and really integrating the entire experience, especially integration for managing, deploying directly to Google Kubernetes engine. And of course, one of my favorite is Jiechi autopilot, which really takes all the goodness with Kubernetes and automatically managing. And then transformative, this is like what I said before, unleashing innovation. And we see Wendy's, for example, right, they want to actually have AI machine learning at run time at their branches, which will allow them to create a new experience for their customers. So this is how we see customers really appreciate these three principles. >> So whenever the subject of Kubernetes and Google comes up, we have to talk Anthos. We're now into what year three of Anthos. How has adoption looked what's the latest on that front? >> That has been really great. We actually have been seeing a 500% growth on the end of Q2 of year over year. And it's important you know to mention that the journey with Anthos is not something new, but something that we have built with our customers when they really love the experience they have on GCP, but needed to innovate elsewhere and not just on Google Cloud. So we've been seeing that, you know, I mentioned the Western Digital, blah, blah, and Wendy's we also have customers like MLB, which is really exciting how they've changed their entire fans' experience using Anthos. And for them, again, it was both the easy part, right? How can I deal with that complexity of having compute and storage everywhere in every one of the stadiums, but also how can I use AI and machine learning, which is unique to Google Cloud in order to create unique experiences for the fans, at real time, of course. >> Yeah. Now you've, touched on this a bit already, if you had to, if you thought about someone reviewing Anthos, their Anthos experience, because we're in the midst of people adopting Anthos and becoming new to Anthos at this point. What does a delighted customers response sound like to you? What is that Yelp review that they would write? If they were telling people we, doubled down on Anthos and we are thrilled because, fill in the blank for a second. >> The first thing that comes to mind is that it works everywhere and the developer experience that comes with it, right? So we have, of course the platform and the infrastructure, but where Anthos really shine is that experience, on top of thinking about all developers and operators that can really work in every environment without paying too much attention to that. And just having that intuitive experience, right? If you go to the Google Cloud console, you see all your clusters, and now we're actually also going to add your VMs into that view, and you can use tools like Anthos config managers, and Anthos service mash to manage your security posture or the configuration in all of those environments. >> So we hear a lot about Multicloud. Multicloud is fantastic, but it sounds like, dealing with the complexity associated with Multicloud is something that Anthos definitely helps with. >> Yes, you know, Google is best with complexity at scale, we've been running containers and really large environments for many years. And some of those principles really, you know, have been fundamental to the way we've started with Kubernetes. So the idea of the declarative intent and automation is really critical in managing large environment and high complexity because in those environments, lots of things can change, but with the declarative approach, you don't have to anticipate everything that is going to change, but you need to know what is your desired state. And that's really one way that Anthos is leveraging the Kubernetes primitives and those ideas to manage different types of environments. In addition to that, it's actually really adding that layer that I talked about before, around the easy can I make sure that my tools, right, if it's, for example, a cloud hybrid build or cloud deploy or Anthos service manager, Anthos config manager, can I make sure that this UI, the CLI the API will be consistent in all of those environments? Can I view in one place, all of my clusters, all of my applications, and this is really where Anthos shines. >> So the cloud data foundation had a, had to get together at the same time as, Google Cloud Next. And there's been a lot of discussion around topics like security. I just like to get your thoughts on, you know, what what's at the forefront of your mind, working in engineering at Google, working in this world where people are deploying Anthos, working in a world where in a multi-cloud environment, you don't necessarily have control as vice president of engineering at Google over what's happening in these other clouds. So what are some of the things that are at the front of your mind is security one of them, what are your thoughts? >> Security is top of mine. Similar to all of our customers and definitely internally. And there are many things that we are very worried about or create some risks. You know, we've just started talking about the secure central supply chain, by building with open source, how can we make sure that everything is secure, right? Then we know what is the contribution that's from the software that we are delivering, how can we make sure that the security posture is portable, right? We talked about workloads portability. We talked about skills portability, and experience, but really I think the next phase for us as an industry is to think about security posture portability. Can I really apply the same policy everywhere and still make sure that I have the right controls in place, which will have to be different depending on the environment, and to make sure that that really is the case. So lots of work around that, and again, talking about the other things we talked about. We talked about open and flexibility, how can you make sure that it's easy? One of the areas that we are very excited about is really around binary authorization, for example. So when you use our tools like cloud build, cloud deploy, artifact, registry, you can get your container images automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and tools like onto service mesh, which allows you to actually manage your security posture, traffic management, who can access what without doing any changes to your applications. >> Fantastic stuff. As we, as we wrap up our time here, do you have any final thoughts on the direction of cloud where we are in the adoption curve? You know, by some estimates, something like 75% of IT is still happening on premises. There've been some announcements coming out of Cloud Next regarding the ability to run all sorts of Google goodness on premises. So we seem to all be acknowledging that we're going to be in a bit of a hybrid world, in addition to a multicloud world, moving forward. Do you want to place any bets on, on when we'll hit the 50, 50 mark or the 25% on premises, 75% cloud mark. What do you think? >> Yeah, I'm not the best gambler to be honest, but I do have a thought about that. I think what's interesting is that customers started to talk, you know, few years back, it was, hey, I have my on-prem environment and I have the cloud. How can they, these two work together. And now what we see our customers talking, you know, they're on premises, their edge is part of their cloud strategy. It's not separated. And I think this is what we'll see more and more of, right? Regardless if this is your private cloud or public cloud, your edge, we would like to have a cloud like experience in that environment and consistency. And of course, we would love to leverage all the goodness of the cloud. If it's like machine learning, AI, and other capabilities, automation, everywhere we go. So I think this is the biggest change we're starting to see. And in addition to that, I think we will see, today everybody are already multicloud cloud, right? If it's recquisitions and just by cause of bottom up culture, you know, people choose different services. And I expect we'll see more strategic thinking about our customers multicloud strategy. Where do I deploy my workloads? What are the benefits? If it's latency, if it's specific services that are available, maybe cost, we'll see the customers becoming more intentional about that and this is really exciting. >> Well Chen, amazing insights. It's obvious why you're a cube veteran. It's obviously why we seek you out for your counsel and guidance on a variety of subjects. Thank you so much for spending time with us today in this cube conversation. With that I'd like to thank you for joining us. Until next time, I'm Dave Nicholson, thanks for joining (peaceful music)

>>Hey, welcome back everyone to cube Cod's coverage and cloud native con the I'm John for your husband, David Nicholson cube analyst, cloud analyst. Co-host you got two great guests, KIPP alumni, Jerry Chen needs no introduction partner at Greylock ventures have been on the case many times, almost like an analyst chair. It's great to see you. I got guest analyst and Martin mal who's the CEO co-founder of Chronosphere just closed a whopping $200 million series C round businesses. Booming. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Hey, first of all, congratulations on the business translations, who would have known that observability and distributed tracing would be a big deal. Jerry, you predicted that in 2013, >>I think we predicted jointly cloud was going to be a big deal with 2013, right? And I think the rise of cloud creates all these markets behind it, right. This, you know, I always say you got to ride a wave bigger than you. And, uh, and so this ride on cloud and scale is the macro wave and, you know, Marty and Robin cryosphere, they're just drafted behind that wave, bigger scale, high cardinality, more data, more apps. I mean, that's, that's where the fuck. >>Yeah. Martin, all kidding aside. You know, we joke about this because we've had conversations where the philosophy of you pick the trend is your friend that you know, is going to be happening. So you can kind of see the big waves coming, but you got to stay true to it. And one of the things that we talk about is what's the next Amazon impact gonna look like? And we were watching the rise of Amazon. You go, if this continues a new way to do things is going to be upon us. Okay, you've got dev ops now, cloud native, but observability became really a key part of that. It's like almost the, I call it the network management in the cloud. It's like in a new way, you guys have been very successful. There's a lot of solutions out there. What's different. >>Yeah. I'd say for Kearney sphere, there's really three big differences. The first thing is that we're a platform. So we're still an observability platform. And by that, I mean, we solved the problem end to end. If thinking about observability and monitoring, you want to know when something's wrong, you want to be able to see how bad it is. And then you want to able to figure out what the root cause is. Often. There are solutions that do a part of that, that that problem might solve a part of the problem really well for a platform that does the whole thing. And 10 that's that's really the first thing. Second thing is we're really built for not just the cloud, but cloud native environments. So a microservices architecture on container-based infrastructure. And that is something that, uh, we, we have saw coming maybe 20 17, 20 18, but luckily for us, we were already solving this problem at Uber. That's where myself, my co-founder were back in 20 14, 20 15. So we already had the sort of perfect technology to solve this problem ahead of where the, the trend was going in the industry and therefore a purpose-built solution for this type of environment, a lot more effective than a lot of the existing. >>It's interesting, Jerry, you know, the view investing companies that have their problem, that they have to solve themselves as the new thing, versus someone says, Hey, there's a market. Let's build a solution for something. I don't really know. Well, that's kind of what's going on here. Right? It's >>That's why we love founders. Like Martin Marna, rod that come out with these hyperscale comes Uber's like we say, they've seen the future. You know, like there were Uber, they looked at the existing solutions out there trying to scale Promethease or you know, data dogs and the vendors. And it didn't work. It fell over, was too expensive. And so Martin Rob saw solid future. Like, this is where the world's going. We're going to solve it. They built MP3. It became cryosphere. And um, so I don't take any credit for that. You know, I just look fine folks that can see the future. >>Yeah. But they were solving their problem. No one else had anything. There's no general purpose software that managed servers you could buy, you guys were cutting your teeth into solving the pain. You had Uber. When did you guys figure out like, oh, well this is pretty big. >>Uh, probably about 20 17, 20 18 with a rise in popularity of Kubernetes. That's when we knew, oh wait, the whole world is shifting to this. It's not, no one could really it to just goober and the big tech giants of the world. And that's when we really knew, okay. The whole, the whole whole world is shifting here. And again, it's, it's sheer blind luck that we already had the ideal solution for this particular environment. It wasn't planned it. Wasn't what we were planning for back then. But, um, yeah. Get everything. >>It makes a lot of difference. When you walk into a customer and say, we had this problem, I can empathize with you. Not just say we've got solved. Exactly. Jerry, how do they compete in the cloud? We always talk about how Amazon and Azure want to eat up anything that they see that might, you know, something on AWS. Um, this castle in the cloud opportunity here. Okay. >>In the cloud. I mean, you know, we talked last time about how to fight the big three, uh, Amazon Azure and, uh, and Google. And I think for sure they have basic offerings, right. You know, Google Stackdriver years ago, they've done basically for Pete's offerings, basic modern offerings. I think you have like basic, simple needs. It's a great way to get started, but customers don't want kind of a piecemeal solution all the time. They want a full product. Like Datadog shows a better user experience, but full product is going to, you know, the better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. So first you can build a better product versus these point solutions. Number two is at some scale and some level complexity, those guys can handle like the demanding users that current affairs handling right now, right? The door dash, the world. >>And finally don't want the Fox guarding the hen house. You know, you don't want to say like Amazon monitoring, you can't depend on Amazon service monitoring your Amazon apps or Google service monitor your Google apps, having something that is independent and multi-cloud, that can dual things, Marta said, you know, see a triage, fixed your issues is kind of what you want. And, um, that's where the market's skilling. So I do believe that cloud guys will have an offering the space, but in our castle and cloud research, we saw that, yeah, there's a plenty of startups being funded. There's plenty of opportunity. And that the scoreboard between Splunk Datadog and all these other companies, that there's a huge amount of market and value to be created in this piece. So, >>So with, at, at the time, when you, you know, uh, uh, necessity is the mother of invention, you're an Uber, you have a practical problem to solve and use you look around you and you see that you're not the only entity out there that has this problem. Where are we in that wave? So not everyone is at, cloud-scale not everyone has adopted completely Kubernetes and cloud native for everything. Are we just at the beginning of this wave? How far from the >>Beach are we, we think we're just at the beginning of this wave right now. Um, and if you think about most enterprises today, they're still using on, and they're not even in perhaps in the cloud at all right. Are you still using perhaps APM and solutions, uh, on premise? So, um, if you look at that wave, we're just at the beginning of it. But when, but when we talked to a lot of these companies and you ask them for their three year vision, Kubernetes is a huge piece of that because everyone wants to be multi-cloud everyone to be hybrid eventually. And that's going to be the enabler of that. So, uh, we're just in the beginning now, but it seems like an inevitable wave that is coming. >>So obviously people evaluated that exactly the way you're evaluating that. Right. Thus the funding, right. Because no one makes that kind of investment without thinking that there is a multiplier on that over time. So that's pretty, that's a pretty exciting place. >>Yeah. I think to your point, a lot of companies are running into that situation right now, and they're looking at existing solutions there for us. It was necessity because there wasn't anything out there now that there is a lot of companies are not using their sort of precious engineering resources to build their own there. They would prefer to buy a solution because this is something that we can offer to all the companies. And it's not necessarily a business differentiating technology for the businesses themselves >>Distributed tracing in that really platform. That's the news. Um, and you mentioned you've got this, a good bid. You do some good business. Is scale the big differentiator for you guys? Or is it the functionality? Because it sounds like with clients like door dash, and it looks a lot like Uber, they're doing a lot of stuff too, and I'm sure everyone needs the card. Other people doing the same kind of thing, that scale, massive amount of consumer data coming in on the edge. Yeah. Is that the differentiation or do you work for the old one, you know, main street enterprise, right. >>Um, that is a good part of the differentiation and for our product thus far before we had a distributor tracing for monitoring and metric data, that was the main differentiation is the sheer volume of data that gets produced so much higher, really excited about distributor tracing because that's actually not just a scale problem. It's, it's a space that everybody can see the potential distributor tracing yet. No one has really realized that potential. So our offering right now is fairly unique. It does things that no other vendors out there can do. And we're really excited about that because we think that that fundamentally solves the problem differently, not just at a larger scale, >>Because you're an expert, what is distributed tracing. >>Yeah. Uh, it's, it's, it's a great question. So really, if you look at this retracing, it captures the details of a particular request. So a particular customer interaction with your business and it captures how that request flows through your complex architecture, right? So you have every detail of that at every step of the way. And you can imagine this data is extremely rich and extremely useful to figure out what the underlying root causes of issues are. The problem with that is it's very bit boast. It's a lot of data gets produced. A ton of data gets produced, every interaction, every request. So one of the main issues are in this space is that people can't afford cost effectively to store all of this data. Right? So one of the main differentiators for our product is we made it cost efficient enough to store everything. And when you have all the data, you have far better analytics and you have >>Machine learning is better. Everything's better with data. That's right. Yeah. Great. What's the blind spot out. Different customers, as cybersecurity is always looking for corners and threats that some people say it's not what you want. It's what you don't see that kills you. That's, that's a tracing issue. That's a data problem. How do you see that evolving in your customer base clients, trying to get a handle of the visibility into the data? >>Yeah. Um, I think right now, again, it's, it's very early in this space of people are just getting started here and you're completely correct where, you know, you need that visibility. And again, this is why it's such a differentiator to have all the data. If you can imagine with only 10% of the data or 1% of data, how can you actually detect any of these particular issues? Right. So, uh, uh, data is key to solving that >>Feel great to have you guys on expert and congratulations on the funding, Jerry. Good to see you take a minute to give a plug for the company. What do you guys do? And actually close around the funding, told you a million dollars. Congratulations. What are you looking for for hiring? What are your milestones? What's on your plan plan. >>Yeah. Uh, so with the spanning, it's really to, to, uh, continue to grow the company, right? So we're sort of hiring, as I told you earlier, we are, uh, we grew our revenue this year by, by 10 X in the sense of the 10 months of this year, thus far. So our team hasn't really grown 10 X. So, so we, we need to keep up with that grid. So hiring across the board on engineering side, on the go to market side, and I just continue to >>Beat that. The headquarters, your virtual, if you don't mind, we've gone >>Completely distributed. Now we're mostly in the U S have a bunch of folks in Seattle and in New York, however, we going completely remote. So hiring anyone in the U S anywhere in Europe, uh, >>Oh, I got you here. What's your investment thesis. Now you got castles in the cloud, by the way, if you haven't seen the research from Greylock, Jerry and the team called castles in the cloud, you can Google it. What's your thesis now? What are you investing in? >>Yeah, it is. It is hard to always predict the next wave. I mean, my job is to find the right founders, but I'd say the three core areas are still the same one is this cloud disruption to Martin's point we're. So early days, the wave, I say, number two, uh, there's vertical apps, different SAS applications be finance, healthcare construction, all are changing. I think healthcare, especially the past couple of years through COVID, we've seen that's a market that needs to be digitized. And finally, FinTech, we talked about this before everything becomes a payments company, right? And that's why Stripe is such a huge juggernaut. You know, I don't think the world's all Stripe, but be it insurance payments, um, you know, stuff in crypto, whatever. I think fintechs still has a lot of, a lot of market to grow. >>It's making things easier. It's a good formula right now. If you can reduce complexity, it makes things easy in every market. You're going to seems to be the formula. >>And like the next great thing is making today's crappy thing better. Right? So the next, the next brace shows making this cube crappy thing. Yeah, >>We're getting better every day on our 11th season or year, I'm calling things seasons now, episodes and season for streaming, >>All the seasons drop a Netflix binge, watch them all the >>Cube plus and NFTs for our early videos. There'll be worth something because they're not that good, Jerry. How, of course you're great. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thanks for coming on it. Cubes coverage here in a physical event, 2021 cloud being the con CubeCon I'm John farrier and Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching.

(bright intro music) >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE coverage of AnsibleFest 2021, virtual, hybrid, all online now. It's been a hell of a year. It's been going great with all the interactions. AnsibleFest 2021, Carol Chen is here. She's the Principal Community Architect for Ansible Community with Red Hat. Carol, thanks for coming on the AnsibleFest 2021 virtual coverage. >> Thanks for having me here, John. >> You know, one of the things about the pandemic I was mentioning, there's the online communities have been really, that have been online, have thrived. Developers know how to do virtual, and virtual, first, now is becoming a norm for developers. So the pandemic, although it's been a really big inconvenience for many, developers, actually, haven't been truly impacted other than the face to face interactions around hallway conversations and events. You're seeing a lot more community open conversations happening more than ever before, just the trend itself was hot. Now you have more people collaborating. What's the state of the Ansible Community right now? Because you know, online content at an all-time high, I'm seeing videos hit. I've seen a lot of content flowing. All around the internet seems to be more action. What's the state of the Ansible Community? >> Yeah, definitely. And actually, from the very start Ansible Community is a very much online community because of the diverse nature in terms of, you know, geographical distribution and just people from all of the world coming together. So initially, I mean, of course we do have like in-person meet-ups, which were a popular thing before the pandemic. That kind of took a little backseat and while it turned virtual, initially, people were like wondering what to do, but, you know, we are used to video conferences and online chats. So virtual meet-ups became quite a popular thing in the first half of the pandemic. So pretty much most of last year, we actually saw a slight rise in the number of, the median number of attendees at these meet-ups, because it's more accessible. You can attend from home, you can, you know, you don't have to go to a physical place to attend these meet-ups. However, this year we are starting to see some virtual fatigue and, you know, the numbers are dropping a little bit, but, you know, hopefully with the, some parts of the world are opening up and we are seeing some meet-ups coming into, in person again, depending on the region, of course, because it's not the same around the world. But I think that the need for people to connect socially is always there, whether it's online or in person. And the Ansible Community is pretty strong in that. And I want to stress that a lot of these meet-ups are organized by the community members, not necessarily by Red Hat or the Ansible team. So, you know, the desire to connect with other people in the community has always there and it's going on strong. >> Yeah, that's a good call out on the community side. I think that the affinity groups around the communities, self forming these meet-ups. >> Right. >> People want to meet in person, that's going to come back. You're starting to see that hybrid. But it's also, you're starting to see again, a fatigue for being like attending these virtual events. But at the same time, you're seeing the asynchronous consumption still go high, too. You're seeing, "Okay, I can do a fly by the event." Or if it's in person, "I'd prefer that." But there's still a lot more asynchronous going on, and a lot more opportunities to contribute. And you guys have done this contributor summits virtually. Can you talk about that trend? Tell me about the virtual contributor summits. >> Sure. So of course we have our regular community meetings, weekly, in fact. But the contributor summit is a place where we can actually gather, previously it was face-to-face, usually part of AnsibleFest, like the day before or after, depending. And, you know, to really, you know, hash out different discussions and more in-depth technical analyses of different parts of the project that we were working on. Even though, virtually, we are still able to do that, and we are, actually, able to increase in frequency of these events. Usually, it used to be once or twice a year, depending on whether or not we have, when we have the AnsibleFest. But last year we had three contributors summits. And this year, the third one will happen along with AnsibleFest in September, end of September, so in this week. So yeah, you know, there's definitely the advantage of making things easier to, for participants. But um... >> Talk about the vibe- Talk about the vibe of the summit. I mean, these contributors. I mean, what's it like and what are people experiencing? Are they just contributing code? They working on projects? Is it hackathons? Is it more, >> Right. >> What's the format of, what are people preferring? What's the best practice? >> So, what we want to encourage is not just one person giving presentations and like a one-way thing, but actually a dialogue. So a lot of these discussions are kind of interactive. So we use tools that allow people, not just like streaming one direction, but people can also appear on video and talk and express their opinions and join the discussions or in chat if they prefer not to show their face. But in any case, it's a lot of times it's not a full presentation, but perhaps an introduction for 5, 10 minutes. And then we go to discussion of a certain topic in-depth. So it's a very, I would say discussion-based, and also we are introducing a hackathon at this contributor summit, because I think it's quite a popular thing for people to get hands-on experience or work on something right away with people to support them then and there. So, you know, you can get results in real-time. So in actual fact, even before the pandemic, our contributor summits have had like, a virtual online component. So we were doing hybrid events before they were, you know, called popular hybrid events, but... >> Before they were necessary, it was cool. >> Right, Right. Exactly. So, because like I said, our contributors are from around the world, so we always made sure that they had a way of participating in the contributor summit as well. >> Yeah. I think that's really important to point out. I mean, I won't say it's cool to do hybrids necessary now because of the pandemic, but that format actually is interesting because you got a linear event that's physical face to face. Certainly that's super valuable when that comes back. But now that the online side has kind of been tied together with the simulated live asynchronous capability, you have this new format. Talk about how you guys are taking that to the next level around trust. Because one of the things about being face-to-face and then being online and knowing people is working together and getting a feeling of trusting each other, right? So, this is a- >> Right. huge part of community. >> How are you guys, now that we're more dispersed than ever, how are you guys handling, or facilitating and nurturing that trust equation? >> Right. So as a open source project, one of the key things is we do a lot of the things in the open. We, you know, the pull request, the development of the code is all done in the open. That's, you know, a very kind of implicit trust that you can have through that. And also the community meetings are open up to the public. Anybody can join if they're interested in. And even if you're not able to join the meetings because time zones or whatever, we share the meeting minutes after the meetings to everyone. Which brings me to, we actually started a newsletter for the community called the Bullhorn, since last April, I think. Because, you know, again, we are trying to explore more channels to be able to reach to different people who may not be able to attend in person, or even during the same time as the community meetings. So they can have this bi-weekly newsletter every two weeks that, you know, shares the meeting minutes. What has been discussed, the new developments in the community, the new collections, updates, new tools and so on. So definitely we see, like, we want to improve the communication to the community and ways that they can provide feedback to us as well. >> And that's called the Bullhorn? That's just getting the word out? >> Yeah, Bullhorn. Yes. Thank you. >> It's like the updates, like it's like, you know, a quick, quick executive summary of kind of what's happening. Is that kind of the vibe? >> Right, Right. >> Okay. Well, I want to ask you specifically, I heard about this new Community Steering Committee. What's the purpose of this? What's this evolving into? Can you give us some background on the purpose and the objective of the community? >> Yeah Sure. Yeah. We established the Ansible Community Steering Committee earlier this year, and as we were saying that the Ansible project is growing, so of course the user community, and also, they're very happy to say that the contributor community is growing. So, you know, we want to provide a better structure for the upstream Ansible project. And a lot of changes are taking place that we want to have some, a group of people to be able to facilitate that. For example, people are, want to make, create new collections, Ansible collections, for automated technologies that they are, you know, working on, or even contribute to existing collections that they have invested interest in. So what are some of the procedures and policies that are needed? Right? So the Steering Committee defines these procedures and make sure that the new content coming in are in compliance to the policies and so on. I mean, this kind of decision-making and stuff has been happening in the committee, I mean the community in an ad hoc manner, to a large extent, even before this. But having the Steering Committee will provide, to add more structure, like I said, and also guidance and accountability for the Ansible Community. >> That's awesome. You know, I love, first of all, I love your title, Principal Community Architect. And you know, one of the things I've always been a big fan of with Ansible, and now as part of Red Hat, is one, Red Hat didn't screw up Ansible. They let it become what it was and became really big with the combination. But the community has always been content driven. And now you've got recipes, you've got collections, you've got content, but the community piece is key. And right now, more than ever with the pandemic, community is more important than ever before. Open source is more important than ever before. How do you look at the architecture of how to sustain and evolve communities to be more inclusive and to grow and to survive and thrive post pandemic? What's your learnings? What's your vision on architecting community for the future? >> I think the key thing is to really find channels and ways to listen to the community. We talk about how to reach our newsletter or whatever, meetings to the community, but it's also what's coming from them. If we don't listen to what they have to say, we don't know what they want and how we can make the community better, the process better for them. I mean, I've been managing different open source communities before Ansible, but every community is different, right? I cannot say what worked for the previous community works for this. So I always try to reach out to the current members in the Ansible Community and hear what they have to say, their complaints, their criticisms, good and bad, because, you know, without those feedback, we cannot grow and we cannot improve. So, and I myself, I've lived in three different continents. So I know the struggle of whether it's like language barriers or time zone restrictions. So, you know, we keep all these in mind as we, you know, build our relationships with the community. >> And I think there's, I think there's a real opportunity with this new virtual standards that not yet emerged. I mean, you mentioned you've been doing hybrid, which has always been part of a physical event, which is going to become normal. But I think there's an opportunity that we're learning in this past a year and a half, where there are new, there are new things and there's, it's good, bad and ugly. I mean, there's been some really ugly conferences. Virtual's a bit painful. But there's also been some really nice moments where people are seeing interaction. So is there any learnings that you've taken away from this past year and a half that you can point to that you might want to share with folks watching around how to tap into the magical moments that could be enabled by, you know, the virtual and or bringing people together? >> You know, I myself, I'm a lover of technology, anything new I like to try. So definitely in this pandemic there's been lots of opportunities to try different technologies. What works, what doesn't work. I think, you know, just trying things out helps. I know sometimes people are resistant to change. I myself sometimes find it hard to change my ways in, in certain, you know, I'm used to this too. I want to use it most of the time, but. But anyway, you know, give, things a chance, but most, I think most importantly, is focus on the people. Because technology aside, it is the people you are reaching out to. Right? So again, listen what they have to say. You know? If this doesn't work for them, find out what they prefer, or you know, what, how we can make things better to improve things for them. So I always keep the focus on the people, on the community and, you know, give new technology a chance. And you know sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but you don't know 'til try and yeah, just- >> Jump in the water is warm. >> Hope for the best. >> Come on in, water is fine. So the meet-ups are happening. >> Right. >> People are getting together where there, where there's a geography opportunity where there's not a lot of scaring, too much scare going on with the meet-ups. So that's cool. What, what is the current AnsibleFest 2021 key thing that you'd like people to walk away with Carol? Because obviously the momentum is continuing. The world needs to go on. We are seeing hybrid, and then we're going to end up coming out of this soon. What's the, what's the key message this year from the AnsibleFest 2021, from the community. >> That, Ansible is open, Ansible is, you know, open to contributions from anyone. And especially the Ansible Community team is working very hard to make things easy and accessible. So please feel free to visit Ansible.com/community for ways of reaching us. And, you know, use Ansible to automate your stuff, and then use the free time that you have from that to spend more time for your family and friends. >> That's great. Be open. Listen. Now you've got a Steering Committee to steer that ship in the right direction. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and for the update, really appreciate it. Again, props to the community at the Ansible part of Red Hat. You guys do a great job. And again, we'll see you on the other side of the pandemic and thanks for coming in remotely all the way in Finland. >> Thank you so much for having me. Its been my pleasure. Thanks. >> Thank you, Carol. I'm John Furrier for AnsibleFest 2021 coverage. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright exit music)

>>let's bring in jerry Chen from Greylock is he here? Let's bring him in there? He is. >>Hey john good to see you. >>Hey congratulations on an amazing talk and thesis on the castles on the cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>All right, well thanks for reading it. Um, always were being put a piece of work out out of the ether, not sure what the responses, but it seemed to resonate with a bunch of developers, founders, investors and folks like yourself. So smart people seem to gravitate to us. So thank you very much. >>Well, one of the benefits of doing the Cube for 11 years, Jerry's, we have videotape of many, many people talking about what the future will hold. You kind of are on this early, it wasn't called castles in the cloud, but you were all, I was, we had many conversations were kind of connecting the dots in real time, but you've been on this for a while it's great to see the work. I really think you nailed this. I think you're absolutely on point here. So let's get into it. What is castles in the cloud? New research come out from Greylock that you spearheaded? It's collaborative effort, but you've got data behind it. Give a quick overview of what is castle the cloud, The new modes of competitive advantage for companies. >>Yeah, it's as a group project that our team put together but basically john the question is how do you win in the cloud? Remember the conversation we had eight years ago when amazon re event was holy cow like can you compete with them? Like is it a winner? Take all, Winner take most. And if it is winner take most. Where are the white spaces for some starts to to emerge clearly the past eight years in the cloud this journey we've seen big companies data breaks, snowflakes, elastic mongo data robot. And so um they spotted the question is you know, why are the castles in the cloud? The big three cloud providers amazon google and as you're winning, you know, what advantage do they have? And then given their modes of scale network effects, how can you as a startup win? And so look, there are 500 plus services between all three cloud vendors but there are like 500 plus um startups, competing gets a cloud vendors and there's like almost 100 unicorn of private companies competing successfully against the cloud vendors, including public companies. So like Alaska Mongo snowflake, No data breaks. Not public yet. Hashtag or not public yet. These are some examples of the names that I think are winning and watch this space because you see more of these guys storm the castle if you will. >>Yeah. And you know one of the things that's a funny metaphor because it has many different implications. One, as we talk about security, the perimeter of the gates, the most being on land, but now you're in the cloud, you have also different security paradigm. You have a different um new kinds of services that are coming on board faster than ever before, not just from the cloud players, but from companies contributing into the ecosystem. So the combination of the big three making the market the main markets, you, I think you call it 31 markets that we know of that probably maybe more. And then you have this notion of sub market, which means that there's like, we used to call it white space back in the day. Remember how many whites? Where's the white space? I mean if you're in the cloud there's like a zillion white spaces. So talk about this sub market dynamic between markets and that are being enabled by the cloud players and how these sub markets play into it. >>Sure. So first, the first problem was what we did, we downloaded all the services for the big three clowns. Right. And you know what as recalls a database or database service, like a document dB and amazon is like Cosmo, dB and Azure. So first thing first is we had to like look at all three cloud providers and you? Re categorize all the services almost 500 Apples, Apples, Apples, # one. Number two, is you look at all these markets or sub markets and said, okay, how can we cluster these services into things that you know, you and I can rock. Right, That's what amazon as well. And google think about it is very different. And the beauty of the cloud is this kind of fat long tail of services for developers. So instead of like oracle as a single database for all your needs, they're like 20 or 30 different databases from time series um, analytics, databases we're talking rocks at later today, right? Um uh, document databases like mongo search database like elastic and so what happens is there's not one giant market like databases, there's a database market and 30 40 sub markets that serve the needs developers. So the Great News is cloud has reduced the cost and create something that new for developers. Um also the good uses for a start up, you can find plenty of white speech solving a pain point very specific to a different type of problem >>and you can sequence up the power law to this. I love the power of a metaphor, you know, used to be a very thin neck note no torso and then a long tail. But now as you're pointing out this expansion of the fat tail of services but also this big tam's and markets available at the top of the power law where you see coming like snowflake essentially take on the data warehousing market by basically sitting on amazon and re factoring with new services and then getting a flywheel completely changing the economic unit economics completely changing the consumption model completely changing the value proposition literally >>you snowflake has created like storm create a hole that mode or that castle wall against red shift. Then companies like rock set real time analytics, It's Russian right behind snowflakes saying, hey snowflake is great for data warehouse, but it's not fast enough for real time analytics. Let me give you something new to your, your parallel argument. Even the big optics snowflake have created kind of a wake behind them that created even more white space for Gaza rock set. So that's exciting for guys like media. >>And then also as we were talking about our last episode two or quarter two of our showcase, um, from a VC came on, it's like the old shelf where you didn't know if a company's successful until they had to return the inventory now with cloud. If you're not successful, you know it right away. It's like, it's like there's no debate. Like, I mean you're either winning or not. This is like that's so instrumented. So a company can have a good better mousetrap and win and fill the white space and then move up. >>It goes both ways. The cloud vendor, the big three amazon google and Azure for sure. They instrument their own class. They know john which ecosystem partners doing well in which ecosystems doing poorly and they hear from the customers exactly what they want. So it goes both ways they can weaponize that just as well as you started to weaponize that info >>and that's the big argument of do that snowflake still pays the amazon bills, they're still there. So again, repatriation comes back. That's a big conversation that's come up. Um, what's your quick take on that? Because if you're gonna have a castle in the cloud, then you're gonna bring it back to land. I mean, what's that dynamic? Where do you see that compete? Because on one hand is innovation, the other ones maybe cost efficiency. Is that a growth indicator? Slow down? What's your view on the movement from and to the cloud? >>I think there's probably three forces you're finding here. One is the cost advantage in the scale advantage of cloud. So that I think has been going for the past eight years. There's a repatriation movement for a certain subset of customers, I think for cost purposes makes sense. I think that's a tiny handful that believe they can actually run things better than a cloud. The third thing we're seeing around repatriation is not necessary against cloud, but you're gonna see more decentralized clouds and things pushed to the edge. Right? So you look at companies like Cloudflare Fastly or a company that we're investing in Cato networks. All ideas focus on secure access at the edge. And so I think that's not repatriation of my own data center, but it's kind of a disaggregated of cloud from one giant monolithic cloud, like AWS East or like a google region in europe to multiple smaller clouds for governance purposes, security purposes or legacy purposes. >>So I'm looking at my notes here, looking down on the screen here for this to read this because it's uh to cut and paste from your thesis on the cloud, the cloud. The of the $38 billion invested uh this quarter. Um uh Ai and ml number one um analytics number two, security number three. Actually security number one. But you can see the bubbles here. So all those are data problems I need to ask you. I see data is hot data as intellectual property. How do you look at that? Because we've been reporting on this and we just started the cube conversation around workflows as intellectual property. If you have scale and your motives in the cloud, you could argue that data and the workflows around those data streams is intellectual property, it's a protocol. >>I believe both are. And they just kind of go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. Right? So data for sure. I p So if you know people talk about days in the oil, the new resource. That's largely true because the powers a bunch. But the workflow to your point john is sticky because every company is a unique snowflake, right? Like the process used to run the cube and your business different how we run our business. So if you can build a workflow that leverages the data that's super sticky. So in terms of switching costs, if my work is very bespoke to your business then I think that's competitive advantage. >>Well certainly your workflow is a lot different than the cube. You guys. Just a lot of billions of dollars in capital. Uh, we're talking to all the people out here jerry. Great to have you on final thought on your thesis. Where does it go from here? What's been the reaction? Uh, no, you put it out there. Great, love the research. I think you're on point on this one. Where did, where's it go from here? >>We have to follow pieces. Um, in the near term one around, you know, deep diver on open source. So look out for that pretty soon. And how that's been a powerful strategy a second is this kind of disaggregated of the cloud be a Blockchain and you know, decentralized apps, be edge applications. So that's in the near term two more pieces of, of deep dive we're doing. And then the goal here is to update this on a quarterly and annual basis. So we're getting submissions from founders that wanted to say, hey, you missed us Or he screwed up here. We got the big cloud vendors saying, Hey jerry, we just lost his new things. So our goal here is to update this every single year and then probably do look back saying, okay, uh, were we wrong? We're right. And then let's say the castle clouds 2022 we'll see the difference were the more unicorns, were there more services were the IPO's happening. So look for some short term work from us on analytics, like around open source and clouds. And then next year we hope that all this forward saying, Hey, you have two year, what's happening? What's changing? >>Great stuff And, and congratulations on the Southern news. You guys put another half a billion dollars into early, early stage, which is your roots. Are you still doing a lot of great investments in a lot of unicorns? Congratulations that great luck on the team. Thanks for coming on And congratulations. You nailed this one. I think I'm gonna look back and say that this is a pretty seminal piece of work here. Thanks for for sharing. >>Thanks john, Thanks for having me as >>always.

>>on the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hello and welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage Cube live here in Palo Alto, California, with the Virtual Cube this year because we can't be there in person. I'm your host, John Fairy year. We're kicking off Day two of the three weeks of reinvent a lot of great leadership sessions to review, obviously still buzzing from the Andy Jassy three. Our keynote, which had so many storylines, is really hard to impact. We're gonna dig that into into into that today with Jerry Chan, who has been a Cube alumni since the beginning of our AWS coverage. Going back to 2013, Jerry was wandering the hallways as a um, in between. You were in between vm ware and V C. And then we saw you there. You've been on the Cube every year at reinvent with us. So special commentary from you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, John, Thanks for having me and a belated happy birthday as well. If everyone out there John's birthday was yesterday. So and hardest. Howard's working man in technology he spent his entire birthday doing live coverage of Amazon re events. Happy birthday, buddy. >>Well, I love my work. I love doing this. And reinvent is the biggest event of the year because it really is. It's become a bellwether and eso super excited to have you on. We've had great conversations by looking back at our conversations over the Thanksgiving weekend. Jerry, the stuff we were talking about it was very proposed that Jassy is leaning in with this whole messaging around change and horizontal scalability. He didn't really say that, but he was saying you could disrupt in these industries and still use machine learning. This was some of the early conversations we were having on the Cube. Now fast forward, more mainstream than ever before. So big, big part of the theme there. >>Yeah, it z you Amazon reinvent Amazon evolution to your point, right, because it's both reinventing what countries are using with the cloud. But also what Amazon's done is is they're evolving year after year with their services. So they start a simple infrastructure, you know, s three and e c. Two. And now they're building basically a lot of what Andy said you actually deconstructed crm? Ah, lot of stuff they're doing around the call centers, almost going after Salesforce with kind of a deconstructed CRM services, which is super interesting. But the day you know, Amazon announces all those technologies, not to mention the AI stuff, the seminar stuff you have slack and inquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. So ah, lot of stuff going on in the cloud world these days, and it's funny part of it, >>you know, it really is interesting. You look up the slack acquisition by, um, by Salesforce. It's interesting, you know, That kind of takes slack out of the play here. I mean, they were doing really well again. Message board service turns into, um, or collaboration software. They hit the mainstream. They have great revenue. Is that going to really change the landscape of the industry for Salesforce? They've got to acquire it. It opens the door up from, or innovation. And it's funny you mention the contact Center because I was pressing Jassy on my exclusive one on one with him. Like they said, Andy, my my daughter and my sons, they don't use the phone. They're not gonna call. What's this? Is it a call center deal? And he goes, No, it's the It's about the contact. So think about that notion of the contact. It's not about the call center. It's the point of contact. Okay, Linked in is with Microsoft. You got slack and Salesforce Contact driven collaboration. Interesting kind of play for Microsoft to use voice and their data. What's your take on that? >>I think it's, um you know, I have this framework. As you know, I talked my friend systems of engagement over systems intelligence and systems record. Right? And so you could argue voice email slack because we're all different systems of engagement, and they sit on top of system of record like CRM customer support ticketing HR. Something like that. Now what sells first did by buying slack is they now own a system engagement, right? Not on Lee is slack. A system engagement for CRM, but also system engagement for E. R. P Service. Now is how you interact with a bunch of applications. And so if you think about sales for strategy in the space, compete against Marcus Soft or serves now or other large AARP's now they own slack of system engagement, that super powerful way to actually compete against rival SAS companies. Because if you own the layer engagement layer, you can now just intermediate what's in the background. Likewise, the context center its own voice. Email, chat messaging, right? You can just inter mediate this stuff in the back, and so they're trying to own the system engagement. And then, likewise, Facebook just bought that company customer a week ago for a billion dollars, which also Omni Channel support because it is chat messaging voice. It's again the system engagement between End User, which could be a customer or could be employees. >>You know, this really gonna make Cit's enterprise has been so much fun over the past 10 years, I gotta say, in the past five, you know, it's been even more fun, has become or the new fun area, you know, And the impact to enterprise has been interesting because and we're talking about just engaging system of record. This is now the new challenge for the enterprise. So I wanna get your thoughts, Jerry, because how you see the Sea, X O's and CSOs and the architects out there trying to reinvent the enterprise. Jassy saying Look and find the truth. Be on the right side of history here. Certainly he's got himself service interest there, but there is a true band eight with Cove it and with digital acceleration for the enterprise to change. Um, given all these new opportunities Thio, revolutionize or disrupt or radically improve, what's the C. C X's do? What's your take on? How do you see that? >>It's increasingly messy for the CXS, and I don't I don't envy them, right? Because back in the day they kind of controlled all the I t spend and kind of they had a standard of what technologies they use in the company. And then along came Amazon in cloud all of sudden, like your developers and Dio Hey, let me swipe my credit card and I'm gonna access to a bunch of a P I s around computing stories. Likewise. Now they could swipe the credit card and you strike for billing, right? There's a whole bunch of services now, so it becomes incumbent upon CSOs. They need Thio new set of management tools, right? So not only just like, um, security tools they need, they need also observe ability, tools, understanding what services are being used by the customers, when and how. And I would say the following John like CSOs is both a challenge for them. But I think if I was a C X, so I'll be pretty excited because now I have a bunch of other weapons and other bunch of services I could offer. My end users, my developers, my employees, my customers and, you know it's exciting for them is not only could they do different things, but they also changed how their business being done. And so I think both interact with their end users. Be a chat like slack or be a phone like a contact center or instagram for your for your for your kids. It's actually a new challenge if I were sick. So it's it's time to build again, you know, I think Cove it has said it is time to build again. You can build >>to kind of take that phrase from the movie Shawshank Redemption. Get busy building or get busy dying. Kinda rephrase it there. And that's kind of the theme I'm seeing here because covert kind of forced people saying, Look, this things like work at home. Who would have thought 100% people would be working at home? Who would have thought that now the workloads gonna change differently? So it's an opportunity to deconstruct or distant intermediate these services. And I think, you know, in all the trends that I've seen over my career, it's been those inflection points where breaking the monolith or breaking the proprietary piece of it has always been an opportunity for for entrepreneur. So you know, and and for companies, whether you're CEO or startup by decomposing and you can come in and create value E I think to me, snowflake going public on the back of Amazon. Basically, this is interesting. I mean, so you don't have to be. You could kill one feature and nail it and go big. >>I think we talked to the past like it's Amazon or Google or Microsoft Gonna win. Everything is winner take all winner take most, and you could argue that it's hard to find oxygen as a start up in a broad platform play. But we think Snowflake and other companies have done and comes like mongo DB, for example, elastic have shown that if you can pick a service or a problem space and either developed like I p. That's super deep or own developer audience. You can actually fight the big guys. The Big Three cloud vendors be Amazon, Google or or market soft in different markets. And I think if you're a startup founder, you should not be afraid of competing with the big cloud vendors because there there are success patterns and how you can win and you know and create a lot of value. So I have found Investor. I'm super excited by that because, you know, I don't think you're gonna find a company takedown Amazon completely because they're just the scale and the network effects is too large. But you can create a lot of value and build Valuable comes like snowflake in and around the Amazon. Google Microsoft Ecosystem. >>Yeah, I want to get your thoughts. You have one portfolio we've covered rock rock set, which does a lot of sequel. Um, one of your investments. Interesting part of the Kino yesterday was Andy Jassy kind of going after Microsoft saying Windows sequel server um, they're targeting that with this new, uh, tool, but, you know, sucks in the database of it is called the Babel Fish for Aurora for post Chris sequel. Um, well, how was your take on that? I mean, obviously Microsoft big. Their enterprise sales tactics are looking like more like Oracle, which he was kind of hinting at and commenting on. But sequel is Lingua Franca for data >>correct. I think we went to, like, kind of a no sequel phase, which was kind of a trendy thing for a while and that no sequel still around, not only sequel like mongo DB Document TV. Kind of that interface still holds true, but your point. The world speaks sequel. All your applications be sequel, right? So if you want backwards, compatibility to your applications speaks equal. If you want your tire installed base of employees that no sequel, we gotta speak sequel. So, Rock said, when the first public conversations about what they're building was on on the key with you and Me and vent hat, the founder. And what Rock said is doing their building real time. Snowflake Thio, Lack of better term. It's a real time sequel database in the cloud that's super elastic, just like Snowflake is. But unlike snowflake, which is a data warehouse mostly for dashboards and analytics. Rock set is like millisecond queries for real time applications, and so think of them is the evolution of where cloud databases air going is not only elastic like snowflake in the cloud like Snowflake. We're talking 10 15 millisecond queries versus one or two second queries, and I think what any Jassy did and Amazon with bowel officials say, Hey, Sequels, Legal frank of the cloud. There's a large installed base of sequel server developers out there and applications, and we're gonna use Babel fish to kind of move those applications from on premise the cloud or from old workload to the new workloads. And, I think, the name of the game. For for cloud vendors across the board, big and small startups thio Google markets, often Amazon is how do you reduce friction like, How do you reduce friction to try a new service to get your data in the cloud to move your data from one place to the next? And so you know, Amazon is trying to reduce friction by using Babel fish, and I think it is a great move by them. >>Yeah, by the way. Not only is it for Aurora Post Chris equal, they're also open sourcing it. So that's gonna be something that is gonna be interesting to play out. Because once they open source it essentially, that's an escape valve for locking. I mean, if you're a Microsoft customer, I mean, it ultimately is. Could be that Gateway drug. It's like it is ultimately like, Hey, if you don't like the licensing, come here. Now there's gonna be some questions on the translations. Um, Vince, um, scuttlebutt about that. But we'll see it's open source. We'll see what goes on. Um great stuff on on rocks that great. Great. Start up next. Next, uh, talk track I wanna get with you is You know, over the years, you know, we've talked about your history. We're gonna vm Where, uh, now being a venture capitalist. Successful, wanted Greylock. You've seen the waves, and I would call it the two ways pre cloud Early days of cloud. And now, with co vid, we're kind of in the, you know, not just born in the cloud Total cloud scale cloud operations. This is kind of what jazz he was going after. E think I tweeted Cloud is eating the world and on premise and the edges. What it's hungry for. It kind of goof on mark injuries since quote a software eating the world. This is where it's going. So it's a whole another chapter coming. You saw the pre cloud you saw Cloud. Now we've got basically global I t everything else >>It's cloud only I would say, You know, we saw pre cloud right the VM ware days and before that he called like, you know, data centers. I would say Amazon lawns of what, 6 4007, the Web services. So the past 14 15 years have been what I've been calling cloud transition, right? And so you had cos technologies that were either doing on migration from on premise and cloud or hybrid on premise off premise. And now you're seeing a generation of technologies and companies. Their cloud only John to your point. And so you could argue that this 15 year transitions were like, you know, Thio use a bad metaphor like amphibians. You're half in the water, half on land, you know, And like, you know, you're not You're not purely cloud. You're not purely on premise, but you can do both ways, and that's great. That's great, because that's a that's a dominant architecture today. But come just like rock set and snowflake, your cloud only right? They're born in the cloud, they're built on the cloud And now we're seeing a generation Startups and technology companies that are cloud only. And so, you know, unlike you have this transitionary evolution of like amphibians, land and sea. Now we have ah, no mammals, whatever that are Onley in the cloud Onley on land. And because of that, you can take advantage of a whole different set of constraints that are their cloud. Only that could build different services that you can't have going backwards. And so I think for 2021 forward, we're going to see a bunch of companies or cloud only, and they're gonna look very, very different than the previous set of companies the past 15 years. And as an investor, as you covering as analysts, is gonna be super interesting to see the difference. And if anything, the cloud only companies will accelerate the move of I t spending the move of mawr developers to the cloud because the cloud only technologies are gonna be so much more compelling than than the amphibians, if you will. >>Yeah, insisting to see your point. And you saw the news announcement had a ton of news, a ton of stage making right calls, kind of the democratization layer. We'll look at some of the insights that Amazon's getting just as the monster that they are in terms of size. The scope of what? Their observation spaces. They're seeing all these workloads. They have the Dev Ops guru. They launched that Dev Ops Guru thing I found interesting. They got data acquisition, right? So when you think about these new the new data paradigm with cloud on Lee, it opens up new things. Um, new patterns. Um, S o. I think I think to me. I think that's to me. I see where this notion of agility moves to a whole nother level, where it's it's not just moving fast, it's new capabilities. So how do you How do you see that happening? Because this is where I think the new generation is gonna come in and be like servers. Lambs. I like you guys actually provisioned E c. Two instances before I was servers on data centers. Now you got ec2. What? Lambda. So you're starting to see smaller compute? Um, new learnings, All these historical data insights feeding into the development process and to the application. >>I think it's interesting. So I think if you really want to take the next evolution, how do you make the cloud programmable for everybody? Right. And I think you mentioned stage maker machine learning data scientists, the sage maker user. The data scientists, for example, does not on provisioned containers and, you know, kodama files and understand communities, right? Like just like the developed today. Don't wanna rack servers like Oh, my God, Jerry, you had Iraq servers and data center and install VM ware. The generation beyond us doesn't want to think about the underlying infrastructure. You wanna think about it? How do you just program my app and program? The cloud writ large. And so I think where you can see going forward is two things. One people who call themselves developers. That definition has expanded the past 10, 15 years. It's on Lee growing, so everyone is gonna be developed right now from your white collar knowledge worker to your hard core infrastructure developer. But the populist developers expanding especially around machine learning and kind of the sage maker audience, for sure. And then what's gonna happen is, ah, law. This audience doesn't want to care about the stuff you just mentioned, John in terms of the online plumbing. So what Amazon Google on Azure will do is make that stuff easy, right? Or a starved could make it easy. And I think that the move towards land and services that moved specifically that don't think about the underlying plumbing. We're gonna make it easy for you. Just program your app and then either a startup, well, abstract away, all the all the underlying, um, infrastructure bits or the big three cloud vendors to say, you know, all this stuff would do in a serverless fashion. So I think serverless as, ah paradigm and have, quite frankly, a battlefront for the Big Three clouds and for startups is probably one in the front lines of the next generation. Whoever owns this kind of program will cloud model programming the Internet program. The cloud will be maybe the next platform the next 10 or 15 years. I still have two up for grabs. >>Yeah, I think that is so insightful. I think that's worth calling out. I think that's gonna be a multi year, um, effort. I mean, look at just how containers now, with ks anywhere and you've got the container Service of control plane built in, you got, you know, real time analytics coming in from rock set. And Amazon. You have pinned Pandora Panorama appliance that does machine learning and computer vision with sensors. I mean, this is just a whole new level of purpose built stuff software powered software operated. So you have this notion of Dev ops going to hand in the glove software and operations? Kind of. How do you operate this stuff? So I think the whole new next question was Okay, this is all great. But Amazon's always had this problem. It's just so hard. Like there's so much good stuff. Like, who do you hired operate it? It is not yet programmable. This has been a big problem for them. Your thoughts on that, >>um e think that the data illusion around Dev ops etcetera is the solution. So also that you're gonna have information from Amazon from startups. They're gonna automate a bunch of the operations. And so, you know, I'm involved to come to Kronos Fear that we talked about the past team kind of uber the Bilson called m three. That's basically next generation data dog. Next generation of visibility platform. They're gonna collect all the data from the applications. And once they have their your data, they're gonna know how to operate and automate scaling up, scaling down and the basic remediation for you. So you're going to see a bunch of tools, take the information from running your application infrastructure and automate exactly how to scale and manager your app. And so AI and machine learning where large John is gonna be, say, make a lot of plumbing go away or maybe not completely, but lets you scale better. So you, as a single system admin are used. A single SRE site reliability engineer can scale and manage a bigger application, and it's all gonna be around automation and and to your point, you said earlier, if you have the data, that's a powerful situations. Once have the data can build models on it and can start building solutions on the data. And so I think What happens is when Bill this program of cloud for for your, you know, broad development population automating all this stuff becomes important. So that's why I say service or this, You know, automation of infrastructure is the next battleground for the cloud because whoever does that for you is gonna be your virtualized back and virtualized data center virtualized SRE. And if whoever owns that, it's gonna be a very, very strategic position. >>Yeah, it's great stuff. This is back to the theme of this notion of virtualization is now gone beyond server virtualization. It's, you know, media virtualization with the Cube. My big joke here with the Q virtual. But it's to your point. It's everything can now be replicated in software and scale the cloud scale. So it's super big opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies. Thio, pivot and differentiate. Uh, the question I have for you next is on that thread Huge edge discussion going on, right. So, you know, I think I said it two years ago or three years ago. The data center is just a edges just a big fat edge. Jassy kind of said that in his keynote Hey, looks at that is just a Nedum point with his from his standpoint. But you have data center. You have re alleges you've got five G with wavelength. This local zone concept, which is, you know, Amazon in these metro areas reminds me the old wireless point of presence kind of vibe. And then you've got just purpose built devices like cameras and factory. So huge industrial innovation, robotics, meet software. I mean, whole huge edge development exploding, Which what's your view of this? And how do you look at that from? Is an investor in industry, >>I think edges both the opportunity for start ups and companies as well as a threat to Amazon, right to the reason why they have outposts and all the stuff the edges if you think about, you know, decentralizing your application and moving into the eggs from my wearable to my home to my car to my my city block edges access Super interesting. And so a couple things. One companies like Cloudflare Fastly company I'm involved with called Kato Networks that does. SAS is secure access service edge write their names and the edges In the category definition sassy is about How do you like get compute to the edge securely for your developers, for your customers, for your workers, for end users and what you know comes like Cloudflare and Kate have done is they built out a network of pops across the world, their their own infrastructure So they're not dependent upon. You know, the big cloud providers, the telco providers, you know, they're partnering with Big Cloud, their parting with the telcos. But they have their own kind of system, our own kind of platform to get to the edge. And so companies like Kato Networks in Cloud Player that have, ah, presence on the edge and their own infrastructure more or less, I think, are gonna be in a strategic position. And so Kate was seen benefits in the past year of Of of Cove it and locked down because more remote access more developers, Um, I think edge is gonna be a super great area development going forward. I think if you're Amazon, you're pushing to the edge aggressively without post. I think you're a developer startup. You know, creating your own infrastructure and riding this edge wave could be a great way to build a moat against a big cloud guy. So I'm super excited. You think edge in this whole idea of your own infrastructure. Like what Kato has done, it is gonna be super useful going forward. And you're going to see more and more companies. Um, spend the money to try to copy kind of, ah, Cloudflare Kato presence around the world. Because once you own your own kind of, um, infrastructure instead of pops and you're less depend upon them a cloud provider, you're you're in a good position because there's the Amazon outage last week and I think like twilio and a bunch of services went down for for a few hours. If you own your own set of pops, your independent that it is actually really, really secure >>if you and if they go down to the it's on you. But that was the kinesis outage that they had, uh, they before Thanksgiving. Um, yeah, that that's a problem. So on this on. So I guess the question for you on that is that Is it better to partner with Amazon or try to get a position on the edge? Have them either by you or computer, create value or coexist? How do you see that that strategy move. Do you coexist? Do you play with them? >>E think you have to co exist? I think that the partner coexist, right? I think like all things you compete with Amazon. Amazon is so broad that will be part of Amazon and you're gonna compete with and that's that's fair game, you know, like so Snowflake competes against red shift, but they also part of Amazon's. They're running Amazon. So I think if you're a startup trying to find the edge, you have to coexist in Amazon because they're so big. Big cloud, right, The Big three cloud Amazon, Google, Azure. They're not going anywhere. So if you're a startup founder, you definitely coexist. Leverage the good things of cloud. But then you gotta invest in your own edge. Both both figure early what? Your edge and literally the edge. Right. And I think you know you complement your edge presence be it the home, the car, the city block, the zip code with, you know, using Amazon strategically because Amazon is gonna help you get two different countries, different regions. You know you can't build a company without touching Amazon in some form of fashion these days. But if you're a star found or doing strategically, how use Amazon and picking how you differentiate is gonna be key. And if the differentiation might be small, John. But it could be super valuable, right? So maybe only 10 or 15%. But that could be ah Holton of value that you're building on top of it. >>Yeah, and there's a little bit of growth hack to with Amazon if you you know how it works. If you compete directly against the core building blocks like a C two has three, you're gonna get killed, right? They're gonna kill you if the the white space is interest. In the old days in Microsoft, you had a white space. They give it to you or they would roll you over and level you out. Amazon. If you're a customer and you're in a white space and do better than them, they're cool with that. They're like, basically like, Hey, if you could innovate on behalf of the customer, they let you do that as long as you have a big bill. Yeah. Snowflakes paying a lot of money to Amazon. Sure, but they also are doing a good job. So again, Amazon has been very clear on that. If you do a better job than us for, the customer will do it. But if they want Amazon Red Shift, they want Amazon Onley. They can choose that eso kind of the playbook. >>I think it is absolutely right, John is it sets from any jassy and that the Amazon culture of the customer comes first, right? And so whatever is best for the customer that's like their their mission statement. So whatever they do, they do for the customer. And if you build value for the customer and you're on top of Amazon, they'll be happy. You might compete with some Amazon services, which, no, the GM of that business may not be happy, but overall. Net Net. Amazon's getting a share of those dollars that you're that you're charging the customer getting a share of the value you're creating. They're happy, right? Because you know what? The line rising tide floats all the boats. So the Mork cloud usage is gonna only benefit the Big Three cloud providers Amazon, particularly because they're the biggest of the three. But more and more dollars go the cloud. If you're helping move more. Absolute cloud helping build more solutions in the cloud. Amazon is gonna be happy because they know that regardless of what you're doing, you will get a fraction of those dollars. Now, the key for a startup founder and what I'm looking for is how do we get mawr than you know? A sliver of the dollars. How to get a bigger slice of the pie, if you will. So I think edge and surveillance or two areas I'm thinking about because I think there are two areas where you can actually invest, own some I p owned some surface area and capture more of the value, um, to use a startup founder and, you know, are built last t to Amazon. >>Yeah. Great. Great thesis. Jerry has always been great. You've been with the Cube since the beginning on our first reinvented 2013. Um, and so we're now on our eighth year. Great to see your success. Great investment. You make your world class investor to great firm Greylock. Um great to have you on from your perspective. Final take on this year. What's your view of Jackie's keynote? Just in general, What's the vibe. What's the quick, um, soundbite >>from you? First, I'm so impressed and you can do you feel like a three Archy? No more or less by himself. Right then, that is, that is, um, that's a one man show, and I'm All of that is I don't think I could pull that off. Number one. Number two It's, um, the ability to for for Amazon to execute at so many different levels of stack from semiconductors. Right there, there there ai chips to high level services around healthcare solutions and legit solutions. It's amazing. So I would say both. I'm impressed by Amazon's ability. Thio go so broad up and down the stack. But also, I think the theme from From From Andy Jassy is like It's just acceleration. It's, you know now that we will have things unique to the cloud, and that could be just a I chips unique to the cloud or the services that are cloud only you're going to see a tipping point. We saw acceleration in the past 15 years, John. He called like this cloud transition. But you know, I think you know, we're talking about 2021 beyond you'll see a tipping point where now you can only get certain things in the cloud. Right? And that could be the underlying inference. Instances are training instances, the Amazons giving. So all of a sudden you as a founder or developer, says, Look, I guess so much more in the cloud there's there's no reason for me to do this hybrid thing. You know, Khyber is not gonna go away on Prem is not going away. But for sure. We're going to see, uh, increasing celebration off cloud only services. Um, our edge only services or things. They're only on functions that serve like serverless. That'll be defined the next 10 years of compute. And so that for you and I was gonna be a space and watch >>Jerry Chen always pleasure. Great insight. Great to have you on the Cube again. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Congrats to you guys in the Cube. Seven years growing. It's amazing to see all the content put on. So you think it isn't? Just Last point is you see the growth of the curve growth curves of the cloud. I'd be curious Johnson, The growth curve of the cube content You know, I would say you guys are also going exponential as well. So super impressed with what you guys have dealt. Congratulations. >>Thank you so much. Cute. Virtual. We've been virtualized. Virtualization is coming here, or Cubans were not in person this year because of the pandemic. But we'll be hybrid soon as events come back. I'm John for a year. Host for AWS reinvent coverage with the Cube. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more coverage all day. Next three weeks. Stay with us from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of aws reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel >>and AWS. Welcome back here to our coverage here on the Cube of AWS.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE I'm in the Palo Alto CUBE Studios here with the quarantine crew, doing the remote interviews during this time of COVID. Of course, we want to check in with all of our great esteemed guests and CUBE alumni. We're here with Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock. Jerry, great to see you, it's been a while. Hope you're sheltering in place, nice camera, nice set up you got there at home, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. I set up all the cameras are just for you. Everybody needs their quarantine hobbies, and for me, I kind of dust off the audio visual playbook and set this up, just for theCUBE interviews. But it's good to see you. Glad you and the family are healthy and sane as well. >> Yeah, and same to you. Let's just jump into it, obviously, COVID-19 has caused the virtualization trend, virtual everything. You're no stranger to virtualization, and VMware back in the day really changed the game on server virtualization, but the whole world's becoming virtual. And it's very interesting because now people are feeling, but we in the industry have been talking about inside the ropes for a long time, which is, the future is there, it's going to be about interactions online, software, cloud scale, these things just got accelerated, and the disruption, the change of behavior, Zoom fatigue, Webexing, all this stuff that's happening, people are kind of like, "Wow! This is the future." This is a real impact, and it's mainstream, everyone's feeling about business, to personal, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think Satya Nadella at Microsoft had this quote recently that they've seen two decade's worth of digital acceleration and transformation in just two months, and I think what we've seen the past four months, John is all the kind of first order effects of virtualization events, not just infrastructure, but like virtualization meetings and people, telemedicine, telehealth, online education, delivery of food, all those trends are just accelerated. We're buying stuff on eCommerce, and Amazon, and Instacart before hand, that's just accelerated. We're moving towards virtualized events, online education, online healthcare, that's just accelerated. So I think we're seeing the first order effects of changing not only how we work, how we communicate, but how we shop, interact, and socialize, it compress two decades within two, three months. And so I think that's changing both how you and I interact and how we build relationships, also how companies interact with their customers, and how companies interact with employees. and it's been exciting time, because one, when there's disruption, there's opportunity, but two is giving guys like you and me a chance to kind of dust off or try new skills, and you and I are both figuring out how to exist and thrive in this role where we're now interacting in this virtualized world. >> And it's still the same game personal relationships. Content is now data. This is stuff that we've been preaching on theCUBE. You've been on many times talking about, I going to get your thoughts as a venture capitalist, whether you're making bets on the future for investments, you have a 10 year horizon, and roughly speaking average on VC deals, enterprises and customers who are building a cloud and data centers, they got to make new bets or double down on stuff they've been doing, or cancel stuff that they had going on, and refactoring. So I want to to get your thoughts on one, first on the VC side, how have you guys refactored your thinking, your meetings, and your bets? >> Yeah, so I would say, three areas, one is how we operate as a VC firm what's changed? Number two, I'll talk about what we're investing in what's good or bad, and thirdly is like, what I think changes for our portfolio companies and how startups think. So first and foremost obviously, we've gone all virtual too, with shelter-in-place, our entire team is now working remotely, working from home, but we're still open for business and we're looking to find new investments, we are investing aggressively right now, and we're just doing things over Zoom. And so we're either A, doing video calls as a partnership, or doing video calls with startups that we're meeting and founders, but I'll be honest, one thing I've done John, is I've turned off the screen more or less, I've done more phone calls because I find that a video call is great for the first or second meeting, but with a founder or executive you have relationship with, it's just really nice to actually, go on a virtual walk where me and the founder of both put AirPods or take the phone to walk outside and kind of have a conversation, that's a little of a higher bandwidth. So, I think how we're operating has changed a little bit, but to your point, is the same business, connecting with a person one-on-one, reading the market, reading the founder, and making a bet. So that hasn't changed. I think on the stuff we're investing in, like you said, all the trends around cloud and APIs and SaaS, that's accelerated. So all the trends around the new workplace, SaaS companies, collaboration, going cloud that's accelerated faster, so some of our companies like Cato Networks that does software defined, wide area networks plus cloud security that just accelerated there in this market called secure access serves edge. We've seen kind of a nice tailwind from that, more and more data is going to cloud so companies like Rockset, that's a database company that you had on theCUBE, they're going to see a benefit from that because more and more data is now in the cloud. Then finally for the founders we work with, the way to go to market, the way to sell like no one's flying around selling one-on-one anymore, you're not meeting a CSO, or the CIO over steak dinner, or you're not going to a conference anymore. So a lot of our companies are figuring out how to do more online sales, bottoms ups adoption, that could be an API, that could be open source, we're trying to find a couple more of our line of business entry to the company and sell that way, versus go to a conference or for one-on-one meeting. So it's interesting, everything's moved faster, but then this slight curve ball on how you connect with your customer has changed. And so what's the Darwin line, it's not the strongest that survives, but the most adaptable. So we're seeing the companies that founders that are most adaptable right now, they're going to thrive. >> It's interesting, we've always talked about from a tech standpoint with DevOps and cloud-native, integration or horizontally scalable has been that ethos of value creation, you've talked about moats in the past, but now it's more real life, is becoming immersed into software, and so I want to get your thoughts on this, and we have a phrase here in theCUBE team is that, every company will become a media company, that's something that we believe in, and you starting to see that people are doing more Zooms, doing more digital events, you mentioned some of the other things. Can you see any other examples where a company has to become blank? Because media is just one element of the new realities of life, right? You got to broadcast, and you got to share your stories and formats, that's media, is there other areas we're seeing, that things that weren't on the radar before with COVID, where companies have to become something like, every company will be blank? Fill in the blank. >> I would say, it's trite to say one, one, was every company is a data company, people have been saying that for a while, that's more true than ever. Number two, I'll be honest, every company now is a healthcare company, right? Because be it in health insurance for employees, the current pandemic is making the reality of both physical health, and emotional health, and mental health key for employees. And so if that was a top cost factor for hiring employees, this could be even more important going forward that every company is a health care company. And thirdly, like you said, every company becomes media company, I would say every company is also either one or two things, they're a Fintech company, because every company is now going online with their content. They wanting to create a one-to-one commercial relationship with a customer, right? That could be ads, could be transaction, could be selling something, so you're now doing business directly with your customer, so every company is a Fintech company, and I would say every company's now also, like you said, content company, right? It's the media creating, but also the data you're taking, the value you add on top of the data you're creating, and then how you share that back to your customer. So you as an enterprise company or a consumer company, you collect data from users, you're to use that data to improve your product, and this could be a SaaS offering, this could be an application, but then take that data through real time analytics, then make your product better and so because of that, if you're a data company, real time data, like our database company mentioned earlier, Rockset becomes more important. If you're a Fintech company, so all things around payments or commercial banking and relationship with your customer make sense. And if a you're a healthcare company because all your employees are now caring about healthcare, just thinking about how to make communication of healthcare with employees a lot more efficient, and a part of the reason why to work for theCUBE and work for a startup is important, so I think those three things are top of mind for all employees and all employers. I think things could change the next six or nine months, but right now I see those three being front and center. >> It's interesting. I wonder if you can add real estate company to that because if you look at the work from home, it's dynamic. >> Yeah >> I had a friend who was a fellow dad with my son's lacrosse team, he lives in Los Gatos, he's been involved in Google, Tesla, building up their facilities, and he had an interesting guest post on SiliconANGLE, and he was saying, it's not just give them some extra pay for their internet access, companies got to rethink the facilities question, right? Because do you pay rent for your employees? Do you provide the VPN, beyond VPN security, for instance? So again, you start to see these new opportunities or challenges, open up new thinking, this is going to be a wave of opportunity. >> Well, that virtualization between work and home has now been blurred like you said earlier, John and so if you're a technology company that enables remote access or distribute access, like Cato Networks when the portfolio comes and Greylock around our road office, home office, that is now how to right? So I had this conversation with Jason of Austin, askSpoke, one of our companies, there's like a mass of hierarchy for working out, and at the base of the mass of hierarchy is like good internet access, right? That's the how to, you need security, right? Because if you don't have secure access, you can't work, and then you have information management, knowledge management, how to communicate, right? And then collaboration, so, you have now this new hierarchy of what is required you to work in this new world, but also the tools and the technologies, be it secured access service edge like CATO or IT Helpdesk for all employees like askSpoke, both of those things become dial tone for any remote work. Just like videoconferencing, we couldn't do this in the same way, 10, 15 years ago, that's become kind of a must have, and so I think it'd be fascinating how we went from the office world where I gave you a laptop, or a computer, or a desk to this home office world, where maybe you now I have to pay for my fancy camera setup and my VPN. >> Well certainly you're getting good ROI on your setup and sure Greylock will take care of that plenty of dough big, billions of dollars under management. And by the way, must have hire things in our houses, ping and internet access, so we fight for that ping time, I got 12 I'm like what's going on? Who's gaming? We have to get the kids off of Twitch, and whatnot. but in all seriousness, this is what the reality is. So now for the average person out there, there's a lot of discussion around mental health, you mentioned taking it off the video conferencing and going for a walk, or just talking on the phone, this speaks to the humanization aspect of what's going on, mental health, social interaction, we're social creatures, collaboration has to be re-imagined. What's your view on all this? >> I think absolutely, look, humans are social creatures by nature, and I think part of the reason why I had this conversation with my founders early during COVID-19, that it's both a healthcare crisis. It's an economic crisis with all the million and millions of people unemployed, but it's also an emotional crisis because one, we're not connected to family, friends, and loved ones, and we're sheltering home with either ourselves or just a handful of people. And so we're trying to figure out ways to like, recreate social connections, and that's a phone call, it's a video call, it's Zoom dinners, it's Zoom dinners, the Zoom parties, is key. I think, going on socially just in walks is another thing to kind of like, play and experience things together. But my two cents is if you're a startup, right now, it can help connect people work-wise or socially, that's just going to be super critical for the new experience. And I think people are discovering new ways to use technology, so Zoom was never meant to be used the way it is today, I think that's amazing. I think how people think about voice video, and email, and chat are changing as well. So I'll finding new ways to like, play games online with my nieces, or communicate with them. And I think as an employer in these companies, like HR software, and how you like manage, and coach, and lead your employees is going to change as well. And so, you have this world where we're all in one building, and think about how you as a CEO, or as a leader now can actually coach, develop, and enable your employees across the world. >> I want to get your thoughts on cloud, we've had many conversations around cloud computing as to rise of AWS, I remember one it was a big Twitter conversation, I think about last year where what enabled Amazon and I think one of the things that came out of it was virtualization enabled them to have all these different servers. What do you see coming out of this virtualization of our lives with the COVID-19, as people start to figure out beyond the triage of stabilization, and as they get foundationally set up in COVID, coming out of it, companies and people have to have a growth strategy, whether it's life or business, people want to come out of this on the upside, whether it's emotional or with their business, what do you see being enabled? What needs to be in place? What kind of scale? What kind of environment? Because this is where I think the entrepreneurs are really going to sharpen their energy on their creativities looking at the expectations and experience needed coming out of this, it may look completely different than what we were talking about a year ago. What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think individually, people can use this time to prove their skills in different ways. So I think as an employee, as CEO, as a founder, you take the time to like invest in new skills, and that could be, "Hey, how do our community collaborate and manage my team remotely?" So I think CEOs and founders that can understand how to motivate, educate, train their employees in this new world, well, those are skills going forward. So communication has always been a great skill John, for any leader, any founder, it's 10X more important in this new virtualized work role, communication, motivation, and leading people over remote work is going to be a new skill that people have. Managing remote teams, managing fully distributed teams or half distributed, half headquarters, so understanding how to organize and lead your team in this kind of half in the office half out of the office role, that's going to be a challenge as well. So any tools, technology and tips there, but I think in terms of the founders that can now hire employees, find customers, sell customers, and manage a distributed team, those three things in this new world, even post COVID-19, we're not going back to the way we were, so the ability to actually use skills around email, creating content, Slack, Zoom, video chat, online conferences, what was that? "Video Killed the Radio Star", the first MTV Video. So, COVID-19, and Zoom, and video collaboration, what's that do to the old skills or the old founders? And what do they enable? So just like TV replaced radio as a medium, and now this virtualized world is going to replace kind of the medium we had beforehand, so, there'll be new generation of founders and investors coming out of this generation that would be for the next 10, 15 years, and I'm excited to be part of that. >> Yeah, and it's super big opportunity, because you have these kind of medium changes, new protocols get developed, new responsibilities and roles emerge, value creation capture, equations change, right? So you're looking at things like online events, for instance, they don't happen anymore, and even when they do come back they'll probably be hybrid anyway. So you got virtual, hybrid, public it sounds like a cloud play to me, public events, hybrid events, and private events, I guess. >> Yeah, virtual private events, but the same thing holds, just like cloud internet increased the reach, right? So all of a sudden, you can reach a bigger audience than just radio, TV, or the newspaper. Now you have these virtualized events like say private events, public events, hybrid events, you as a company or a media property, like theCUBE can now reach a larger audience, right? It's global, you don't have to be there in person, you're going to have the remote audience as a first class citizen, now more than ever, it's just like the internet replacing newspaper and print, people really care about print and newspaper, but really the reach online is always a magnitude larger than print, so all of a sudden you thought more about the print, so the online audience more than print audience. So now going forward, you're going to think about the virtual audience that's remote versus the physical audience. And so you're going to have to create experiences that are their world class or both properties. So just like the cloud, you think about the big three cloud providers, private cloud, as a technology company, you think about all three venues, all three infrastructures as a first class citizen. It's not going to be all one cloud, it's not all going to be one note, if you will. So it forces everyone to think, not just kind of one path, but multiple paths, so like classic problems a lot of founders think, okay, I'm going to do an enterprise private cloud strategy only or I'm going to do a cloud only SaaS strategy. Now founders of this do both the same time, I got to address the private cloud on premise business at the same time as the cloud business, and not just one cloud, three or four clouds around the world. So it forces founders to be able to do more things at one time and the ability for a company to attack multiple venues or multiple territories at the same time, they'll be successful. And the days where I can just do one cloud or one venue, or one audience, those are gone, and so, folks like yourself, John, and what you've built here at theCUBE with everyone else, they can reach multiple audiences at the same time, that's going to be very powerful. >> And we're going to be marketing and doing a lot more online events, like you said, it's going to be easier to tap into our 7000 plus alumni to get people together to create great content. And again, content value to remote audience is interesting. So that shifts into the conversation that everyone talks about the remote worker. Well, what about the remote customer, the remote prospects? So this is going to change how companies have to be change of behaviors. And it's going to be driven by developers, because it's not like one app can solve it, 'cause you got to integrate, you got to have some integration points. So this is the question, are we moving away from that monolithic SaaS app? Or is it going to be some SaaS apps that need to integrate with others? Will there be an abstraction layer of innovation around? Because at the end of the day, these new workloads and new apps going to be built. If you're going to run an event, if I'm a SAP or a big company, I'm not going to rely or may not want to rely on a vendor. In fact, the CEO of SAP said, 'cause their site crashed for their event, "I'm not going to rely on a third party to run my business event." 'Cause their business model is the event, not just a supplier selection for a SaaS app. So interesting kind of new surge of online activity might tip the scales for the supplier side. >> I think you're right John, I think because now the, just like the IT technology is now your business, you're going to basically do one or two things, one, vet the IT technology provider that much higher or harder. But number two to your point, I think the way you sell and you reach companies is going to be through developers and yes, you're going to have these large monolithic SaaS apps before, but almost every SaaS app now has APIs for integration, and so to your point, is that integration and the ability to have multiple companies work together, and share data, and collaborate, that's going to be more important. And so really at Greylock and myself, I've been investing in developer-led technologies and developer-led adoption, or API, or open source-led adoption, for seven plus years now. And the truth of matter is, that's going to be even more powerful going forward. Nassim Taleb would say that's anti-fragile, right? So having one giant app is fragile, but having a bunch of small apps, or a bunch of APIs, or a bunch of developers using your open source technology, or using your API technology to build an application, that's anti-fragile, because at the end of the day, that's going to be more reliable for your customer than a single point of failure, which can be one giant application. So all the big apps like Salesforce, have now other platforms, right? They have APIs, they have extensibility, they understand that there's a long fat tail of solutions needed to build. And all the new startups are doing open source, or API-led adoption 'cause they understand that the fastest route to create value for the customer, is also the most robust technology stack that a customer can build upon. I think that's super insightful, in fact, that is, I think so compelling, because if you think about it, that's the formula for great investments from a startup standpoint. But now, because of COVID, you said, everything's been pulled forward and accelerated at the same time, there's a collision, not all the enterprises are that strong, they're not that developer-led. So I think, to the point about acceleration, now, the enterprises, and we've seen pockets of this with cybersecurity where they have their own, in-house teams doing a variety of different development. The customers have to be developer-led, because that's where the value is, so they have to have a supplier with the right stack and integration frameworks. Now, the customers who haven't really been developer-led, have to be developer-led, what's your take on that? >> Absolutely true. 20 years ago, the CIO of a company that used to be the monopoly supplier technology for the company, they decided what hardware to use, what servers, what stores to use, what applications to buy. And then all of a sudden, like Amazon came around and said, "Well, look, here's a set of APIs, go build what you want." And so the competition for kind of like the centralized decision making became Amazon. And guess what? CIOs reacted, they got better, they got smarter, and those that embrace kind of like an API developer-led adoption, became the CIOs you wanted to have in the company. So I think, CIOs in this cloud mobile era have adopted that philosophy that, look, my job now as the CIO is to enable my developers, my employees, which really the assets of the company is the people, to have the right tools. So you're asked a bunch of cloud APIs, like Rockset or whatever for data, or here's a bunch of resources, or open source technologies for you to pull. So like I invested in a company recently called Chronosphere, it's an open source technology around metrics and monitoring. So, "Hey, use this open source time series database for monitoring your cloud and build upon that," and they're not going to say, "We're going to pick one large vendor that's monolithic," we're going to say, "Here's an open source tech company or a cloud API, go build upon that." And the companies that are embracing that philosophy of API-led or developer-led, John, they're going to be far ahead the better CIOs, the better companies, because the rate of digital adoption has just gone exponential, so we were on this super fast path already, and with quarantine in COVID, we've accelerated all that digital transformation, so every brick-and-mortar retailer now has to be eCommerce retailer. So they're making a slow digital transformation to go from brick-and-mortar stores to online stores. Now like brick-and-mortar retail is pretty much not happening, and probably won't come back to the same levels for a while, they need to accelerate their move towards digital transformation, right? >> And IT certainly exposes the people who haven't really made those investments, because literally action and the mandate, now take action, make those changes, totally want to dig into this developer-led vision, because I think that's very real. And the new decision is going to be made on what to do. I'm happy to see the DevOps thinking, the agile, speed become the table stakes. So with that, this week, Google is having their nine-week digital event of 200 plus sessions, essentially, an asynchronous event, it's going to be sprinkled out, they've kind of pretty much released the videos, most of them today. Over the next eight, nine weeks, you're going to see a lot of videos. Google, one of the big three got AWS, Azure, Google, what's your assessment of the horses on the track relative to the cloud? >> I've been talking about this for seven, eight, nine years, I first met it, like in the first or second Amazon reinvent and what was the forecast? And we said, well, it's not a winner take all, but right now, it's a winner take most. Amazon's clearly the market share leader, Azure coming up quickly behind the enterprise, Google's a third but they're doing some smart things around technology. Google announced a bunch of things today, which I think are very smart. So for example, they announced BigQuery Omni, which is BigQuery that's in query, their kind of a data warehouse, also query data and private cloud Azure or Amazon. And so strategically, if you're the number three player, you're going to push a multi-cloud agenda with BigQuery Omni, or Google Anthos, which is kind of a multi-cloud platform. And for Google, I think is the right strategy. I also think it's the right strategy for most customers to be multi-cloud, because you can't be dependent upon, a single point of failure in your applications. You can't be dependent on a single cloud as well. So I think multi-cloud is probably the direction we're headed as cloud matures. And I think Google's making a bunch of the right choices around embracing multi-cloud, and today they made that choice with BigQuery Omni, and so I think they're playing catch up but they're playing that game. I think Amazon's clue is still in the lead and still it blows my mind, and it's continuing to impress me what they've done over the past 10 years in terms of improving the cloud offering and the cloud services up and down the stack, and I think the past five, six years, what Azure has done, has been super impressive in terms of, Microsoft embracing, open source embracing, cloud as an ethos against their legacy business of operating systems and servers on premise, they've done a great job of embracing the next generation. But I do think, looking around the corner this new developer-led mindset is going to matter, right? So the cloud tomorrow will be APIs, like Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication. So I see the next evolution not just being VMs and containers, but also a bunch of cloud services around data, security, and privacy. And the cloud vendors can build this next generation of database APIs, or privacy APIs, security APIs, that they're going to be in the catbird seat for the next 10 years of applications are going to be built. >> And it'll be interesting to your developer-led position, our conversation around that, if the developer is going to be leading, is it going to be an abstraction layer across multiple clouds? Or do I have to have my Google developers, and my Amazon developers, and my Azure developers? How do you see that playing out? Because I do believe developer-led is the way, the question is, how do you avoid forking resources, right? So you might want to have an (mumbles) I get that, but if I'm going to go double down on say, a cloud, I'm going to go deep, I'm going to hire developers. >> It's interesting, history suggests you have multiple teams remember, we used to have a Unix team or a Sun team inside companies, right? You had a Windows team, you had a kind of a Solaris and Linux team, and there's a Microsoft team, and a non-Microsoft team, in most companies and they didn't really work well together and they had kind of two groups in most companies. I think that was an okay way to get started, but ultimately, to your point, that was not cost effective at all, it was defeating, you see now you had to like have to rethink it, what was my data backup strategy? Okay, I have a Windows backup strategy, and a Unix Solaris backup strategy. So I think we're not going to make the same mistake again, right? I think what will happen, we'll going to have multiple clouds, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then on premise private cloud, so call it, three, four, or five clouds. And then you're going to have a set of tools that can abstract away, not 100% of the clouds, but I think the best developer tools, the best APIs will be multi-cloud. So I can get 80% or 90% of what I want to be done through this developer-led layer of APIs, be it databases or analytics. And then, 10 to 20% of the code, you can write will be able to take care of what's unique to Amazon, what's unique to Azure, what's unique to Google or what's unique to your own private cloud. But I think we're seeing a layer of technology and that's true to all the startups. With back and true to all the startups I see that lets you get most of the way done with a single platform, seamlessly AI technologies, and that's what customers want, right? They don't want to create modal fiefdoms, they want-- >> They want choice. The want choice, but the reality is they don't always get it. I want to go through a throwback to 2010 when Paul Maritz, head of the VMware our first CUBE gig, he said, there's a hardened top. Okay, the hardened top was, you don't worry about what's underneath the top, we're just going to focus on top of the stack that was classic kind of, the stack would develop and you'd had standardization. You mentioned you had Windows teams and Unix teams, but also you could argue that, back then you had Cisco and Wellfleet vendors, but you didn't have two teams of routers, you had one standard that ran the remote interoperability, and OSPF routing, or whatever you had going on, so you had some standardization, how do you view that? Because you want some standardization to have the interoperability, the SLAs and the security, at the same time you want to have flexibility, kind of above what may be called a hardened top, is there a hardened top in multi-cloud? >> I'd say hard top doesn't exist in same way. I think back in the day, you had proprietary technologies, operating systems and firmware, right? So windows was closed, a lot of the network operating systems were closed source. Now you can't get away with that. So you have open source technologies today and public APIs. And so the pressure of both one, competition, two, public APIs that people can read, copy, adjust, three, open source, and it's just customer demand not to be locked into a hard top anymore, that's largely going to go away. So I think most of the major vendors success will try to kind of more or less lock you in and keep you stuck on their platform, their technology, and that's fine, right? Every successful company should be able to do that. But I think the ability to lock you in through proprietary software or operating systems, that's not going to happen anymore. I see through cloud and open source, what we've seen is kind of interoperability, and flexibility is the default, if you can't meet those needs, customers will go other ways. There'll be proprietary technologies, proprietary extensions along the way, but 60, 70% of what you want is going to be compatible with most technologies and most clouds. If you're not going to offer choice and freedom to our customers, they'll go elsewhere. If you don't offer a flexible solution, John, someone else will, and the customers will choose a more flexible solution. >> I would agree with you. Outside of latency, which is laws of physics, value is the lock in, if you're creating value, that's really what the customers want, they get to capture that value. Well, Jerry, great to have you on. I love the new setup. We're going to have to make this more of it. We can bring you in on the podcast when we get Zooms over the weekend, maybe put a panel together. Let's get Carl Eschenbach some VMware alarms to come on, give the perspective, what's going on. And I thank you for taking the time and great to see that you're healthy and doing well. Thanks. >> Me too. Thanks, john. Anytime, I love to be on theCUBE, so I look forward to my next trip. >> All right, Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, our first interview over nine years ago, he brought that up. That was at the second reinvent, boy has the world changed, and it's only going to accelerate even faster. Everything's changing new bets are being made, decisions have to be evolving quickly and faster. If you're not fast, you will be in the pile of dead companies and not making it. So, Jerry Chen breaking it down as venture capitalist for Greylock. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online, they're virtual. Then I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studios for theCUBE virtual. We're remotely doing interviews during this COVID crisis. We have our quarantine crew, we're doing our best now for two and a half months getting those stories out, and today is AWS Summit. It's going to continue online, it never ends. It's virtual, it's asynchronous, but more importantly, let's get to great content. Our next guest Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. Great entrepreneur, vision with real impact and this is a story that is super important in my opinion, because it's a tech story and it's a social impact story. And you don't have to do one or the other, you can do both these days. This is going to be great. Jimmy, thanks for spending the time with us today. >> Yeah John, thanks for having me on the show. >> So, I want to get into the broader entrepreneurship and social impact as an entrepreneurial thing, which I think is a total awesome opportunity. But, you guys are using AWS for good, Propel, Take a minute to explain Propel the company, the things you're working and what you're passionate about. >> So Propel, we're a tech company based in Brooklyn that build software to help people navigate safety net programs like the food stamp program. There are about 40 million Americans who get their food stamp benefits on a debit card, called an EBT card, which looks kind of like a debit card or a credit card you get from a bank. But, when we spent time talking to people who use these cards to buy groceries, we actually found that it has kind of a weird quirk, which is that everyone who goes grocery shopping with an EBT card has to call the 1-800 number on the back of the card first, because that's how they can check the balance. And if you try to check-out at the grocery store you don't have enough left on your card, you get into this really embarrassing experience of having to decide, do you want three apples or two, and trying to figure out how to get your balance to be appropriate for the amount of food they're trying to buy. And so, we actually found that this pain point of needing to call the 1-800 number to go check your balance on your EBT card is a really common one that's felt by all 40 million of these Americans who use the food stamp program to put food on the table. So, what be built at Propel is really simple, it's a mobile banking app for the EBT card, the same way that you have a mobile banking app or your banking product, that we've created a digital free app that allows someone who gets their food stamp benefit on an EBT card to check their balance, to see their transaction history and more broadly actually to improve their overall financial help. >> And mends also the quality of life, knowing confidence whether whatever they're going through, that's something they're going to feel about as well. Talk about the tech piece of it. Obviously, this is a good example of something that I've been really riffing on for many years now, and just trying to get people's attention to is that cloud computing changes the game on social impact, because the time to get to the value, which is well talked about in entrepreneurial circles, later got funded, I got product market fit, applies to anything. And this is really spawning a new generation of entrepreneurship. This is a real thing and Amazon does that. What's your experience with AWS in this area? >> Well, our experience over the last month and a half in the middle of the COVID crisis I think has really driven home the value of AWS for our business, which is that, you know, at the start of COVID we had about 2 million people who used the Fresh EBT app on a monthly basis to manage their existing SNAP benefits. Unfortunately, as the economy has worsen and people's usage of safety net services as has increased, so has our userbase. And AWS has been really key to us, being able to scale our services, to be able to help an extra million people start using the Fresh EBT app essentially over the last few weeks. And so, you know, to your point about infrastructure and scale and technology, for us it's really been about, what are the best practices in the consumer tech worlds? And how do we apply those to help people that are lower-income and generally deal with experiences that are less good. >> You know, I've talked about though is something that I've been really talking a lot about, and maybe I'm a little bit older, but the younger entrepreneurs, they love to be agile and everything else. But what you're doing and what you've done is really have agility, but when you have these hard times everyone uses the word pivot. Which I hate that word pivot, it means to me like, it didn't work out, I'm going to pivot to something else. But to me, I think what's available when you're using the cloud, like what new position you're in, you built an app for a use case, you had product market fit. This COVID crisis becomes a tailwind for you, because actually your app helps people that are in need, but it also might give you an opportunity to do other things really fast, which means jump on an opportunity, not necessarily pivot. I mean is that tacking, pivot? It's kind of semantics, but it's a cultural mindset. And I want to get your thoughts Jimmy on how you see your business changing where you can actually take what you've built on the trajectory in the climbs of scale, the steep learnings. And then also take new territory down, whether it's a new service, helping people in need, 'cause that's the mission. Now you have flexibility. >> Jimmy: That's right. >> Talk about how you think about that, and what are some of your opportunities that you see. >> Jimmy: Well, the reality is that financial life for people who are low-income and using safety net services changes rapid. And there's no better example of this over the last, you know, few decades than the COVID crisis. Over the past few months, people who are using food stamp benefits have had really an unprecedented challenge over the last few months. It's been tough for everyone, but our survey data shows that for people who were getting food stamp benefits and working in early March, 86% of them have now lost some source of income, or have had their hours cut. And so I think one of the things we're starting to hear from our users is just the unprecedented type of need that they're facing and that they're turning to apps like the Fresh EBT app, to help them to navigate this particular crisis. To answer questions like, "What are the nutrition programs "through the government that are available to me? "How do I get a stimulus check? "What about the unemployment program? "And just, what are the full set of safety net resources "that are available to help someone like me "to get back on my feet and to make it through "this unprecedented financial hardship?" So, to your point about pivoting, you know, it's not necessarily, I don't think of it as pivoting, I think of it as like as responding to the real changes in user need. >> Yeah, ceasing opportunity on your position of your value proposition. Jimmy talk about the company, that your company launched a new service, Project 100. What is that about? Can you take a minute to explain that? >> Project 100 is a partnership between Propel, Stand for Children and the GiveDirectly team, which is the other two are nonprofits that are focused on different aspects of serving people that are in financial need. And it is a partnership that we've created to raise a $100 million to be able to make cash transfers to a 100,000 people who use the Fresh EBT app and are in financial need. So, Propel's role in this is that we, because our app helps people that are getting their food stamp benefits, we can certify that this is a person who is in financial need and uses, essentially, the status on the food stamp program as a proxy for, this is a family who really needs help to get through this crisis. We've been fortunate to have a lot of donors who are very generous and interested in finding ways to support, you know, people that are going through these types of financial hardships. And so, we've been fortunate to raise already about $70 million through this program. But, I think we still have a ways to go to reach this $100 million goal, where we really think that, that was a material impact on helping low-income Americans weather this financial shock. >> Well, I really appreciate what you're doing and thanks for what you're doing, it's great, and I think it's a great opportunity. Got great product market fit and you got a lot of horizontal opportunities to go after as you're more successful. I also want to get your thoughts real quick on tech entrepreneurship. It's been very glamorous over the past couple decades, to be an entrepreneur, but ultimately it's about creating value. I think, you're seeing with the cloud a lot of opportunities that aren't the traditional, you know, go public, built, raise a bunch of money, really either for profit or nonprofit, really in highly social impact situations. This is a growing field and you're doing it. Can you share what you're seeing and what advice you could give folks who are really thinking about having a mission driven opportunity. >> Jimmy: Well, I think that people solve the problems that they understand, and that traditionally tech entrepreneurs understand the very specific set of challenges, because the demographics of tech entrepreneurs are a smaller set than the overall population in the United States, right? Tech entrepreneurs tend to be male, they tend to have a college education, they tend to live in cities like San Francisco or New York City, and they tend to have a lot of money. But the reality is, that's not the demographic of people who use technology in the United States and so if people solve the problems that they understand, whose going to solve the problems that people on food stamps understand, if there are not a lot of people who are on food stamps that are starting their own software companies? And so I think the power of tools like Amazon Web Services and the cloud that allow people to be able to create new technology in a record amount of time and scale that, is the ability to democratize who gets to build the technology that people use, right? It means, both being able to help people who traditionally would not have the resources to start a new type of organization, to start a new one, but it also means being able to help companies like mine identify these types of challenges, to learn about the needs that people who are low-income have and be able to scale a product. >> Phenomenal mission Propel. Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel. If you're designing a product, or art, or anything, you got to know who you're designing it for. And great point, and people solve problems that they understand. Thank you for what you're doing. Congratulations and continue success. We'll keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the virtual CUBE, thank you. >> Jimmy: Thank you so much for having me John. >> I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE for theCUBE virtual coverage of AWS Summit Online. A virtual conference has gone a way to virtual, so is theCUBE. Until further notice, we're going to do our part in our studio in Palo Alto, the studio in Boston. Checking in with folks and getting the updates. We're all in this together, and I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with it's Ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back, everyone theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for AWS reInvent. It's theCUBE's 10th year of operations, it's our seventh AWS reInvent and every year, it gets better and better and every year, we've had theCUBE at reInvent, Jerry Chen has been on as a guest. He's a VIP, Jerry Chen, now a general partner at Greylock Tier One, one of the leading global Venture capitals at Silicon Valley. Jerry, you've been on the journey with us the whole time. >> I guess I'm your good luck charm. >> (laughs) Well, keep it going. Keep on changing the game. So, thanks for coming on. >> Jerry: Thanks for having me. >> So, now that you're a seasoned partner now at Greylock. You got a lot of investments under your belt. How's it going? >> It's great, I mean look, every single year, I look around the landscape thinking, "What else could be coming? "What if we surprise this year?" What's the new trends? What both macro-trends, also company trends, like, who's going to buy who, who's going to go public? Every year, it just gets busier and busier and bigger and bigger. >> All these new categories are emerging with this new architecture. I call it Cloud 2.0, maybe next gen Cloud, whatever you want to call it, it's clear visibility now into the fact that DevOps is working, Cloud operations, large scale operations with Cloud is certainly a great value proposition. You're seeing now multiple databases, pick the tool, I think Jassy got that right in his keynote, I believe that, but now the data equation comes over the top. So, you got DevOps infrastructure as code, you got data now looking like it's going to go down that same path of data as code where developers don't have to deal with all the different nuances of how data's stored, how it's handled, where is it, warm or cold or at glacier. So, developers still don't have that yet today. Seems to be an area of Amazon. What's your take on all this? >> I think you saw, so what drove DevOps? Speed, right? It's basically how developers shows you operations, merging of two groups. So, we're seeing the same trend DataOps, right? How data engineers and data scientists can now have the same speeds developers had for the past 10 years, DataOps. So, A, what does that mean? Give me the menu of what I want like, Goldilocks, too big, too small, just right. Too hot, too cold, just right. Like, give me the storage tier, the data tier, the size I want, the temperature I want and the speed I want. So, you're seeing DataOps give the same kind of Goldilocks treatment as developers. >> And on terms of like Cloud evolution again, you've seen the movie from the beginning at VM where now through Amazon, seventh year. What jumps out at you, what do you look at as squinting through the trend lines and the fashion of the features, it still seems to be the same old game, compute memory storage and software. >> Well I mean, compute memory storage, there's an atomic building blocks of a compute, right? So, regardless of services these high level frameworks, deep down, you still have compute networking and storage. So, that's the building blocks but I think we're seeing 10th year of reInvent this kind of, it's not one size fits all but this really big fat long tail, small instances, micro-instances, server lists, big instances for like jumbo VMs, bare metal, right? So, you're seeing not one architecture but folks can kind of pick and choose buy compute by the drip, the drop or buy compute by the whole VM or whole server full. >> And a lot of people are like, the builders love that. Amazon owns the builder market. I mean, if anyone who's doing a startup, they pretty much start on Amazon. It's the most robust, you pick your tools, you build, but Steve Malaney was just on before us says, "Enterprise don't want power tools, "they're going to cut their hand off." (laughs) Right so, Microsoft's been winning with this approach of consumable Cloud and it's a nice card to play because they're not yet there with capabilities with Amazon, so it's a good call, they got an Enterprise sales force. Microsoft playing a different game than AWS because they have to. >> Sure I mean, what's football now, you have a running game, you need a passing game, right? So, if you can't beat them with the running game, you go with a passing game and so, Amazon has kind of like the fundamental building blocks or power tools for the builders. There's a large segment of population out there that don't want that level of building blocks but they want us a little bit more prescriptive. Microsoft's been around Enterprise for many many years, they understand prescriptive tools and architectures. So, you're going to become a little bit more prefab, if you will. Here's how you can actually construct the right application, ML apps, AI apps, et cetera. Let me give you the building blocks at a higher level abstraction. >> So, I want to get your take on value creations. >> Jerry: Sure. >> So, if it's still early (mumbles), it's took a lot more growth, you start to see Jassy even admit that in his keynotes that he said quote, "There are two types "of developers and customers. "People want the building blocks "or people who want solutions." Or prefab or some sort of more consumable. >> More prescriptive, yeah. >> So, I think Amazon's going to start going that way but that being said, there's still opportunities for startups. You're an investor, you invest in startups. Where do you see opportunities? If you're looking at the startup landscape, what is the playbook? How should you advise startups? Because ya know, have the best team or whatever but you look at Amazon, it's like, okay, they got large scale. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> I'm going to be a little nervous. Are they going to eat my lunch? Do I take advantage of them? Do I draft off them? There are wide spaces as vertical market's exploding that are available. What's your view on how startups should attack the wealth creation opportunity value creation? >> There, I mean, Amazon's creating a new market, right? So, you look at their list of many services. There's just like 175 services out there, which is basically too many for any one company to win every single service. So, but you look at that menu of services, each one of those services themselves can be a startup or a collection of services can be a startup. So, I look at that as a roadmap for opportunity of companies can actually go in and create value around AI, around data, around security, around observability because Amazon's not going to naturally win all of those markets. What they do have is distribution, right? They have a lot of developer mind share. So, if you're a startup, you play one or three themes. So like, one is how do I pick one area and go deep for IP, right? Like, cheaper, better, faster, own some IP and though, they're going to execute better and that's doable over and over again in different markets. Number two is, we talked about this before, there's not going to be a one Cloud wins all, Amazon's clearly in the lead, they have won most of the Cloud, so far, but it'll be a multi-Cloud world, it'll be On Premise world. So, how do I play a multi-Cloud world, is another angle, so, go deep in IP, go multi-Cloud. Number three is this end to end solution, kind of prescriptive. Amazon can get you 80% of the way there, 70% of the way there but if you're like, an AI developer, you're a CMO, you're a marketing developer, you kind of want this end to end solution. So, how can I put together a full suite of tools from beginning to end that can give me a product that's a better experience. So, either I have something that's a deeper IP play a seam between multiple Clouds or give it end to end solutions around a problem and solve that one problem for our customer. >> And in most cases, the underlay is Amazon or Azure. >> Or Google or Alley Cloud or On Premises. Not going to wait any time soon, right? And so, how do I create a single fabric, if you will that looks similar? >> I want to riff with you in real time here on theCUBE around data. So, data scale is obviously a big discussion that's starting to happen now, data tsunami, we've heard that for years. So, there's two scale benefits, horizontal scale with data and then vertical specialism, vertical scale or ya know, using AI machine learning in apps, having data, so, how do you view that? What's your reaction to the notion of creating the horizontal scale value and vertical specialism value? >> Both are a great place for startups, right? They're not mutually exclusive but I think if you go horizontal, the amount of data being created by your applications, your infrastructure, your sensors, time stories data, ridiculously large amount, right? And that's not going away any time soon. I recently did investment in ChronoSphere, 'cause you guys covered over at CUBEcon a few weeks ago, that's talking about metrics and observability data, time stories data. So, they're going to handle that horizontal amount of data, petabytes and petabytes, how can we quarry this quickly, deeply with a lot of insight? That's one play, right? Cheaper, better, faster at scale. The next play, like you said, is vertical. It's how do I own data or slice the data with more contacts than I know I was going to have? We talked about the virtual cycle of data, right? Just the system of intelligence, as well. If I own a set of data, be it healthcare, government or self-driving car data, that no one else has, I can build a solution end to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography, you can go either way. It's hard to do both, though. >> It's hard for startup. >> For a startup. >> Any big company. >> Very few companies can do two things well, startups especially, succeed by doing one thing very well. >> I think my observation is that I think looking at Amazon, is that they want the horizontal and they're leaving offers on the table for our startups, the vertical. >> Yeah, if you look at their strategy, the lower level Amazon gets, the more open-sourced, the more ubiquitous you try to be for containers, server lists, networking, S3, basic sub straits, so, horizontal horizontal, low price. As you get higher up from like, deep mind like, AI technologies, perception, prediction, they're getting a little bit more specialized, right? As you see these solutions around retail, healthcare, voice, so, the higher up in the stack, they can build more narrow solutions because like any startup of any product, you need the right wedge. What's the right wedge in the customers? At the base level of developers, building blocks, ubiquitous. For solutions marketing, healthcare, financial services, retail, how do I find a fine point wedge? >> So, the old Venture business was all enamored with consumers over the years and then, maybe four years ago, Enterprise got hot. We were lowly Enterprise guys where no one-- >> Enterprise has been hot forever in my mind, John but maybe-- >> Well, first of all, we've been hot on Enterprise, we love Enterprise but then all of a sudden, it just seemed like, oh my God, people had an awakening like, and there's real value to be had. The IT spend has been trillions and the stats are roughly 20 or so percent, yet to move to the Cloud or this new next gen architecture that you're investing companies in. So, a big market... that's an investment thesis. So, a huge enterprise market, Steve Malaney of Aviation called it a thousand foot wave. So, there's going to be a massive enterprise money... big bag of money on the table. (laughs) A lot of re-transformations, lot of reborn on the Cloud, lot of action. What's your take on that? Do you see it the same way because look how they're getting in big time, Goldman Sachs on stage here. It's a lot of cash. How do you think it's going to be deployed and who's going to be fighting for it? >> Well, I think, we talked about this in the past. When you look to make an investment, as a startup founder or as a VC, you want to pick a wave bigger than you, bigger than your competitors. Right so, on the consumer side, ya know, the classic example, your Instagram fighting Facebook and photo sharing, you pick the mobile first wave, iPhone wave, right, the first mobile native photo sharing. If you're fighting Enterprise infrastructure, you pick the Cloud data wave, right? You pick the big data wave, you pick the AI waves. So, first as a founder startup, I'm looking for these macro-waves that I see not going away any time soon. So, moving from BaaS data to streaming real time data. That's a wave that's happening, that's inevitable. Dollars are floating from slower BaaS data bases to streaming real time analytics. So, Rocksett, one of the investors we talked about, they're riding that wave from going BaaS to real time, how to do analytics and sequel on real time data. Likewise, time servers, you're going from like, ya know, BaaS data, slow data to massive amounts of time storage data, Chronosphere, playing that wave. So, I think you have to look for these macro-waves of Cloud, which anyone knows but then, you pick these small wavelettes, if that's a word, like a wavelettes or a smaller wave within a wave that says, "Okay, I'm going to "pick this one trend." Ride it as a startup, ride it as an investor and because that's going to be more powerful than my competitors. >> And then, get inside the wave or inside the tornado, whatever metaphor. >> We're going to torch the metaphors but yeah, ride that wave. >> All right, Jerry, great to have you on. Seven years of CUBE action. Great to have you on, congratulations, you're VIP, you've been with us the whole time. >> Congratulations to you, theCUBE, the entire staff here. It's amazing to watch your business grow in the past seven years, as well. >> And we soft launch our CUBE 365, search it, it's on Amazon's marketplace. >> Jerry: Amazing. >> SaaS, our first SaaS offering. >> I love it, I mean-- >> John: No Venture funding. (laughs) Ya know, we're going to be out there. Ya know, maybe let you in on the deal. >> But now, like you broadcast the deal to the rest of the market. >> (laughs) Jerry, great to have you on. Again, great to watch your career at Greylock. Always happy to have ya on, great commentary, awesome time, Jerry Chen, Venture partner, general partner of Greylock. So keep coverage, breaking down the commentary, extracting the signal from the noise here at reInvent 2019, I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (energetic electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. We're here live at the the Sands Convention Center. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is re:Invent 2019, the seventh year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Justin Warren. Sesh Iyer is here, he's the Managing Director and Senior Partner at DCG and is joined by Allen Chen who's the Associate Director of Software Engineering at BCG. Gents, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you >> Thank you for having us >> So we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about machine intelligence, digital transformation, but I want to start with this concept that you guys have put forth and you're putting it to action with some of your clients I'm sure, of this bionic organization. You know it's a catchy term, but what's behind it? What's a bionic company? >> So if you think about the next 10 years we believe that it's going to be the era of the bionic organization. Where the bionic organization is essentially humans and machines coming together. The bio and the nic, right. We believe that we are at a point now where the power from AI, the power from machines combined with the intrinsic human potential coming together delivers a very, very different set of outcomes. We get to outcomes largely on three fronts. The first is around customer experiences and relationships, you take that to a really new level. The second thing is in operations, you drive to a lot more productive set of operations through automation, and the third thing is innovation. The rate of innovation is just going to increase significantly, and we are seeing a lot of that today at re:Invent here. >> So you're optimists for the future, right? You don't want to pave the cow path, you don't want to protect the past from the future, but at the same time people are concerned, right. Machines are replacing humans, and they always have but for the first time in history it's with cognitive functions. So I'm sure you guys are having these conversations with your clients, maybe that's one of the blockers is that sort of perceptions that it's going to cause too much disruption. But maybe you could talk about that. How do I get to become a bionic organization? What are some of the barriers that I have to go through? >> I think the biggest thing is we are actually getting to an organization where technology continues to augment the human. So it's not substituting or replacing the human it's really augmenting the human. So how do we take human performance and organizational performance to a next level by bringing them together? So it's always about them coming together. When we think about barriers the real barriers actually are organizational models and old ways of working. They are legacy technologies. It's the lack of access to data that we can leverage to actually convert that into insightful outcomes using AI. And the lack of talent, so we really are at a point where we don't have enough digital and AI talent out there . Andy today talked about training as one of the core tenants of what you do to take an organization to leverage technologies that we have today, so those are the things that are barriers today that we're working with our clients on to overcome, to be able to extract the full potential of what we can do. >> Allen maybe you could talk a little bit about BCG's AI business, how do you guys look at it? Maybe share that with our audience. >> I mean as Sesh mentioned, the bionic organization really has two parts, right. It has the human element and it has the machine element and AI is really the thing that underpins the backbone for the machine element, but you can't really disconnect it from the human, because you know as we see with our clients if you just do the algorithms themselves the algorithms can't change the business, right. You can't remove the algorithms from the context of the business. The people who need to make the cultural changes, the organizational changes, the priority changes to actually put those algorithms into action. So we of course, as a company that helps clients go through this transformation, we have to usher along the human change but for the AI and machine learning change, we bring a lot of the best talent that we have. We've got 850 data scientists and engineers around the world helping our clients go through this transformation and you know we build lots of really, really interesting technology. For example, we've got a platform called SOURCE AI that we use to facilitate the building of these AI models and these advanced analytics use cases to accelerate at least the machine portion of that journey. >> Do you have a discrete AI business, a practice, or is it part of sort of a client's digital transformation where you bring in that expertise? >> Yeah, so within BCG we have a group called BCG GAMMA which is the arm of the company that focuses solely on AI and machine learning use cases. But the thing is, our model isn't just to kind of embed ourselves into your company and try to like take root and be there forever. We want to empower these companies to kind of kickstart their journey so we can go in, we help them get started, prove out a few use cases and then we actually train and transfer them so that they can make sure that the programs that we helped plant the seeds for end up being long term, sustainable programs for them. >> Dave: Teaching 'em to fish? >> Exactly >> When we think about what really drives impact and outcome and clients, it's all about bringing together the different capabilities that we have. So we have our heritage strategy consulting business. We have GAMMA, which is our AI at-scale, data analytics business. We have BCG Digital Ventures which is all about incubating new companies and taking them out of market. And then we have our Platinion team which is all about driving new architectures, new technologies, in terms of driving adoption at client. So all these capabilities typically come together at a client for us to deliver impact at the end of the day. >> Examples of sort of where you've implemented? Some successes? >> So I think, I think one great example that we have is around when you think about customer experiences and customer engagement, we have recently done a piece of work with United Airlines that's actually getting showcased here at AWS re:Invent where we really used personalization technology that we have with our partner Formation.Ai to really deliver a new level of customer experience and engagement for United customers, right. So we call it Miles Play and you can actually, I don't know if you guys are United customers, I know you guys travel a lot, >> Dave: Of course, everybody we also, so Miles Play is a way in which we have actually really leveraged AI and gamification inside of the United app to really drive a different level of experience for customers. So that's one example, there are many, many others. >> Yeah, we are here at AWS re:Invent as you point out, and the talk of transformation was part of the keynote this morning with Andy Jassy. A lot of that is around organizational change, but this is also a cloud show, so how does this work that BCG's doing with AI, how does that interact with the cloud and how does that link into that idea of organizational transformation? >> So when we think about, again I'll go back to that bionic organization, we see as we move towards this new organization that's bringing together bringing together data, technology as well as organization constructs, there are four things that we think of. We think about purpose at the core. So what is the reason that an organization exists, and how to we make that alive, and bring it alive? I think there's a second around data and technologies. So what can you do with AI, what can you do with data, how do you really drive modular technologies to adopt them to drive change? And then there's a third around people and organization. So how do you drive new organizational models to get an organization to deliver to the potential? And how do you bring new talent? And you know Andy talked about re-skilling today or training people, and then lastly leadership. How do you bring in a different style of leadership, we call it jazz leadership, where you really have to bring different parts of your organization to, and help them orchestrate to get to an outcome, rather than a more command and control style approach. So all of these are the pieces that we see coming together and that's what we work with our clients on to move them from where they are today to where they will be in the next 5 years. >> Allen you have software in your title, so I'm curious as to what kind of tooling that you guys have built, that you apply in your client situations? >> Yeah, so we work with a lot of different clients in a lot of different industries, and in a lot of different use cases and even though we treat every client as a unique situation there are patterns that begin to emerge and we want to make sure that, you know in order to provide the most value to our clients we want to be able to quickly prove out wins and use cases. And one of the ways that we're able to do that is building software products that facilitate those things. And so we've got data scientists that go through this whole machine learning pipeline even though the use cases are different, the challenges are kind of the same no matter what so you go through the process of how do you get access to data, right? Once you have access to data, how do you begin experimenting with models? Once you've experimented, how do you begin to consolidate the knowledge of the team to start evaluating models in a collaborative way? And once you have a model that you decide is good, how do you deploy that into a client environment? In many cases, it's going to be cloud because in order for these clients to really see the value of these AI programs, it's got to scale and so we work very closely with partners like AWS to ensure that we can bring the most scalable AI solutions to bear for our clients. And so we build platforms like SOURCE AI to facilitate that entire journey from data access all the way to deployment at scale. And then depending on the verticals, we also have other products that are most use case specific So we work with a lot of airlines to actually do airline scheduling for their airplanes, gate scheduling, routing bags. And so while we have SOURCE AI underpinning the platform, airlines have very, very unique problems of their own that are very, very interesting to solve and so we built products to cater to those industries specifically as well. >> One other piece that I would add is for the retail industry for example, markdowns is a big topic. So how do you get the best price for the given inventory that you have. We again have AI based solutions that drive markdowns and take the profitability of the revenue of a client to a better level than they're at. >> One of the things that we see is many of our clients want to get increasingly close to their customer to have that one-on-one relationship that traditional marketing can never afford you, right. So with things like markdown and personalization, we can gather all this data, use the latest AI techniques and begin to start giving offers and discounts and promotions and offers to people on a one-to-one basis, rather than marketing to a cohort of people. >> So a lot of these are functional areas, particular problem domains that have particular technological solutions, and then the pace of technology continues to change. We've seen that for decades. But it seems that this transformational agenda that we need to have, has a lot more to do with the humans and that problem doesn't really seem to have changed to me in the last several decades. BCG's been around for a very long time. Became famous back in the '80s for doing a lot of the same sort of transformational ideas how do you transform your organization? So what is it that is about, what is it about cloud and AI today that's changed the nature of organizational change? What the change in there? >> So my sense is My sense is, if you think about maybe there are two points to make here, and then Allen you should add on. I think one is, it's always easy to bring AI and data and do a proof of concept, right? And to show that something has potential. Taking that potential to impact and outcomes requires it to move to being at scale. So one of the big changes that we are seeing is we have to take these AI technologies and really deliver them at scale. So that's one piece of it. I think the other piece that really becomes important is leveraging AI for the right context in which you're applying the solve for. So you need to go into targeted spaces, as Allen said, certain use cases that have huge impact and go after it and deliver value there. As opposed to trying to do something a lot more expansively. So how do you now go into specific industries and identify unique areas that have a lot of promise and potential, and then put your energy against that to get to again impactful outcomes. Right, he had that example around markdowns. We've talked about airline optimization, we have talked about personalization. All of these are good examples of very targeted areas that have a lot of potential to really drive value. >> Yeah, like one of the things that I see that cloud has changed the transformation process is just the ability for us to very quickly experiment with new use cases, right. In terms of the types of tools and building blocks that cloud vendors like AWS provide us, you know we could think of an idea, an AI powered use case one day, and we could start cranking the gears on it the next day and if it works, we could just start scaling it up. And if it doesn't, we turn it off and it's a very, very kind of low regret, low risk kind of thing. Whereas back in the day where everybody is building data centers, in order to try something new you have to capitalize the cost of actually buying all this hardware, filling up your data center, staffing it, and then if it turns out that that use case didn't pan out, well now you've got loads of hardware that's just kind of costing you tons of money every day. With the cloud, we can just move so much more quickly and take a lot more bold risks. >> It's the cost of, I think it's the cost of experiments and the speed with which you can bring teams to get to outcomes. Right, so Andy again talked today about an integrated development environment for data scientists. How do you really bring data scientists, get them to start working on something, experiment with it, start to show some potential and then really scale it? Those are things that we believe, you know cloud has really immensely changed. The other thing is access to massive, massive data sets. Again Andy today talked about how different data sets can be brought into Amazon and the ability to do that easily today. So how can you really create value from these billions, and billions of rows of data that are sitting out there in your enterprise and converting that into something meaningful. >> So that approach and that philosophy of sort of low risk, pick a winner, scale it first of all, the CFO loves it, I think generally the organization is going to see value. They can, it's tangible. However, I think about digital disruption and if you think about the successful digital companies they've got data at their core. So my question to you is, are you helping these sort of incumbents? You mentioned United, I'm sure there are many others you work with. Are they able to sort of transform and put data at the core, become a digitally transformed organization before somebody disrupts them? You know will those, maybe not quick hits, but those focused projects, will they ultimately lead to an outcome that transforms them in a way that Jassy was sort of putting forth today? >> I would, I think so. I think that's the promise of the next five years. So if I think about, when we talk about a bionic organization, we talk about 30 to 50 processes that that organization will have. I mean my sense is those processes will have 50 to 60% of the components that are driven by AI or data. So if you think about an incumbent today working in manual processes, legacy systems, they are going to actually move to leveraging AI and data and new ways of working to transform that legacy environment into a next gen technological environment but also ways of working, and then bringing all of that together to drive a very different level of engagement with the customer, experiences with the customer, how they actually run their operations, do it much faster, reduce cycle time, and then also the rate and pace of innovation, right. You can see today the number of new features that got released on AWS and it's all been in a year and there are like 30 of them. So how do you really drive to that level of rate and pace of innovation. You'll see all of those happening in all of these traditional industries over the next five years. >> And if they don't move, they're going to probably be in big trouble. >> Sesh: They are going to be in big trouble, they're going to die >> All right, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great conversation, great to have you. >> Our pleasure, thank you >> Yeah, thank you so much for the time. >> All right, keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Dave Vellante for Justin Warren from AWS re:Invent 2019. Right back (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, our 10th year. We actually call this one the Valley set, over on the other side, it's in the middle of a meadow, and this was in the valley. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost for this segment is, of course, John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. And joining us, the quintessential Valley guest that we have, Jerry Chen. Long time participant in the program, climbing up the leaderboard here of theCUBE Times at VMworld. Jerry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, John, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so we knew you back when you worked for VMware. >> Jerry: Right. >> You're now a partner at Greylock. We watched some of your amazing startups, we've had many of them on our program. Just a little bit going on in your world this day, maybe we'll start there. >> Sure, it amazes me, both being at VMworld 10 years since you guys started covering. For me, I joined VMware back in 2003. So I was at the first Vmworld, through every single one of them, and seeing this ecosystem reinvent itself, and juxtapose that with every other conference at Moscone. So Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, VMworld. And I would say five years ago, no one would have thought Dreamforce itself, or Salesforce as an ecosystem big enough for investors. But yes, now they can invest in startups. All they do is sell to the Salesforce ecosystem. You can always invest in a startup. All they sell to is the VMware ecosystem. And for sure, when, you and I, three of us go to Amazon or an event, that ecosystem just continues to grow exponentially year over year. >> And this some of the highlights of Datadog, we were talking before we came on camera. They always had a big booth, they bet on the AWS ecosystem, not a lot of Datadog here, but monitoring turns into observability, a key component, which basically was a white space. I mean, monitoring was boring. A little sector, but because of the nature of the data security auditing, this has become kind of a killer category. >> I think last week you saw SignalFX get acquired by Splunk, which is another huge enterprise company, and Datadog filed their S-1. No one thought monitoring would be a big enough market to support multiple billion plus companies, and what we've learned is making a bet on just cloud-native companies like Datadog did, purely in the Amazon Ecosystem, was a great bet because they've grown super fast, and that market turned out to be very big. In addition, it could be Splunk, and they could bet on logging for mostly on-premise companies. That turned out to be a large market. So I think five, 10 years ago, no one thought that these markets would be so big and so gigantic. The cloud itself, you can have a multi-billion dollar company like Datadog purely on a cloud-native application and cloud-native companies, if you will. >> You know, it's interesting, you're a VC and the enterprise specialist at Greylock. Consumer used to be all the rage in venture. "Oh, we're going to consumer against Facebook," Facebook breaks democracy, all kinds of problems. Being regulated. But enterprise became really hot with the cloud, and then you have an interesting dynamic. Now a thousand flowers are blooming on the startup side, so yes, there's a lot of action in startups, but the buyers of startups and the IPO markets is where the liquidity happens, which you care about, right? So now you have liquidity options for IPO for fast-growing flit scalers as you guys call it, and then the M and A market are buying the companies. So I got to ask you, with seeing Splunk as a great example, where they own the log market, log files, bring SignalFX in, former VMware guys and Facebook guys, comes in, they add some servability piece to it. Splunk's got more power now because of the acquisition. It's not just token acquisition. This is the market, product market slash M and A market. What's your thoughts on that? Because that's a key exit opportunity, and the numbers are pretty sizable when you think about it. >> I think just going back to the opportunity, the market's so big that you have multiple multi-billion dollar companies, so like Splunk's a huge company, great company. We're investors in a company called Sumo Logic. That's going to also be a successful company, and also a big-- >> John: And filed for IPO. >> And a big company that's OZA, Amazon, and Vmworld. So I think what you have here is each of these markets are monitoring, APM, the log, infrastructure, are turning out to be multi multi-billion, and larger than we anticipated. So I think before, to your analogy in the consumer, we always knew consumer markets had huge TAMs. Like how many billion in people are on Facebook? How many billion people are on Twitter? What we're learning now is the market and the TAM for these enterprise software companies, be it SAAS, be it LOG, be it Metrics, be it security, those TAMs are actually bigger than we thought beforehand as well. >> And the driver of that is what? Cloud, transformation, just replatforming, modernization? The businesses are businesses still. >> I think the move to cloud is accelerate, I think your last line, "businesses are businesses," is what's key. Like every business now is being touched by software. They all got to go cloud so I'm an investor in a company called Blend that does mortgage software. So the entire financial services industry, from mortgages to car loans and consumer lending, that's all going digital. That's all going online. Jobs that were like mortgage brokers are going to be an app on your phone now. So finance, retail, healthcare, construction, so all these markets now are going to the cloud, going digital, so these TAMs are expanding exponentially. >> Yeah, Jerry, want to get your take on the ecosystem. You know, we look at VMware, they built a big ecosystem, the end user computing space, you know. You've coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, from that environment there was an ecosystem around there. I see VMware at a lot of shows, and they have a good presence there, and there's some overlap between the public cloud space. Like when I go to this show, and I walk through the expo hall, oh my gosh. Data protection is everywhere, and all of those companies are at a all of the cloud environment, but do you see a transition from, you know, where VMware is in kind of the cloud-native space? Is there a lot of overlap, or what's your thinking on those kind of dynamics? >> I think all above. I think VMware at Vwworld, and like all these tech companies are constantly reinventing themselves and expanding. So you have, as a VC, say it's this company I'm looking at, when it's two individuals, and a dog, and PowerPoint. Is it a feature, is it a product, or is it a company? It's a feature, it's okay. You know, it's probably not worth the investment, but it's worthwhile. It'll get acquired for something. Is it a product? Some companies are just one killer product, right? And you can ride that product for the arc of the company. But then some startups turn out be companies, multi-product companies. And there always have one or two great products, and then you start adding new things as the market evolves, and VMware has done that. And so, as a result of adding server virtualization, desktop virtualization, Cloud Foundry which I helped build, out in the Kubernetes stuff. So they're adding multiple products to their company. I think the great companies can do that. Look at Amazon. They keep launching 10 new products every single month. Microsoft has done a great job reinventing themselves. So I think the great companies can reinvent, but not transform, they just add to what they have, and just to be a multi-product family. >> Stu: All right, so you mentioned Cloud Foundry. >> Yeah. >> Pivotal, of course, is now back in the mothership where it started there. When Cloud Foundry first started it was, "Well, we're not going to take the hypervisor "and put it all of these places." We needed a slightly different footprint. Well, five years later, we're talking about Kubernetes is going to be baked into Vsphere, and Vsphere is going to be a main piece of VMware's cloud-native strategy. Has the market changed or some of those technology pieces, you know, still a challenge? What's your take there? >> You know, it's a great question because I think what we're seeing is there's never ever in technology as you guys know, on platforms, it's a zero-sum game. It's never always going to all mainframe, all client server, all VMs, all microservers, all Serverless, right? And I think we're seeing is it's also never going to be all Amazon, it's never going to be all Google, it's never going to be all Azure, right? I think we talked about early days, it's not a winner take all. It may be, you know, what one-third, two-thirds, or something, 25-40% market share, but it's not going to be all or nothing. And so we're seeing companies now have architectures on multiple clouds, multiple technologies, and so just like 10 years ago, you had a mainframe team, you had a Windows team, you had a Solaris team. Remember Sun and Spark? And a Linux team. Now you have a Google team, and Azure team, an Amazon team, and an on-prem team. And so you just had these different stacks evolve, and I think what's interesting to see is like, we've kind of had this swing of momentum around Docker, Containers, Kubernetes, Serverless, but at the same time you see a bunch of folks realize, okay, what's happening is I'm choosing how much I want to consume. Like an API, a container, or a whole VM, right? And people realizing, yes, maybe consuming the APIs is our right level of consumption, but quite frankly, Stu, John, buying whole VMs also what I want. So you see a bunch of companies say, I'm just going to build better monolithic applications around VMware, I'm going to build better microservices around Docker and Kubernetes, and then we'll use Serverless where I think I need to use Serverless. >> Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things we hear from customers we talk to, and there's two types of enterprise customers, at least in the enterprise infrastructure side, classic CIOs and then CISOs. Two different spectrums. CIOs, old, traditional, multi-vendor means a good thing, no lock in, I know how to deal with that world. CISOs, they want to build their own stacks, manage their own technology, then push APIs out to the suppliers, and rechange the supplier relationship because security is so important they're forced to the cutting edge. So I look at that a kind of canary in the coal mine, and want to get your thought on that, because we're seeing a trend where enterprises are building software. They're saying, hey, you know, I want a stack internally that we're going to do for a variety of different reasons, security or whatever, and that doesn't really blend well for the multi-cloud team approach, because not everyone can have three killer teams building stacks, so you're seeing some people saying, you know, I'm going to pick a cloud here and go all in on certain things, build the stack, and then have a backup cloud there. And then some CIOs say, hey, you know what? I want all the cloud guys in there negotiating their best price maybe, or whatever. >> I think it's great nuance you pointed out. Even just like we had a Windows team and a Linux team, you still had a single database team that ran across both, or storage teams are ran across both. So I think the nuance here is certain parts of the stack should be Azure, Amazon, VMware. Certain parts of the stack should be, I think that the ultimate expression is just an API with service errors. So one of the companies you guys are familiar with, Roxette, it's a search and Serverless analytics company. It's basically an API in the cloud, multi-cloud, to do search and analytics. And just like you had a database team that's independent across all these stacks, for certain parts of the architecture, you're going to want something like Roxette, that's going to be independent of the architecture stacks. And so it's not all isolated, it's not siloed, it's not all horizontal, depending on the part of the stack, you're going to either want a horizontal cross-cloud solution, or a team that's going to go deep on one. >> So it's really a contextual decision based on what the environment looks like, or business. >> And there's certain areas of technology that we know from history that lends themself to either full stacks versus horizontals. Just like I said, there was a storage team and a database team, right? That's Oracle, or something that ran across Windows and Linux and Sun, you're going to see someone like Roxette become this search and Serverless analytics team across multiple cloud stacks. >> This is why the investment is such a great opportunity for the enterprise VCs right now because, I mean, there's so many dimensions of opportunities for companies to grow and become pretty large, and the markets are shifting so the TAM is pretty big. Michael Dell was just on the other side, I interviewed him. He says, you know, he was getting kind of in Dave's grill saying, "Well, the TAM for enterprise is bigger than cloud TAM." I go, "Well that TAM is going to be replatformized, so like that's going away and moving, shifting, so the numbers are big but they're shifting so tons of opportunities. >> It depends if you're a big company like Dell versus a small startup. Oftentimes, this true that the TAM for enterprise is still much larger than cloud, but your point is what's shifting were the dollars growing fast. >> The TAM for horses was huge at one point, and then, you know, cars came along, right? So you know. >> Every startup, what you want to do, you want to attach to a growing budget. You don't want to attach to a flat to shrinking budget. And so right now, if you're a founder, and say, "Okay, where are the budget dollars flowing to?" Everyone's got a kind of a cloud strategy, just like they had a VMware virtualization strategy, so if I'm like a startup G, metrics, or data analytics, I'm going to try to attach to where the dollars are flowing. That's a cloud strategy, that's an AI application strategy, security strategy. >> So let me ask you one question. So if I'm going to start up, this is a hypothetical startup, startups got an opportunity. It's a SaaS-based startup, they say, "You know what? "This is a feature in the market "that's part of a bigger system, "but I'm going to innovate on that." I think that with the markets shifting, that could evolve into a large TAM to your point about Datadog. What's the strategy, from an investment standpoint, that you would take? Would you say go all in on the single product? Do you want to have one or two features? What's the makeup of that approach, because you want to have some maybe defensibility, is it go all in on the one thing and hope that you return into like a Salesforce, then you bolt stuff on, or do you go in and try to do a little platform play underneath? >> It depends where you are in the startup world. We're in lifecycle. Look, startups succeed because they do one thing better, right? And so focus, focus, focus. And you have to have something that's like 10 times faster, 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, or something different. Something the world hasn't seen before. But if you do that one thing well, either A, you're taking budget dollars from incumbents, or B, you're something net new, the world hasn't seen, people will come to you when they see utility. As an investor I like to see that focus, I like to see, you know, some founders you get say, hey, Stu, think bigger. Some founders like John think smaller. Like what's your wedge? What's that initial entry point to the customer you're going to hit? Because once you land that, you get the right to do the next product, the next feature. >> That's the land, adopt, expand, like Xoom did. Or they picked video, >> Correct, voice, et cetera. >> I mean who the hell thought that was going to be a big market? It's a legacy market but they innovated with the cloud. >> Absolutely. I have all these sayings that I try to say like, "You don't get to play the late innings, "if you don't make it out the early innings," right? You know, and so if you want and have this strategy for this large platform, that's great, and every VC wants to see a path there. But they want to see execute from we're going to land, and we're expand. Now, startups fail because either where they land, they picked incorrectly. Like you decided to storm the wrong beach, right? Or it's either to small, or it's too big. The initial landing spot is too big, and they can't hold that ground. And so part of the art of navigating from Point A to Point B, or where I say, Act one, Act two, Act three of a lifecycle is make sure that you land correctly, earn your keep, show a lot of value, win that first battle, if you will, Act one, and then they move to Act two, Act three, and you can see a company like VMware clearly on their second, third act, right? And they've done a nice job of owning one product category, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, now expanding to other adjacent categories, buying companies like Carbon Black, right? In terms of security. So it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, VMware started in 1998. I was there when there was about 200 employees. People forget Amazon's been, gosh 27, 1998, when Bezos started selling books. Now they're selling books, movies, food, groceries, video, right? >> When did you first use AWS? Was it when the EC2 launched? I mean, everyone kicked the tires on that puppy. >> We all kicked the tires. I was at VMware as a Product Manager, I think it was '06 when they launched, right? And we all kind of kicked the tires on it. And it was a classic innoverse dilemna. We saw this thing that you thought was small and a very narrow surface area. Amazon started with an EC2, >> Two building blocks, storage and EC2. >> S-3, right, that's it. And then they said, "Okay, we're going to give a focus, focus on basic compute and basic object storage," and people were like, "What can you do with S-3? "Nothing," right? It's not a Sand, it's an availability. It's going to fail all the time, but people just started innovating and working their way through it. >> All right, so Jerry, when you look at the overall marketscape out there today, it seems like you still feel pretty confident that it's a good time for startups. Would you say that's true? >> Absolutely. >> All right, I want to get your final word here. 10 years in theCUBE at Vmworld, you know, you've known John for a long time. Did you think we'd make it? Any big memories as to what you've seen as we've changed over the years. >> I've plenty, let's go back to, >> John: Okay, now you can embarrass us. >> 10 year anniversary of VMworld. For your first Vmworld 10 years ago, I was like a Product Manager, and John Furrier, I think I met at a Press dinner, and he's like, "Hey, Chen," walking by, "come here, sit down," and they turn the camera on, and we had no idea what was going on, and he just started asking a bunch of random questions. I'm like, sure, I haven't cleared this with marketing or anyone else, but why not? >> John: Hijack interview, we call that. >> Hijack interview, and then it's been amazing to watch the two of you, Dave, John, everybody, grow SiliconANGLE and theCUBE in particular, and to this, the immediate franchise, in terms of both having a presence at all these shows, like Amazon, Oracle World, DreamForce, Vmworld, etc. But also the content you guys have, right? So now you have 10 years of deep content, and embarrassingly enough, 10 years, I guess, of videos of yours truly, which is always painful to watch, like either what I was saying, or you know, what my hair looked like back then. >> Stu: Jerry, you still have hair though, so. (laughing) >> Well, the beautiful thing is that we can look at the reputation trajectory of what people say and what actually happens. You always had good picks, loved the post you did on MOATs. That turned out to be very timeless content, and yeah, sometimes you miss it, we sometimes cringe. >> We miss a bunch. >> I remember starting one time with no headset on. Lot of great memories, Jerry. Great to have you in the community. Thanks for all your contribution. >> I look forward to the next 10 years of theCUBE, so I got to be here for the 20th anniversary, and now if I walk away, come back on right away, do I get another notch on my CUBE attending list so I can go up and catch Hared in the best? >> If you come on the other set, that counts as another interview. >> Perfect, so I got to catch up with Steve and the rest of the guys. >> Steve just lost it to Eric Herzog just a minute ago. We had a ceremony. It was like a walk through the supermarket, the doors thing, and the confetti came down. 11th time so you got to get to 11 now. So 12 is the high water mark. >> Done, we need t-shirts. (laughing) >> Well Jerry, thanks so much for joining us again. For John Furrier, I'm Stu Miniman, and you can go to theCUBE.net, if you search for Jerry Chen, there's over 16 interviews on there. I know I've gone back and watched some of them. Some great discussions we've had over the years. Thanks so much, and stay tuned for lots more coverage here at Vmworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube, covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone live here in San Francisco at Moscone, this is the Cube's live coverage of Google Next 2019, #googlenext19. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, as well as David Vellante, who has been co-host, he's out there getting stories and getting all the scoop. We are here with two great guests, Cube alumni's, Aparna Sinha, the Group Product Manager at Google, and Chen Goldberg, director of Engineering, Google. Both the architects of the big wave that we're riding. Containers, kubernetes, and anthos. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on again. >> Aparna: Thanks for having us, great to be here. >> Chen: Thank you. >> So, you were smirking last night when we saw each other at the press gathering, knowing what was coming. I watched the keynote, it was awesome. I didn't get a chance to see the spotlight session you guys just had, but Anthos, obviously the rebranding and the additional integration points for making things run end to end, this is our dream come true, Devops Infrastructure as Code is happening, we've been talking about this for a while, you guys are behind it all, give us the update. >> So we've been hard at work over the last eight months since our last Next. Can you believe that it's only been eight months? Last year we were here announcing GK On Prem. This year we've rebranded CSP to Anthos and enlarged it and we've moved it to GA. So that's the big announcement. In our spotlight we actually walked through all the pieces and gave three live demos, as well as had two customers on stage and really the big difference in the eight months is while we're moving to GA now we've been working throughout this time with a set of customers. We saw unprecedented demand for what we announced last year and we've had that privilege of working with customers to build the product, which is what's unique really. So we had two of those folks up on stage talking about the transformation that Anthos is creating in their companies. >> I want to get to the customer focus a little bit later, but I want to just get it out on the record while you're here, because there's not a lot of time on stage other than the great demo Jennifer Lynn did. What actually is the difference, what's the new things, because obviously its a rebrand, some people might say, "Oh, they're just rebranding the announcement from last year", what were the new things, what are the new elements of Anthos, why is it important, what does it mean, what's under the covers, tell us what's new. >> Chen: So, first of all lets talk about, "What is Anthos?" Anthos is a Google opinionated solution that lets you right once, deploy anywhere. Really, the key thing about Anthos is choice. What we've been hearing from our customers, how much they appreciate choice in their journey to the cloud and modernization in general. The main thing that we have announced is that everything we have announced last year is GA. So talking about GKE On Prem, Anthos config management and our marketplace and the control plane from managing multiple classes, all of that has moved to GA. when thinking about choice, we've added new capabilities and one choice that customers are thinking about, "Do I need to choose a single cloud provider?" I had a discussion just yesterday with one of the customers and they said that when they exclude a cloud provider from their strategy, they're actually blocking their own innovation and that might get even a bigger risk for them. So we know that customers are adopting a multi cloud strategy. The big announcement here is that we are moving towards, or maybe we are even leaning more into multi cloud, we already had other solutions that we were talking about and definitely with Kubernetes and Istio talking about open API's, but we are leaning in towards multi cloud strategy, so that would be one. The second thing that talks about choice, is "How do we start?" One thing we are hearing from our customers is the importance that they want to innovate with what they have. So Anthos migrate, lets them take their existing applications, package applications that are running today on VM's and onboard to Anthos automatically and see value. So those are the top two announcements and I think the third one would be around all the partnerships, which is part of the people we've been working with in eight months. >> That's awesome. >> Stu: I'm sorry, the migrate piece, that's not GA yet, am I understanding? >> No, it's moving to beta. >> So Stu, you and I have been talking about applications, Renaissance, multi cloud, obviously is a reality for enterprises. Now you've got the hybrid model, this is kind of in the main themes of what this all means with anthem. So its holistically looking at the cloud, as you said, not just Google Cloud. This is a key nuance, its kind of embedded in the announcement, but its not just Google Cloud. >> That's right and I think in that sense, Anthos is a game changer, its not just an incremental improvement to something that's existing for customers. Its not like its just something faster or cheaper or adds more features, its actually something that allows them to do something they couldn't do before, which is, have a consistent platform that they can use to write once and deploy their workloads anywhere, On Prem, in GCP and that we had, but expanding that to any cloud, not just Google Cloud. >> I want to get your guys' thoughts here because you've got the brain and trust inside Google Cloud, because I've been talking on the cube about this and publicly. There seems to be confusion around what multi cloud means, and a company is an enterprise, there's a lot of things going on in the enterprise, so certainly the enterprise will have multiple workloads. There's certain situations that some people say, "Hey, this workload would be great on this cloud, this workload would be great on that cloud." So its not about having a cloud for cloud's sake. "We have to standardize on Google, we have to standardize on Amazon." Instead, what I hear, and I want to get your thoughts and reaction to is, I'd like to have a workload that has data, highly addressable, really low latency for this workload, and a cloud for this workload, but together its multi cloud, this seems to be a trend, do you guys agree with that? Is that something that you're seeing, is that the main message here? It's not so much standardized on the cloud, but have multiple clouds, pick the right cloud for the job, kind of philosophy. What's your thoughts, this is kind of a philosophical question. >> So this is exactly what we are hearing from our customers about their multicloud strategy and exactly what you are saying. This is actually for most of them is a reality, either because they have been organically building things in the cloud or they want to get to multiple geographies, and it's not only a cloud vendor, we need to remember that On Prem is where most of their workloads are still running and where they still need to innovate or when you talk about retail or banks, they have their branches and their stores where they need to have compute at. Really, services are spread all over. Now the question is, this kind of situation creates a lot of risk for our customers. Security risk and talent fragmentation, which are related, so how can I manage all of those environments? >> The risk is multi cloud, or one cloud? >> So multi cloud actually increases the risk even further, so they already have a multicloud reality. That's their strategy forward, but how can they mitigate risk with that reality? We are talking about kubernetes gave you portability of workloads, but how can you do portability of skills and making sure that your talent can really focus where it matters and not be spread too thin, so this is one example that I think Anthos is really unique about using it from our hosted control plane on GCP. >> So let the workloads decide what's best for the workloads and let the clouds naturally use kubernetes. >> Yeah, I mean one thing I've seen in our customer base is, you know the line of business wants to innovate and they want to use the best service for whatever it is that they're doing and the different clouds have different types of services, they have different strengths. So, you don't want centralized IT to say, "Hey, no actually you can't do that, you have to follow this policy." We've seen many examples where centralized IT is taking months to approve cloud services and they've got a backlong of hundreds of services that they need to approve. That's really slowing down innovation, and, "why is that happening?" Because you don't have a consistent platform that you can run and use across clouds. Like you said, kubernetes actually solves that and so that's why were introducing Anthos based on kubernetes, so that you don't have that risk, you don't have that fragmentation and you can innovate faster. >> Lets do one more question and with compounds to complexity is old procurement rules might slow it down. I've got to buy this. So the old baggage on procurement standards, Its kind of a moving train. >> Yeah, I mean enterprise has its policies, we've been talking to some of they largest banks, we had HSBC on stage with us, we had (mumbles), which is one of the largest grocers, we have kohls, these companies have policies and they have compliance requirements and these are very valid compliance requirements and they need to be adhered to. Its just, how can you speed that process up, and if you have a platform that actually spans environments, it doesn't look different in each environment, you can imagine that simplifies the process, it simplifies the approval process because the platform's already pre-approved and then new services as they come online, if they follow a certain pattern, they're kubernetes approved services, then it's much easier to approve them and it's much easier to unlock that productivity without increasing risk. >> If I could poke on that just a little bit (mumbles) approved services isn't a term I've heard yet. There are dozens of providers that have kubernetes, Anthos I know is different but if I go out there and use kubernetes from a different cloud provider or a different service provider. Kubernetes is not a magic layer, everybody builds lots of stuff on top of that and a concern is if I just have a platform that spans all of these environments. There's skillset challenges and do I also get a least common denominator. Cloud is not a utility, GCP is very different from the other clouds, how do I balance that and how do I make sure that I'm actually being able to get the most out of why I choose a specific platform or cloud. >> That's where Anthos is that layer that actually is more than kubernetes. We have, in Anthos, an opinionated platform from google that utilizes kubernetes but it isn't just pure kubernetes, as you would experience it from the open source with the fragmentation, we're working with certified kubernetes distributions and we've got this marketplace where the applications that are in the marketplace have been tested and certified and are supported by a set of partners as well as by Google Cloud to run on these different distributions that you connect and register with Anthos. >> To give maybe another perspective of that, what we have seen with kubernetes is that customers do appreciate that consistency. They have been demanding, for example, that all kubernetes distribution will be conformed. We had that announcement when we were on stage today about consistency and how we can integrate PKS into Anthos. I think what customers are telling us, they don't want us to innovate in that layer. So they appreciate us using open API's and using sensibility which is predefined and actually allows that interoperability of services and this is something that is really in the foundation of Anthos. >> Well you guys have done a great job, we've been following the progress from day one and watching the foundation of Google Enterprise. You guys have been big contributors, congratulations to your work, it's great to see the progress and it seems to be, the train's moving faster on the tracks, so congratulations. I guess my final question for you guys is, boil down Anthos. To the folks watching that are in IT, they're trying to solve some problems, a lot of people realize and wake up, "wow I've got multiple clouds." That's not (mumbles), that's reality. They see billing statements from multiple vendors how they still want maybe hybrid, what does Anthos mean to those people? What is it about, what is it? I'm trying to get bumper sticker. What's the bottom line, what is Anthos? >> So Anthos gives you a choice without the risk. That means that they can choose an existing service or a new green field service to use, On Prem or in the cloud. Containerized or uncontainerized, and they can build on top of that at their own pace. So that's the choice and they can mitigate risk by giving those tools to manage that consistently. The other thing I would say for something that we are not talking a lot about because we are focusing about technology and requirements and constraints is what we hear about our customers that Anthos is good for the engineering teams, and what we hear our customers say, that because they are choosing this technology, their talent is appreciating that they can use the best and latest technology and their skills are portable to other areas as well and they can attract the best talent. That to me is a very big value for us that are looking to do digital transformation. >> I'll take a crack at it as well, so Anthos is Google's opinionated solution for hybrid and multi cloud and it is like Chen said, something that mitigates risk and gives users choice so that they're not locked in to a particular cloud and instead, they can build once and deploy anywhere. From a technical standpoint, it's three things. There's a multi cluster, multi cloud, management plane, that's hosted in Google Cloud. Number two, there's a service management layer which actually bridges your monolithic, migrated services with your green field services that are containerized and treats them all as services that you can secure, manage, and control, and then number three, we have an awesome marketplace from which you can deploy Google Services, you can also deploy partner services, and you can deploy them into anywhere that Anthos is registered and can run. >> So Anthos embraces the cloud, all clouds, all services. >> Anthos embraces the user and it puts the user first. >> Does this benefits, good choice, lock in options, negotiating contracts, developers love it, ... Guys congratulations, thanks for the insight, love the explanation of Anthos, thanks for sharing, appreciate it. (mumbles) Thanks for coming on, cube coverage here live in San Fransisco, we're breaking it down, Google Next 19, day one of three days, there'll be live cube coverage. We have all the leaders, google executives, all the engineers, coming on to explain to us what's happening, thanks for watching, stay with us for more after this short break. (funky music)