(bright upbeat music) >> Good morning fellow cloud community nerds and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, we're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You can tell by my sequence. My name's Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be here with theCUBE. Joining me this morning is a packed house. We have three fabulous guests from AWS's global startup program. Immediately to my right is Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> We've also got Jimmy and Jeff. Before we get into the questions, how does it feel? This is kind of a show off moment for you all. Is it exciting to be back on the show floor? >> Always, I mean, you live for this event, right? I mean, we've got 50,000. >> You live for this? >> Yeah, I mean, 50,000 customers. Like we really appreciate the fact that time, money and resources they spend to be here. So, yeah, I love it. >> Savanna: Yeah, fantastic. >> Yeah, everyone in the same place at the same time, energy is just pretty special, so, it's fun. >> It is special. And Jimmy, I know you joined the program during the pandemic. This is probably the largest scale event you've been at with AWS. >> First time at re:Invent. >> Welcome >> (mumbles) Customers, massive. And I love seeing some of the startups that I partner with directly behind me here from theCUBE set as well. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. First time on theCUBE, welcome. >> Jimmy: Thank you. >> We hope to have you back. >> Jimmy: Proud to be here. >> Jimmy, I'm going to keep it on you to get us started. So, just in case someone hasn't heard of the global startup program with AWS. Give us the lay of the land. >> Sure, so flagship program at AWS. We partner with venture backed, product market fit B2B startups that are building on AWS. So, we have three core pillars. We help them co-built, co-market, and co-sell. Really trying to help them accelerate their cloud journey and get new customers build with best practices while helping them grow. >> Savanna: Yeah, Jeff, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I would say we try our best to find the best technology out there that our customers are demanding today. And basically, give them a fast track to the top resources we have to offer to help them grow their business. >> Yeah, and not a casual offering there at AWS. I just want to call out some stats so everyone knows just how many amazing startups and businesses that you touch. We've talked a lot about unicorns here on the show, and one of Adam's quotes from the keynote was, "Of the 1200 global unicorns, 83% run on AWS." So, at what stage are most companies trying to come and partner with you? And Eric we'll go to you for that. >> Yeah, so I run the North American startup team and our mission is to get and support startups as early as inception as possible, right? And so we've got kind of three, think about three legs of stool. We've got our business development team who works really closely with everything from seed, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, top tier VCs. And then we've got a sales team, we've got a BD team. And so really, like we're even looking before customers start even building or billing, we want to find those stealth startups, help them understand kind of product, where they fit within AWS, help them understand kind of how we can support them. And then as they start to build, then we've got a commercial team of solution architects and sales professionals that work with them. So, we actually match that life cycle all the way through. >> That's awesome. So, you are looking at seed, stealth. So, if I'm a founder listening right now, it doesn't matter what stage I'm at. >> No, I mean, really we want to get, and so we have credit programs, we have enablement programs, focus everything from very beginning to hyper scale. And that's kind of how we think about it. >> That's pretty awesome. So Jeff, what are the keys to success for a startup in working with you all? >> Yeah, good question. Highly differentiated technology is absolutely critical, right? There's a lot of startups out there but finding those that have differentiated technology that meets the demands of AWS customers, by far the biggest piece right there. And then it's all about figuring out how to lean into the partnership and really embrace what Jimmy said. How do you do the co build, the co-marketing, co-sell to put the full package together to make sure that your software's going to have the greatest visibility with our customers out there. >> Yeah, I love that. Jimmy, how do you charm them? What do the startups see in working with AWS? (indistinct) >> But that aside, Jeff just alluded to it. It's that better together story and it takes a lot of buy-in from the partner to get started. It is what we say, a partner driven flywheel. And the successful partners that I work with understand that and they're committing the resources to the relationship because we manage thousands and thousands of startups and there's thousands listed on Marketplace. And then within our co-sell ISV Accelerate program, there's hundreds of startups. So startups have to, one, differentiate themselves with their technology, but then two, be able to lean in to do the tactical engagement that myself and my PDM peers help them manage. >> Awesome, yeah. So Eric. >> Yes. >> Let's say I talk to a lot of founders because I do, and how would I pitch an AWS partnership through the global startup program to them? >> Yeah, well, so this... >> Give me my sound back. >> Yeah, yeah, look for us, like it's all about scaling your business, right? And so my team, and we have a partnership. I run the North American startup team, they run the global startup program, okay? So what my job is initially is to help them build up their services and their programs and products. And then as they get to product market fit, and we see synergy with selling with Amazon, the whole idea is to lead them into the go-to market programs, right? And so really for us, that pitch is this, simply put, we're going to help you extend your reach, right? We're going to take what you know about your service and having product market fit understanding your sales cycle, understanding your customer and your value, and then we're going to amplify that voice. >> Sounds good to me, I'm sold. I like that, I mean, I doubt there's too many companies with as much reach as you have. Let's dig in there a little bit. So, how much is the concentration of the portfolio in North America versus globally? I know you've got your fingers all over the place. >> Jimmy: Yeah. >> Go for it, Jeff. >> Jimmy: Well, yeah, you start and I'll... >> On the partnership side, it's pretty balanced between North America and AMEA and APJ, et cetera, but the type of partners is very different, right? So North America, we have a high focus on infrastructure led partners, right? Where that might be a little different in other regions internationally. >> Yeah, so I have North America, I have a peer that has AMEA, a peer that has Latin America and a peer that has APJ. And so, we have the startup team which is global, and we break it up regionally, and then the global startup program, which is partnership around APN, Amazon Partner Network, is also global. So like, we work in concert, they have folks married up to our team in each region. >> Savannah, what I'm hearing is you want do a global startup showcase? >> Yeah. (indistinct) >> We're happy to sponsor. >> Are you reading my mind? We are very aligned, Jimmy. >> I love it, awesome. >> I'm going to ask you a question, since you obviously are in sync with me all ready. You guys see what you mentioned, 50,000 startups in the program? 100, 000, how many? >> Well you're talking about for the global startup program, the ISV side? >> Sure, yeah, let's do both the stats actually. >> So, the global startup program's a lot smaller than that, right? So globally, there might be around 1,000 startups that are in the program. >> Savanna: Very elite little spot. >> Now, a lot bigger world on Eric's side. >> Eric: Yeah, globally over 200,000. >> Savanna: Whoa. >> Yeah, I mean, you think about, so just think about the... >> To keep track, those all in your head? >> Yeah, I can't keep track. North America's quite large. Yeah, no, because look, startups are getting created every day, right? And then there's positive exits and negative exits, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it's impressive. And particularly over the last two years, over the last two years are a little bit crazy, bonkers with the money coming. (mumbles) And yet the creation that's going to happen right now in the market disruption is going to mirror what happened in 2008, 2009. And so, the creation is not going to slow down. >> Savanna: No, hopefully not. >> No. >> No, and our momentum, I mean everyone's doing things faster, more data, it's all that we're talking about, do more and make it easier for everybody in the same central location. Jimmy, of those thousand global startups that you're working with, can you tell us some of the trends? >> Yeah, so I think one of the big things, especially, I cover data analytics startups specifically. So, one moving from batch to real time analytics. So, whether that's IOT, gaming, leader boards, querying data where it sits in an AWS data, like companies need to make operational decisions now and not based off of historic data from a week ago or last night or a month ago. So, that's one. And then I'm going to steal one of John's lines, is data is code. That is becoming that base layer that a lot of startups are building off of and operationalizing. So, I think those are the two big things I'm seeing, but would love... >> Curious to both, Jeff, let's go to you next, I'm curious, yeah. >> Yeah, totally. I think from a broader perspective, the days of completely free money and infinite resources are coming to a close, if not already closed. >> We all work with startups, we can go ahead and just talk about all the well is just a little (indistinct)... >> So, I think it's closed, and so because of that, it's how do you deal with a lot? How do you produce the results on the go to market side with fewer resources, right? And so it's incumbent on our team to figure out how to make it an easier, simpler process to partner with AWS, knowing those constraints are very real now. >> Savanna: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and to build on that. I think mid stage, it's all about cash preservation, right? And it's in that runway... >> Especially right now. >> Yeah, and so part of that is getting into the right infrastructure, when you had a lot of people, suddenly you don't have as many people moving into managed services, making sure that you can scale at a cost efficient way versus at any cost. That's kind of the latter stage. Now what's really been fascinating more at the at the early stages, I call it the rise of the AIML native. And so, where you say three years ago, you saw customers bolting on AI, now they're building AI from the start, right? And that's pervasive across every industry, whether it's in FinTech, life sciences, healthcare, climate tech, you're starting to see it all the way across the board. And then of course the other thing is, yeah, the other one is just the rise of just large language models, right? And just, I think there's the hype and there's the promise, but you know, over time, like the amount of customers big and small, whom are used in large language models is pretty fascinating. >> Yeah, you must have fascinating jobs. I mean, genuinely, it's so cool to get to not only see and have your finger on the pulse of what's coming next, essentially that's what startups are, but also be able to support them and to collaborate with them. And it's clear, the commitment to community and to the customers that you're serving. Last question for each of you, and then we're talking about your DJing. >> Oh yeah, I definitely, I want to see that. >> No, we're going to close with that as a little pitch for everyone watching this show. So, we make sure the crowd's just packed for that. This is your show, as you said, you live for this show, love that. >> Yeah. >> Give us your 30 second hot take, most important soundbites, think of this as your thought leadership shining moment. What's the biggest takeaway from the show? Biggest trend, thing that has you most excited? >> Oh, that's a difficult one. There's a lot going on. >> There is a lot going on. I mean, you can say a couple things. I'll allow you more than 30 seconds if you want. >> No, I mean, look, I just think the, well, what's fascinating to me in having this is my third or fourth re:Invent is just the volume of new announcements that come out. It's impressive, right? I mean it's impressive in terms of number of services, but then the depth of those services and the building on, I think it's just really amazing. I think that the trend you're going to continue to see and there's going to be more keynotes tomorrow, so, I can't let anything out. But just the AI, ML, real excited about that, analytic space, serverless, just continue to see the maturation of that space, particularly for startups. I think that to me is what's really exciting. And just seeing folks come together, start exchanging ideas, and I think the last piece I'll do is a pitch for my own team, like we have like 18 different sessions from the North American startup team. And so, I mean, shout out to our solution architects putting those sessions together, geared towards startups for startups, and so, that's probably what I'm most excited about. >> Casual, that was good, and you pitched it in time. I think that was great. >> There you go. >> All right, Jeff, you just had a little practice time while he was going. Let's (indistinct). >> No, so it's just exciting to see all the partners that we support here, so many of them have booths here and are showcasing their technology. And being able to connect them with customers to show how advanced their capabilities are that they're bringing to the table to supplement and compliment all the new capabilities that AWS is launching. So, to be able to see all of that in the same place at the same time and really hear what they need from a partnership perspective, that's what's special for us. >> Savanna: This is special. All right, Jimmy. >> My thoughts on re:Invent or? >> Not DJ yet. >> Not DJ. Not DJ, but I mean, your first re:Invent. Probably your first time getting to interact with a lot of the people that you chat with face to face. How does it feel? What's your hot take? Your look through the crystal ball, if you want to take it farther out in front. >> I think it's finally getting FaceTime with some of the relationships that I've built purely over Chime and virtual calls over the past two years has been incredible. And then secondly, to the technical enablement piece, I can announce this 'cause it was already announced earlier, is AWS Security Lake, one of my partners, Cribl, was actually a launch partner for that service. So, a little too to the Horn for Global Startup program, one of the coolest things at the tactical level as a PDM is working with them throughout the year and my partner solution architect finding these unique alignment opportunities with native AWS services and then seeing it build all the way through fruition at the finish line, announced at re:Invent, their logo up on screen, like that's, I can sleep well tonight. >> Job well done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty cool. >> That is cool. >> So, I've already told you before you even got here that you're a DJ and you happen to be DJing at re:Invent. Where can we all go dance and see you? >> So, shout out to Mission Cloud, who has sponsored Tao, Day Beach Club on Wednesday evening. So yes, I do DJ, I appreciate AWS's flexibility work life balance. So, I'll give that plug right here as well. But no, it's something I picked up during COVID, it's a creative outlet for me. And then again, to be able to do it here is just an incredible opportunity. So, Wednesday night I hope to see all theCUBE and everyone that... >> We will definitely be there, be careful what you wish for. >> What's your stage name? >> Oh, stage name, DJ Hot Hands, so, find me on SoundCloud. >> DJ Hot Hands. >> All right, so check out DJ Hot Hands on SoundCloud. And if folks want to learn more about the Global Startup program, where do they go? >> AWS Global Startup Program. We have a website you can easily connect with. All our startups are listed on AWS Marketplace. >> Most of them are Marketplace, you can go to our website, (mumbles) global startup program and yeah, find us there. >> Fantastic. Well, Jeff, Jimmy, Eric, it was an absolute pleasure starting the day. We got startups for breakfast. I love that. And I can't wait to go dance to you tomorrow night or tonight actually. I'm here for the fist bumps. This is awesome. And you all are great. Hope to have you back on theCUBE again very soon and we'll have to coordinate on that global Startup Showcase. >> Jimmy: All right. >> I think it's happening, 2023, get ready folks. >> Jimmy: Here we go. >> Get ready. All right, well, this was our first session here at AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the leader in high tech reporting. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not in person because of the pandemic. We're doing the remote Cube Cube Virtual were the Cube virtual. I'm your host, John for here with Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web services, in for his annual at the end of the show comes on the Cube. This year, it's virtual Andy. Good to see you remotely in Seattle or in Palo Alto. Uh, Dave couldn't make it in a personal conflict, but he says, Hello, great to see you. >>Great to see you as well, John. It's an annual tradition. On the last day of reinvent. I wish we were doing it in person, but I'm glad at least were able to do it. Virtually >>the good news is, I know you could arrested last night normally at reinvent you just like we're all both losing our voice at the end of the show. At least me more than you, your and we're just at the end of like okay, Relief. It happens here. It's different. It's been three weeks has been virtual. Um, you guys had a unique format this year went much better than I expected. It would go on because I was pretty skeptical about these long, um, multiple days or weeks events. You guys did a good job of timing it out and creating these activations and with key news, starting with your keynote on December 1st. Now, at the end of the three weeks, um, tell me, are you surprised by the results? Can you give us, Ah, a feeling for how you think everything went? What's what's your take So far as we close out reinvented >>Well, I think it's going really well. I mean, we always gnome or a Z get past, reinvent and you start, you know, collecting all the feedback. But we've been watching all the metrics and you know, there's trade offs. Of course, now I think all of us giving our druthers would be together in Las Vegas, and I think it's hard to replace that feeling of being with people and the excitement of learning about things together and and making decisions together after you see different sessions that you're gonna make big changes in your company and for your customer experience. And yeah, and there's a community peace. And there's, you know, this from being there. There's a concert. The answer. I think people like being with one another. But, you know, I think this was the best that any of us could imagine doing doing a virtual event. And we had to really reinvent, reinvent and all the pieces to it. And now I think that some of the positive trade offs are they. You get a lot mawr engagement than you would normally get in person So normally. Last year, with about 65,000 people in Las Vegas this year, we had 530,000 people registered to reinvent and over 300,000 participate in some fashion. All the sessions had a lot more people who are participating just because you remove the constraints of of travel in costs, and so there are trade offs. I think we prefer being together, but I think it's been a really good community event, um, in learning event for for our customers, and we've been really pleased with it so >>far. No doubt I would totally agree with you. I think a lot of people like, Hey, I love to walk the floor and discover Harry and Sarah Davis moments of finding an exhibit her and the exhibit hall or or attending a session or going to a party, bumping into friends and seeing making new friends. But I think one of the things I want to get your reaction to it. So I think this is comes up. And, you know, we've been doing a lot of Q virtual for the past year, and and everyone pretty much agrees that when we go back, it's gonna be a hybrid world in the sense of events as well as cloud. You know that. But you know, I think one of the things that I noticed this year with reinvent is it almost was a democratization of reinvent. So you really had to reinvent the format. You had 300,000 plus people attend 500 pending email addresses, but now you've got a different kind of beehive community. So you're a bar raiser thinker. It's with the culture of Amazon. So I gotta ask you do the economics does this new kind of extra epiphany impact you and how you raise the bar to keep the best of the face to face when it comes back. And then if you keep the virtual any thoughts on how to leverage this and kind of get more open, it was free. You guys made it free this year and people did show up. >>Yeah, it's a really good question, and it's probably a question will be better equipped to answer in a month or two after we kind of debrief we always do after reading that we spend. Actually, I really enjoy the meeting because the team, the Collective A. W s team, works so hard in this event. There's so many months across everything. All the product teams, um, you know, all the marketing folks, all the event folks, and I think they do a terrific job with it. And we we do about 2.5 3 hour debrief on everything we did, things that we thought was really well the things that we thought we could do better and all the feedback we get from our community and so I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't find things from what we tried this year that we incorporate into what we do when we're back to being a person again. You know, of course, none of us really know when we'll be back in person again. Re event happens to fall on the time of the year, which is early December. And so you with with a lot of people seemingly able to get vaccinated, probably by you know, they'd spring early summer. You could kind of imagine that we might be able to reinvent in person next year. We'll have to see e think we all hope we will. But I'm sure there are a number of pieces that we will take from this and incorporate into what we do in person. And you know, then it's just a matter of how far you go. >>Fingers crossed and you know it's a hybrid world for the Cube two and reinvent and clouds. Let's get into the announcement. I want to get your your take as you look back now. I mean, how many announcements is you guys have me and a lot of announcements this year. Which ones did you like? Which one did you think were jumping off the page, which ones resonated the most or had impact. Can you share kind of just some stats on e mean how many announcements launches you did this >>year? But we had about 100 50 different new services and features that we announced over the last three weeks and reinvent And there, you know the question you're asking. I could easily spend another three hours like my Kino. You know, answering you all the ones that I like thought were important. You know, I think that, you know, some of the ones I think that really stood out for people. I think first on the compute side, I just think the, um the excitement around what we're doing with chips, um, is very clear. I think what we've done with gravitas to our generalized compute to give people 40% better price performance and they could find in the latest generation X 86 processors is just It's a huge deal. If you could save 40% price performance on computer, you get a lot more done for less on. Then you know some of the chip work we're doing in machine learning with inferential on the inference chips that we built And then what? We announced the trainee, um, on the machine learning training ship. People are very excited about the chip announcements. I think also, people on the container side is people are moving to smaller and smaller units of compute. I think people were very taken with the notion of E. K s and D. C s anywhere so they can run whatever container orchestration framework they're running in A. W s also on premises. To make it easier, Thio manage their deployments and containers. I think data stores was another space where I think people realize how much more data they're dealing with today. And we gave a couple statistics and the keynote that I think are kind of astonishing that, you know, every every hour today, people are creating mawr content that there was in an entire year, 20 years ago or the people expect more data to be created. The next three years in the prior 30 years combined these air astonishing numbers and it requires a brand new reinvention of data stores. And so I think people are very excited about Block Express, which is the first sand in the cloud and there really excited about Aurora in general, but then Aurora surveillance V two that allow you to scale up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second and saved about 90% of supervision or people very excited about that. I think machine learning. You know, uh, Sage Maker has just been a game changer and the ease with which everyday developers and data scientists can build, train, tune into play machine learning models. And so we just keep knocking out things that are hard for people. Last year we launched the first i D for Machine Learning, the stage maker studio. This year, if you look at things that we announced, like Data Wrangler, which changes you know the process of Data Prep, which is one of the most time consuming pieces in machine learning or our feature store or the first see, I see deeper machine learning with pipelines or clarify, which allow you to have explain ability in your models. Those are big deals to people who are trying to build machine learning models, and you know that I'd say probably the last thing that we hear over and over again is really just the excitement around Connect, which is our call center service, which is just growing unbelievably fast and just, you know, the the fact that it's so easy to get started and so easy to scale so much more cost effective with, you know, built from the ground up on the cloud and with machine learning and ai embedded. And then adding some of the capabilities to give agents the right information, the right time about customers and products and real time capabilities for supervisors. Throw when calls were kind of going off the rails and to be ableto thio, stop the the contact before it becomes something, it hurts. The brand is there. Those are all big deals that people have been excited about. >>I think the connecting as I want to just jump on that for a second because I think when we first met many, many years ago, star eighth reinvent. You know the trends are always the same. You guys do a great job. Slew of announcements. You keep raising the bar. But one of the things that you mentioned to me when we talked about the origination of a W S was you were doing some stuff for Amazon proper, and you had a, you know, bootstrap team and you're solving your own problems, getting some scar tissue, the affiliate thing, all these examples. The trend is you guys tend to do stuff for yourself and then re factor it into potentially opportunities for your customers. And you're working backwards. All that good stuff. We'll get into that next section. But this year, more than ever, I think with the pandemic connect, you got chime, you got workspaces. This acceleration of you guys being pretty nimble on exposing these services. I mean, connect was a call center. It's an internal thing that you guys had been using. You re factored that for customer consumption. You see that kind of china? But you're not competing with Zoom. You're offering a service toe bundle in. Is this mawr relevant? Now, as you guys get bigger with more of these services because you're still big now you're still serving yourself. What? That seems to be a big trend now, coming out of the pandemic. Can you comment on um, >>yeah, It's a good question, John. And you know we do. We do a bunch of both. Frankly, you know, there there's some services where our customers. We're trying to solve certain problems and they tell us about those problems and then we build new services for him. So you know a good example that was red shift, which is our data warehouse and service, you know, two or three very large customers of ours. When we went to spend time with them and asked them what we could do to help them further, they just said, I wish I had a data warehousing service for the cloud that was built in the AWS style way. Um and they were really fed up with what they were using. Same thing was true with relation databases where people were just fed up with the old guard commercial, great commercial, great databases of Oracle and Sequel Server. And they hated the pricing and the proprietary nature of them and the punitive licensing. And they they wanted to move to these open engines like my sequel and post dress. But to get the same performance is the commercial great databases hard? So we solve that problem with them. With Aurora, which is our fastest growing service in our history, continues to be so there's sometimes when customers articulate a need, and we don't have a service that we've been running internally. But we way listen, and we have a very strong and innovative group of builders here where we build it for customers. And then there are other cases where customers say and connect with a great example of this. Connect with an example where some of our customers like into it. And Capital One said, You know, we need something for our contact center and customer service, and people weren't very happy with what they were using in that space. And they said, You, you've had to build something just to manage your retail business last 15, 20 years Can't you find a way to generalize that expose it? And when you have enough customers tell you that there's something that they want to use that you have experienced building. You start to think about it, and it's never a simple. It's just taking that technology and exposing it because it's often built, um, internally and you do a number of things to optimize it internally. But we have a way of building services and Amazon, where we do this working backwards process that you're referring to, where We build everything with the press release and frequently asked questions document, and we imagine that we're building it to be externalized even if it's an internal feature. But our feature for our retail business, it's only gonna be used as part of some other service that you never imagine Externalizing to third party developers. We always try and build it that way, and we always try to have well documented, hardened AP eyes so that other teams can use it without having to coordinate with those teams. And so it makes it easier for us to think about Externalizing it because we're a good part of the way there and we connect we. That's what we did way generalized it way built it from the ground up on top of the cloud. And then we embedded a bunch of AI and it so that people could do a number of things that would have taken him, you know, months to do with big development teams that they could really point, click and do so. We really try to do both. >>I think that's a great example of some of the scale benefits is worth calling out because that was a consistent theme this past year, The people we've reported on interviewed that Connect really was a lifeline for many during the pandemic and way >>have 5000 different customers who started using connect during the pandemic alone. Where they, you know, overnight they had to basically deal with having a a call center remotely. And so they picked up connect and they spun up call center remotely, and they didn't really quickly. And you know, it's that along with workspaces, which are virtual desktops in the cloud and things like Chime and some of our partners, Exume have really been lifelines for people. Thio have business continuity during a tandem. >>I think there's gonna be a whole set of new services that are gonna emerge You talked about in your keynote. We talked about it prior to the event where you know, if this pandemic hit with that five years ago, when there wasn't the advancements in, say, videoconferencing, it'd be a whole different world. And I think the whole world can see on full display that having integrated video communications and other cool things is gonna have a productivity benefit. And that's kind >>of could you imagine what the world would have been like the last nine months and we didn't have competent videoconferencing. I mean, just think about how different it would have been. And I think that all of these all of these capabilities today are kind of the occult 1.5 capabilities where, by the way, thank God for them. We've we've all been able to be productive because of them. But there's so early stage, they're all going to get evolved. I'm so significantly, I mean, even just today, you know, I was spending some time with with our team thinking about when we start to come back to the office and bigger numbers. And we do meetings with our remote partners, how we think about where the center of gravity should be and who should be on video conferencing and whether they should be allowed to kind of video conference in conference rooms, which are really hard to see them. We're only on their laptops, which are easier and what technology doesn't mean that you want in the conference rooms on both sides of the table, and how do you actually have it so that people who are remote could see which side of the table. I mean, all this stuff is yet to be invented. It will be very primitive for the next couple few years, even just interrupting one another in video conferencing people. When you do it, the sound counsel cancels each other out. So people don't really cut each other off and rip on one another. Same way, like all that, all that technology is going to get involved over time. It's a tremendous >>I could just see people fighting for the mute button. You know, that's power on these meetings. You know, Chuck on our team. All kidding aside, he was excited. We talked about Enron Kelly on your team, who runs product marketing on for your app side as well as computer networking storage. We're gonna do a green room app for the Q because you know, we're doing so many remote videos. We just did 112 here for reinvent one of things that people like is this idea of kind of being ready and kind of prepped. So again, this is a use case. We never would have thought off if there wasn't a pandemic. So and I think these are the kinds of innovation, thinking that seems small but works well when you start thinking about how easy it could be to say to integrate a chime through this sdk So this is the kind of things, that kind thing. So so with that, I want to get into your leadership principles because, you know, if you're a startup or a big company trying to reinvent, you're looking at the eight leadership principles you laid out, which were, um don't be afraid to reinvent. Acknowledge you can't fight gravity. Talent is hungry to reinvent solving real customer problems. Speed don't complex. If I use the platform with the broader set of tools, which is more a plug for you guys on cloud pull everything together with top down goals. Okay, great. How >>do you >>take those leadership principles and apply them broadly to companies and start ups? Because I think start ups in the garage are also gonna be there going. I'm going to jump on this wave. I'm inspired by the sea change. I'm gonna build something new or an enterprise. I'm gonna I'm gonna innovate. How do you How do you see these eight principles translating? >>Well, I think they're applicable to every company of every size and every industry and organization. Frankly, also, public sector organizations. I think in many ways startups have an advantage. And, you know, these were really keys to how to build a reinvention culture. And startups have an advantage because just by their very nature, they are inventive. You know, you can't you can't start a company that's a direct copy of somebody else that is an inventive where you have no chance. So startups already have, you know, a group of people that feel insurgent, and they wanted their passionate about certain customer experience. They want to invent it, and they know that they they only have so much time. Thio build something before money runs out and you know they have a number of those built in advantages. But I think larger companies are often where you see struggles and building a reinvention and invention culture and I've probably had in the last three weeks is part of reinvent probably about 40 different customer meetings with, you know, probably 75 different companies were accomplished in those or so and and I think that I met with a lot of leaders of companies where I think these reinvention principles really resonated, and I think they're they're battling with them and, you know, I think that it starts with the leaders if you, you know, when you have big companies that have been doing things a certain way for a long period of time, there's a fair bit of inertia that sets in and a lot of times not ill intended. It's just a big group of people in the middle who've been doing things a certain way for a long time and aren't that keen to change sometimes because it means ripping up something that they that they built and they remember how hard they worked on it. And sometimes it's because they don't know what it means for themselves. And you know, it takes the leadership team deciding that we are going to change. And usually that means they have to be able to have access to what's really happening in their business, what's really happening in their products in the market. But what customers really think of it and what they need to change and then having the courage and the energy, frankly, to pick the company up and push him to change because you're gonna have to fight a lot of inertia. So it always starts with the leaders. And in addition to having access that truth and deciding to make the change, you've gotta also set aggressive top down goal. The force of the organization moved faster than otherwise would and that also, sometimes leaders decide they're gonna want to change and they say they're going to change and they don't really set the goal. And they were kind of lessons and kind of doesn't listen. You know, we have a term the principal we have inside Amazon when we talk about the difference between good intentions and mechanisms and good intentions is saying we need to change and we need to invent, reinvent who we are and everyone has the right intentions. But nothing happens. Ah, mechanism, as opposed to good intention, is saying like Capital One did. We're going to reinvent our consumer digital banking platform in the next 18 months, and we're gonna meet every couple of weeks to see where we are into problem solved, like that's a mechanism. It's much harder to escape getting that done. Then somebody just saying we're going to reinvent, not checking on it, you know? And so, you know, I think that starts with the leaders. And then I think that you gotta have the right talent. You gotta have people who are excited about inventing, as opposed to really, Justin, what they built over a number of years, and yet at the same time, you're gonna make sure you don't hire people who were just building things that they're interested in. They went where they think the tech is cool as opposed to what customers want. And then I think you've got to Really You gotta build speed into your culture. And I think in some ways this is the very biggest challenge for a lot of enterprises. And I just I speak to so many leaders who kind of resigned themselves to moving slowly because they say you don't understand my like, companies big and the culture just move slow with regulator. There are a lot of reasons people will give you on why they have to move slow. But, you know, moving with speed is a choice. It's not something that your preordained with or not it is absolutely a leadership choice. And it can't happen overnight. You can't flip a switch and make it happen, but you can build a bunch of things into your culture first, starting with people. Understand that you are gonna move fast and then building an opportunity for people. Experiment quickly and reward people who experiment and to figure out the difference between one way doors and two way doors and things that are too way doors, letting people move quick and try things. You have to build that muscle or when it really comes, time to reinvent you won't have. >>That's a great point in the muscle on that's that's critical. You know, one of things I want to bring up. You brought on your keynote and you talk to me privately about it is you gave attribute in a way to Clay Christensen, who you called out on your keynote. Who was a professor at Harvard. Um, and he was you impressed by him and and you quoted him and he was He was your professor there, Um, your competitive person and you know, companies have strategy departments, and competitive strategy is not necessarily departments of mindset, and you were kind of brought this out in a zone undertone in your talk, we're saying you've got to be competitive in the sense of you got to survive and you've got to thrive. And you're kind of talking about rebuilding and building and, you know, Clay Christians. Innovative dilemma. Famous book is a mother, mother teachings around metrics and strategy and prescriptions. If he were alive today and he was with us, what would he be talking about? Because, you know, you have kind of stuck in the middle. Strategy was not Clay Christensen thing, but, you know, companies have to decide who they are. Their first principles face the truth. Some of the things you mentioned, what would we be talking with him about if we were talking about the innovator's dilemma with respect to, say, cloud and and some of the key decisions that have to be made right now? >>Well, then, Clay Christensen on it. Sounds like you read some of these books on. Guy had the fortunate, um, you know, being able to sit in classes that he taught. And also I got a chance. Thio, meet with him a couple of times after I graduated. Um, school, you know, kind of as more of a professional sorts. You can call me that. And, uh, he he was so thoughtful. He wasn't just thoughtful about innovation. He was thoughtful about how to get product market fit. And he was thoughtful about what your priorities in life were and how to build families. And, I mean, he really was one of the most thoughtful, innovative, um, you know, forward thinking, uh, strategist, I had the opportunity Thio encounter and that I've read, and so I'm very appreciative of having the opportunity Thio learn from him. And a lot of I mean, I think that he would probably be continuing to talk about a lot of the principles which I happen to think are evergreen that he he taught and there's it relates to the cloud. I think that one of the things that quite talked all the time about in all kinds of industries is that disruption always happens at the low end. It always happens with products that seem like they're not sophisticated enough. Don't do enough. And people always pooh pooh them because they say they won't do these things. And we learned this. I mean, I watched in the beginning of it of us. When we lost just three, we had so many people try and compare it Thio things like e m. C. And of course, it was very different than EMC. Um, but it was much simpler, but And it and it did a certain set of activities incredibly well at 1 1/100 of the price that's disrupted, you know, like 1 1/100 of the price. You find that builders, um, find a lot of utility for products like that. And so, you know, I think that it always starts with simple needs and products that aren't fully developed. That overtime continue to move their way up. Thio addressing Maura, Maura the market. And that's what we did with is what we've done with all our services. That's three and easy to and party ass and roar and things like that. And I think that there are lots of lessons is still apply. I think if you look at, um, containers and how that's changing what compute looks like, I think if you look at event driven, serverless compute in Lambda. Lambda is a great example of of really ah, derivative plays teaching, which is we knew when we were building Lambda that as people became excited about that programming model it would cannibalize easy to in our core compute service. And there are a lot of companies that won't do that. And for us we were trying to build a business that outlasts all of us. And that's you know, it's successful over a long period of time, and the the best way I know to do that is to listen to what customers We're trying to solve an event on their behalf, even if it means in the short term you may cannibalize yourself. And so that's what we always think about is, you know, wherever we see an opportunity to provide a better customer experience, even if it means in the short term, make cannibalism revenue leg lambda with complete with easy to our over our surveillance with provisions or are we're going to do it because we're gonna take the long view, and we believe that we serve customers well over a long period of time. We have a chance to do >>that. It's a cannibalize yourself and have someone else do it to you, right? That's that's the philosophy. Alright, fine. I know you've got tight for time. We got a you got a hard stop, But let's talk about the vaccine because you know, you brought up in the keynote carrier was a featured thing. And look at the news headlines. Now you got the shots being administered. You're starting to see, um, hashtag going around. I got my shot. So, you know, there's a There's a really Momenta. Mit's an uplifting vibe here. Amazon's involved in this and you talked about it. Can you share the innovation? There can just give us an update and what's come out of that and this supply chain factor. The cold chain. You guys were pretty instrumental in that share your your thoughts. >>We've been really excited and privileged partner with companies who are really trying to change what's possible for all of us. And I think you know it started with some of the companies producing vaccines. If you look at what we do with Moderna, where they built their digital manufacturing sweet on top of us in supply chain, where they used us for computing, storage and data warehousing and machine learning, and and on top of AWS they built, they're Cove in 19 vaccine candidate in 42 days when it normally takes 20 months. I mean, that is a total game changer. It's a game changer for all of us and getting the vaccine faster. But also, you just think about what that means for healthcare moving forward, it zits very exciting. And, yeah, I love what carriers doing. Kariya is building this product on top of AWS called links, which is giving them end and visibility over the transportation and in temperature of of the culture and everything they're delivering. And so it, uh, it changes what happens not only for food, ways and spoilage, but if you think about how much of the vaccine they're gonna actually transport to people and where several these vaccines need the right temperature control, it's it's a big deal. And what you know, I think there are a great example to what carrier is where. You know, if you think about the theme of this ring and then I talked about in my keynote, if you want to survive as an organization over a long period of time, you're gonna have to reinvent yourself. You're gonna have to probably do it. Multiple times over and the key to reinventing his first building, the right reinvention culture. And we talk about some of those principles earlier, but you also have to be aware of the technology that's available that allows you to do that. If you look at Carrier, they have built a very, very strong reinvention culture. And then, if you look at how they're leveraging, compute and storage and I o. T at the edge and machine learning, they know what's available, and they're using that technology to reinvent what's what's possible, and we're gonna all benefit because of >>it. All right. Well, Andy, you guys were reinventing the virtual space. Three weeks, it went off. Well, congratulations. Great to go along for the ride with the cube virtual. And again. Thank you for, um, keeping the show alive over there. Reinvent. Um, thanks for your team to for including the Cube. We really appreciate the Cube virtual being involved. Thank you. >>It's my pleasure. And thanks for having me, John and, uh, look forward to seeing you soon. >>All right? Take care. Have a hockey game in real life. When? When we get back, Andy Jesse, the CEO of a W s here to really wrap up. Reinvent here for Cuba, Virtual as well as the show. Today is the last day of the program. It will be online for the rest of the year and then into next month there's another wave coming, of course. Check out all the coverage. Come, come back, It's It's It's online. It's all free Cube Cube stuff is there on the Cube Channel. Silicon angle dot com For all the top stories, cube dot net tons of content on Twitter. Hashtag reinvent. You'll see all the commentary. Thanks for watching the Cube Virtual. I'm John Feehery.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Cloud computing has been the single most transformative force in IT over the last decade. As we enter the 2020s, we believe that cloud will become the underpinning of a ubiquitous, intelligent and autonomous resource that will disrupt the operational stacks of virtually every company in every industry. Welcome to this week's special edition of Wikibon's CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, and as part of theCUBE365's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, we're going to put forth our scenario for the next decade of cloud evolution. We'll also drill into the most recent data on AWS from ETR's October 2020 survey of more than 1,400 CIOs and IT professionals. So let's get right into it and take a look at how we see the cloud of yesterday, today and tomorrow. This graphic shows our view of the critical inflection points that catalyze the cloud adoption. In the middle of the 2000s, the IT industry was recovering from the shock of the dot-com bubble and of course 9/11. CIOs, they were still licking their wounds from the narrative, does IT even matter? AWS launched its Simple Storage Service and later EC2 with a little fanfare in 2006, but developers at startups and small businesses, they noticed that overnight AWS turned the data center into an API. Analysts like myself who saw the writing on the wall and CEO after CEO, they poo-pooed Amazon's entrance into their territory and they promised a cloud strategy that would allow them to easily defend their respective turfs. We'd seen the industry in denial before, and this was no different. The financial crisis was a boon for the cloud. CFOs saw a way to conserve cash, shift CAPEX to OPEX and avoid getting locked in to long-term capital depreciation schedules or constrictive leases. We also saw shadow IT take hold, and then bleed in to the 2010s in a big way. This of course created problems for organizations rightly concerned about security and rogue tech projects. CIOs were asked to come in and clean up the crime scene, and in doing so, realized the inevitable, i.e., that they could transform their IT operational models, shift infrastructure management to more strategic initiatives, and drop money to the bottom lines of their businesses. The 2010s saw an era of rapid innovation and a level of data explosion that we'd not seen before. AWS led the charge with a torrent pace of innovation via frequent rollouts or frequent feature rollouts. Virtually every industry, including the all-important public sector, got into the act. Again, led by AWS with the Seminole, a CIA deal. Google got in the game early, but they never really took the enterprise business seriously until 2015 when it hired Diane Green. But Microsoft saw the opportunity and leaned in heavily and made remarkable strides in the second half of the decade, leveraging its massive software stake. The 2010s also saw the rapid adoption of containers and an exit from the long AI winter, which along with the data explosion, created new workloads that began to go mainstream. Now, during this decade, we saw hybrid investments begin to take shape and show some promise. As the ecosystem realized broadly that it had to play in the AWS sandbox or it would lose customers. And we also saw the emergence of edge and IoT use cases like for example, AWS Ground Station, those emerge. Okay, so that's a quick history of cloud from our vantage point. The question is, what's coming next? What should we expect over the next decade? Whereas the last 10 years was largely about shifting the heavy burden of IT infrastructure management to the cloud, in the coming decade, we see the emergence of a true digital revolution. And most people agree that COVID has accelerated this shift by at least two to three years. We see all industries as ripe for disruption as they create a 360 degree view across their operational stacks. Meaning, for example, sales, marketing, customer service, logistics, etc., they're unified such that the customer experience is also unified. We see data flows coming together as well, where domain-specific knowledge workers are first party citizens in the data pipeline, i.e. not subservient to hyper-specialized technology experts. No industry is safe from this disruption. And the pandemic has given us a glimpse of what this is going to look like. Healthcare is going increasingly remote and becoming personalized. Machines are making more accurate diagnoses than humans, in some cases. Manufacturing, we'll see new levels of automation. Digital cash, blockchain and new payment systems will challenge traditional banking norms. Retail has been completely disrupted in the last nine months, as has education. And we're seeing the rise of Tesla as a possible harbinger to a day where owning and driving your own vehicle could become the exception rather than the norm. Farming, insurance, on and on and on. Virtually every industry will be transformed as this intelligent, responsive, autonomous, hyper-distributed system provides services that are ubiquitous and largely invisible. How's that for some buzzwords? But I'm here to tell you, it's coming. Now, a lot of questions remain. First, you may even ask, is this cloud that you're talking about? And I can understand why some people would ask that question. And I would say this, the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud has defined the consumption model for technology. You're seeing cloud-like pricing models moving on-prem with initiatives like HPE's GreenLake and now Dell's APEX. SaaS pricing is evolving. You're seeing companies like Snowflake and Datadog challenging traditional SaaS models with a true cloud consumption pricing option. Not option, that's the way they price. And this, we think, is going to become the norm. Now, as hybrid cloud emerges and pushes to the edge, the cloud becomes this what we call, again, hyper-distributed system with a deployment and programming model that becomes much more uniform and ubiquitous. So maybe this s-curve that we've drawn here needs an adjacent s-curve with a steeper vertical. This decade, jumping s-curves, if you will, into this new era. And perhaps the nomenclature evolves, but we believe that cloud will still be the underpinning of whatever we call this future platform. We also point out on this chart, that public policy is going to evolve to address the privacy and concentrated industry power concerns that will vary by region and geography. So we don't expect the big tech lash to abate in the coming years. And finally, we definitely see alternative hardware and software models emerging, as witnessed by Nvidia and Arm and DPA's from companies like Fungible, and AWS and others designing their own silicon for specific workloads to control their costs and reduce their reliance on Intel. So the bottom line is that we see programming models evolving from infrastructure as code to programmable digital businesses, where ecosystems power the next wave of data creation, data sharing and innovation. Okay, let's bring it back to the current state and take a look at how we see the market for cloud today. This chart shows a just-released update of our IaaS and PaaS revenue for the big three cloud players, AWS, Azure, and Google. And you can see we've estimated Q4 revenues for each player and the full year, 2020. Now please remember our normal caveats on this data. AWS reports clean numbers, whereas Azure and GCP are estimates based on the little tidbits and breadcrumbs each company tosses our way. And we add in our own surveys and our own information from theCUBE Network. Now the following points are worth noting. First, while AWS's growth is lower than the other two, note what happens with the laws of large numbers? Yes, growth slows down, but the absolute dollars are substantial. Let me give an example. For AWS, Azure and Google, in Q4 2020 versus Q4 '19, we project annual quarter over quarter growth rate of 25% for AWS, 46% for Azure and 58% for Google Cloud Platform. So meaningfully lower growth rates for AWS compared to the other two. Yet AWS's revenue in absolute terms grows sequentially, 11.6 billion versus 12.4 billion. Whereas the others are flat to down sequentially. Azure and GCP, they'll have to come in with substantially higher annual growth to increase revenue from Q3 to Q4, that sequential increase that AWS can achieve with lower growth rates year to year, because it's so large. Now, having said that, on an annual basis, you can see both Azure and GCP are showing impressive growth in both percentage and absolute terms. AWS is going to add more than $10 billion to its revenue this year, with Azure growing nearly 9 billion or adding nearly 9 billion, and GCP adding just over 3 billion. So there's no denying that Azure is making ground as we've been reporting. GCP still has a long way to go. Thirdly, we also want to point out that these three companies alone now account for nearly $80 billion in infrastructure services annually. And the IaaS and PaaS business for these three companies combined is growing at around 40% per year. So much for repatriation. Now, let's take a deeper look at AWS specifically and bring in some of the ETR survey data. This wheel chart that we're showing here really shows you the granularity of how ETR calculates net score or spending momentum. Now each quarter ETR, they go get responses from thousands of CIOs and IT buyers, and they ask them, are you spending more or less than a particular platform or vendor? Net score is derived by taking adoption plus increase and subtracting out decrease plus replacing. So subtracting the reds from the greens. Now remember, AWS is a $45 billion company, and it has a net score of 51%. So despite its exposure to virtually every industry, including hospitality and airlines and other hard hit sectors, far more customers are spending more with AWS than are spending less. Now let's take a look inside of the AWS portfolio and really try to understand where that spending goes. This chart shows the net score across the AWS portfolio for three survey dates going back to last October, that's the gray. The summer is the blue. And October 2020, the most recent survey, is the yellow. Now remember, net score is an indicator of spending velocity and despite the deceleration, as shown in the yellow bars, these are very elevated net scores for AWS. Only Chime video conferencing is showing notable weakness in the AWS data set from the ETR survey, with an anemic 7% net score. But every other sector has elevated spending scores. Let's start with Lambda on the left-hand side. You can see that Lambda has a 65% net score. Now for context, very few companies have net scores that high. Snowflake and Kubernetes spend are two examples with higher net scores. But this is rarefied air for AWS Lambda, i.e. functions. Similarly, you can see AI, containers, cloud, cloud overall and analytics all with over 50% net scores. Now, while database is still elevated with a 46% net score, it has come down from its highs of late. And perhaps that's because AWS has so many options in database and its own portfolio and its ecosystem, and the survey maybe doesn't have enough granularity there, but in this competition, so I don't really know, but that's something that we're watching. But overall, there's a very strong portfolio from a spending momentum standpoint. Now what we want to do, let's flip the view and look at defections off of the AWS platform. Okay, look at this chart. We find this mind-boggling. The chart shows the same portfolio view, but isolates on the bright red portion of that wheel that I showed you earlier, the replacements. And basically you're seeing very few defections show up for AWS in the ETR survey. Again, only Chime is the sore spot. But everywhere else in the portfolio, we're seeing low single digit replacements. That's very, very impressive. Now, one more data chart. And then I want to go to some direct customer feedback, and then we'll wrap. Now we've shown this chart before. It plots net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis and market share, which measures pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And in the table portion in the upper-right corner, you can see the actual numbers that drive the plotting position. And you can see the data confirms what we know. This is a two-horse race right now between AWS and Microsoft. Google, they're kind of hanging out with the on-prem crowd vying for relevance at the data center. We've talked extensively about how we would like to see Google evolve its business and rely less on appropriating our data to serve ads and focus more on cloud. There's so much opportunity there. But nonetheless, you can see the so-called hybrid zone emerging. Hybrid is becoming real. Customers want hybrid and AWS is going to have to learn how to support hybrid deployments with offerings like outposts and others. But the data doesn't lie. The foundation has been set for the 2020s and AWS is extremely well-positioned to maintain its leadership, in our view. Now, the last chart we'll show takes some verbatim comments from customers that sum up the situation. These quotes were pulled from several ETR event roundtables that occurred in 2020. The first one talks to the cloud compute bill. It spikes and sometimes can be unpredictable. The second comment is from a CIO at IT/Telco. Let me paraphrase what he or she is saying. AWS is leading the pack and is number one. And this individual believes that AWS will continue to be number one by a wide margin. The third quote is from a CTO at an S&P 500 organization who talks to the cloud independence of the architecture that they're setting up and the strategy that they're pursuing. The central concern of this person is the software engineering pipeline, the cICB pipeline. The strategy is to clearly go multicloud, avoid getting locked in and ensuring that developers can be productive and independent of the cloud platform. Essentially separating the underlying infrastructure from the software development process. All right, let's wrap. So we talked about how the cloud will evolve to become an even more hyper-distributed system that can sense, act and serve, and provides sets of intelligence services on which digital businesses will be constructed and transformed. We expect AWS to continue to lead in this build-out with its heritage of delivering innovations and features at a torrid pace. We believe that ecosystems will become the main spring of innovation in the coming decade. And we feel that AWS has to embrace not only hybrid, but cross-cloud services. And it has to be careful not to push its ecosystem partners to competitors. It has to walk a fine line between competing and nurturing its ecosystem. To date, its success has been key to that balance as AWS has been able to, for the most part, call the shots. However, we shall see if competition and public policy attenuate its dominant position in this regard. What will be fascinating to watch is how AWS behaves, given its famed customer obsession and how it decodes the customer's needs. As Steve Jobs famously said, "Some people say, give the customers what they want. "That's not my approach. "Our job is to figure out "what they're going to want before they do." I think Henry Ford once asked, "If I'd ask customers what they wanted, "they would've told me a faster horse." Okay, that's it for now. It was great having you for this special report from theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Keep it right there for more great content on theCUBE from re:Invent 2020 virtual. (cheerful music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome to the AWS Public Sector Awards Program. This year, AWS partnered with "theCUBE" to interview a selection of the award winners and their clients. My name is Jeff Frick. I'm the GM and host of "theCUBE" and to share more on the award program and this year's winners, I'd like to introduce Sandy Carter, joining us from Seattle. She is the VP Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs for AWS. Sandy, great to see you. >> So great to see you too, Jeff. Everything's going well. >> Yeah, exactly. How are you doing? So you're in Seattle, you're sheltering in place, but you're getting through and business moves on and you guys are doing a lot of exciting things based on some of the challenges that have come from COVID. >> Absolutely. And we're even making our logo signs out of Legos to support our home offices. So we're having a blast and we're really helping a lot of our customers and our partners through this time as they are helping us as well. >> Right. So let's jump into it. So you run Partners and Programs. Share with everyone why partners are so important to Amazon and AWS specifically and public sector specifically? >> Yeah, Jeff, the partner business, of course, is critical to public sector. For us, partners represent that overall customer experience. They're often subject matter experts at raising awareness, helping customers evaluate AWS and some of the workloads. They help accelerate procurement, deploy services, and most important, our partners support our customer missions. And mission is almost everything in public sector. Now for us, public sector is not just government, but it's also education, nonprofits, healthcare, depending upon where you are in the world, it could also be travel and transportation or oil and gas. It's a really big mission that our partners go on every day with us in the field and the real world. >> Right, so one of the things that comes up all the time, if anyone's spent any time listening to Amazon content, whether it's Bezos or Andy, talks about customer obsession and this constant drive around customer obsession. Now, I noticed you've got 18 awards and people can see all the awards later today or they can go to the website, but I noticed like a third of your awards are customer obsession. So you've really kind of taken that customer obsession theme, if you will, and pushed it in and through all these awards and award categories. So talk about customer obsession in the context of these awards. >> Well, customer obsession for us is everything. Everything that we do starts with the customer and then works backwards. So if you think about what's been happening during these COVID times, like call center wait times are astronomical, too long. Customers are waiting too long. We've been helping States and local governments and countries really implement artificial intelligence and have that ability to answer calls quickly. That's one example of working backwards from a customer. Another example might be having limited access to data. So Jeff, we've always said, and I know "theCUBE's" always said that data is queen or king, but during COVID, data became so essential. So working backwards from our customers, leaders needed to make emergency decisions and did not have immediate access to data. So we had a lot of partners who said, "Hey, I can help you with that. "I can build a data lake. "I can use analytics to help you get to that data." So those were just some examples of how our partners did some extraordinary things, working backwards from their customer. >> Right, well, the other thing obviously is COVID, we've been at this now since mid-March and there was a lot of challenges that came out of COVID. But the other thing that came out of it is this light switch moment for digital transformation and initiatives that were potentially running or thought about running or moving slow. Suddenly digital transformation came to the top of everybody's priorities because of COVID and they had no other choice. And I noticed you've got a couple of COVID-19 specific winners in your list. I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenges that arose that they responded to, to earn some of these COVID awards. >> Yeah, it was funny, Jeff, I'm sure you saw it too on social media. There was a slide that said, "Who drove your digital transformation? "Was it your CEO, your CIO, your chief marketing officer, "or was it COVID?" And, of course, everybody picked COVID. So some of the areas that our partners focused in on was the failure of some legacy systems that occurred, decade old mission critical systems and websites, failed under the stress because they couldn't go up for the demand like the cloud can. We also saw limited remote access. You and I were chatting before, how do you do remote work? How does that work? So employees had limited access to systems, to tools, to data that they needed. And so our customers were really, again, really in want of a solution for remote work. And we had a lot of partners who really stepped up. And then of course, looking at the tech skills that existed, I'm sure you had people call you. I had people call me saying, "I don't really know how to get on Zoom or WebEx or Chime. "Can you help me?" And our customers experience the same thing. Employees don't have the same level of technical skills. And so we saw partners step up with training systems, for example. I was really impressed with the scrappiness of our partners and the way that they always started with the customer, working backwards. But they pivoted because COVID really did create some of these new opportunities in the marketplace. >> Right. So we've got a full program running at the conclusion of this conversation which people will get to see the winners and see some of the solution providers. And we've got three tracks, like you said, the government, nonprofit and education, and there's 18 award winners. And I wouldn't ask you to pick your favorite kid, but I'm going to ask you to share a couple of favorites amongst these award winners that really jumped out to you. >> Okay, I will but first I'll just say, Jeff, that we did have 18 winners and amongst them, they had over 45 customer references. They averaged over six years of experience with AWS and they spread across every single geo. So I thought that was pretty amazing. They also spanned across a couple of different areas, a set of technical capabilities like AI-ML, migration, you know, having a skill for Amazon Connect, which is our call center. They spread a cost missions that you talked about for education, healthcare, DOD. And then they also had a lot of special focus on migration. This was one of Andy's really big, big themes at re:Invent. And so we wanted to reinforce that as well with our partners. So a couple of highlights. So I'm going to start with migration because that was a really big one for Andy at re:Invent, as well as Teresa, our head of public sector. So one of our award winners is around migration is the Navy and SAP NS2. They were asked to migrate 26 ERPs across 50 landscapes with 60,000 users accessing the data from around the globe or another one of my favorites was the Accenture Award where they help the government of Canada and they help them through some of the employment and social development areas that they need to focus in on, really launching a 2,600 person contact center to help deal with some of the spikes in call volumes and other areas. And then let me see. I would also call out Maxar. Maxar set up a high performance computing or HPC environment for a number of weather prediction areas for NOAA, which was also very essential because it wasn't just COVID. Right now, we're in the midst of hurricane season. And how can you optimize that performance and cost even more? Or my last one I'll do, I promise, Jeff, is mission-based, which is Tyler Technologies and they help the city of Alvin in Texas and their municipal courts. Like how do you continue to do court systems? How do you implement a virtual court? And that's exactly what Tyler technology helped to have happen in Texas. So those are just some of the favorite ones that I have today, Jeff. >> (laughs) That's great. And again, everybody can watch interviews with the selection of these people. They'll be running, starting at the bottom of the hour and really get to meet the solution providers as well as the customers that put some of these things in. I've been fortunate to cover a couple of the AWS IMAGINE shows, which are really small public sector shows around nonprofits and education. And it's pretty amazing, once you get out of the commercial space, some of the things that are being enabled by cloud generally and AWS specifically around things that people aren't thinking, missing children, community colleges and education for quick employment. And there's just so many really meaningful, you said mission type of activities going on out there that you guys support. So that's really exciting to keep up with. So before we close out and let everybody watch the award winners, your priorities for 2020? We're kind of halfway through, it's a very strange year. I'm sure every plan that was written and approved in January got ripped up to shreds (Sandy laughs) by April. So Sandy, what are some of your priorities for what you're working on with partners and programs and public sector for the balance of the year? >> Yeah, I would start out by reemphasizing migration. I think migration is really crucial, taking something that's on premises and moving it to the cloud. And the reason that's so important, moving forward, is that the discussion we just had, Jeff, around digital transformation, the cloud provides you so much on-demand capacity. You can just scale and do so many more things. We're also seeing a big focus on cyber security. A lot of our customers across the globe now need to secure remote education, their call centers, their portals, their elections. So cyber security will continue to be really important. As well as our Amazon Connect area. So Amazon Connect, this amazing call center that we've integrated with salesforce, one of our other award winners continues to grow rapidly as we see more and more demand for that as well. And Jeff, I would be remiss to also not call out the mission areas. So whether that's helping with public safety or whether that is assisting in healthcare or our new telemedicine, just providing that, not just the technology, but the mission help too, really understanding what's required and delivering that will be really important. And Jeff, we can't end the key without talking about #techforgood either, right? >> Right, right. Something that's close to both our hearts. >> (chuckles) So we did have some really cool award winners that I think one, because of that #techforgood. So Axial3D, for instance, really helped out Belfast Hospital. And they won an award for AI-ML because of the way that they help surgeons save lives. And this is, your intro here was really important to me. It's not just about your super power for profit. That's important because you have to stay in business, but that super power for purpose is equally as important. We didn't do an award this time for startups, but we have also been working with Hello Alice who set up an entire, saying a website is too small, but they've used AI and ML through SageMaker to tag stories and help for small businesses and other startups that are diverse either through gender or race or be in veteran-owned. They're doing an amazing thing. So we continue, at Amazon to focus on #techforgood, as I know, you guys do at "theCUBE" as well. >> Right, right. Well, we used to call it a word and the triple line accounting. So it's not only just for profitability, but also for your employees and your constituents, which include your customers and your partners, but also the broader community and doing well for the broader community. And I do think, the younger people today that are entering the workforce have really forced that conversation and raised the status of mission-based activities. And really trying to think beyond just the bottom line, you still need to make money cause you got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, but that shouldn't be the only thing. And it shouldn't be really at the expense of everything else. So that's great to hear. And again, I think that the tech for good angle is a really, really important one. It probably doesn't get enough pub compared to some of the other stuff that we see in the news. So Sandy, congratulations to you and the team for weeding through all the applicants, selecting these 18 lucky winners. And thank you for giving us the opportunity to interview a few of them and share their stories on "theCUBE" and on this program. And, that's what we love, love to do since we can't be together in person as we have been so many times in the past. >> Yeah, so Jeff, if we could just show that slide real quick as we end. As we end, I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of these partners who were here. All 18, you're going to get to hear most of them. I don't want to take away from their thunder, but I know that "theCUBE" has been doing interviews with them and their customers, see and hear the amazing stories that they have and how they really have helped customers beyond what we can normally even expect because they are award winners. So Jeff, thank you and "theCUBE" for helping us to find a way to get their stories out. Because it's not normal times, we didn't have our public conference, but this is a great way to celebrate each and every one of these 18. So I want to say, thank you, congratulations. And from the bottom of my heart, I appreciate all the great work that you're doing. And to the rest of our partners, I hope that I see you on this list in our next award ceremony. >> Alright, well, thank you Sandy, for those kind words. And without further ado, we will end this segment, this kickoff and people can jump into the award-winner segments and learn lots. And hopefully, it won't be too long, Sandy, till we can actually meet again in-person. So thank you for watching this portion and enjoy the rest of the show. (calm music)

(upbeat rhythmic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman, live in Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019. This is day three of the event. Can you hear all of that buzz behind us? It's been a very full event. 6,500 or so attendees, 140 vendors here in the Exhibitor Hall. New products, new announcements, we're very excited, speaking of new announcements, to welcome for the first time to theCUBE the CEO of Poly, Joe Burton. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Well thanks so much for having us, it's great. >> Our pleasure, so big news Plantronics, Polycom, rebranded as Poly this week. Big coming out part here, this is way more than a rebrand. Walk us through what you guys have just announced, and why this is so exciting for the industry? >> Well it really is an exciting time. An exciting time for all of us. About a year ago, to the day, we announced that Polycom and Plantronics were coming together as one company to provide a end-to-end set of end points for the entire UC industry. So no matter what cloud you're hooking to in the contact center, for unified communications, from the headset that rides on your body, to the desktop, to the huddle room, to the board room, we were going to provide every end point where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud. Very, very exciting. We were really looking for the right name to take us into the future. And frankly, Plantronics is a wonderful name, but it's very 60s sounding. Formed in 1961 by a couple of airline pilots to build headsets. Polycom, also a very good name, but a little old. We were looking for something short, punchy, tight, that really talked about everything that we do. And we were thinking about going down the route of an entirely new word, going the whole way. And one day a brilliant person on the brand team walked in and said, we can do both. We can have our heritage, our history, and we can go a different direction. Poly, Greek word for many. So many kinds of communication, many people, the power of many. Many ways of interacting. You actually look at our new logo it looks very much like a Polycom speakerphone of the past, it looks like an airline propellor for Plantronics, but it's also three Ps. Plantronics and Polycom coming together to form Poly. >> Joe, I do love that because that iconic speakerphone, heck, I sold some of those back in the 90s when I worked for one of the telecommunications company. There's still one sitting in our conference room in our boss scenario office today. Plantronics, of course, so known for so many of the different devices over the year. So maybe give us a little bit as to the coming together of Plantronics and Polycom, now as Poly. What's that mean for the future as we talk proliferation in devices, the line between what consumers expect and the Enterprise Connect. That's something we've been talking about for a couple of decades now. So what is Poly, into the future? >> You bet. So you see all these amazing communications, cloud providers around. Everybody is innovating in the cloud, they want to provide this software as a service that can enable all these great communications. But at the end of the day all of that Collaboration Cloud, gets accessed through a set of devices. Every single device where the end user touches the Collaboration Cloud actually comes from Poly. Like I said, the headset, the video conferencing, the audio conferencing and beyond. So as Poly we're going to build every single device that you need to access the cloud with a management layer, where you can understand each and every device. Is it on, is it off? Firmware upgrades, security patches, but so much more. You can actually understand usage data you've never seen before. So literally, because we're writing on the person, we're in the conference room, or on the desktop, we're in the open office area. We're in a position where we can actually tell you, these devices are being utilized but not these. That corner of the building is too noisy for good collaboration. Figure out what's going on. Even though the laptops in building 32 are telling you that there's no network problem, at the ear, we're actually seeing packet loss, and here's what we think you should do about it. So we think Poly literally brings something from the human perspective to the collaboration experience that just nobody else can do. >> We've heard a lot about the human element in it. Anytime we talk about emerging technologies, AI, ML, there's always that, oh the concerns about AI taking over jobs. But thematically, at this event, we've heard that it's got to be machines and humans augmenting. Whether we're talking about call center and it's agent delivery, but that human element, that relationship point, that voice, is really resounding at this event. It's absolutely hot again, still critical, whatever you want to call it. >> You're absolutely right. So what we're seeing very much when we look at AI and ML in our devices we're not in anyway seeing something that takes a job as much as helps you be your best self. What if you could be on your game, in the zone, instead of an hour or two a day but two, three, four times that much? And we think with some of the coaching we can do, using some of these AI and ML techniques. Through our devices, we can just help you be the best you can be all the time. >> Joe, at this show, we know it's a complex ecosystem. Something that I heard over and over again though, in the keynotes, is you've got a lot of partnerships. I heard many companies talking about, oh, and here's Poly devices. Heard it in the Microsoft keynote. We're here in the Five9 booth, we understand the partnership there. Talk about some of those partnerships, some of the news that was announced beyond just the company rebranding. >> Absolutely. Partnerships are our life blood. The reason we can be a great partner to so many companies is because, frankly, we don't compete against them for the cloud. We said we're going to do the user experience, we're going to be the end point. The management of the end point. But we've announced a lot of exciting things. Of course, Microsoft's a great partner to us. Zoom, and others, are a great partner. We announced this week a partnership with Google around Google Voice where we're the first and only certified Google Voice set of phones, at this point. Great announcements with Amazon around Chime and Alexa for business. Both in our trio speakerphones but also in the headsets. So I can actually touch the button and access Alexa straight through the headsets as well. And then of course companies like Five9 that are just an amazing, amazing partner to us. They have such an incredible product. Our headsets are on the vast mass majority of their agents. And when we look ahead at some of the unique analytics that we can do out of our headsets, some of the things they're trying to do, we just see an unbeatable combination with so many of these companies. >> What have been some of the feedback that you've heard from some of your customers and partners? This week, with such big news coming out and you mentioned a big spectrum-- >> Yeah. >> Of very big partners. Tell us about some of the feedbacks that you're getting from customers. >> Well I have to say, it has really been a thrilling week. The rebranding of the company as Poly, we had done all the research, we thought it was the right thing to do, the right name, the right heritage, plus being fresh. But it has been just overwhelmingly, you nailed it. I think from our customers and partners just a real excitement that they knew that Plantronics and Polycom were a premier end point provider, maybe the premier. But to see us partnered with so many of the cloud providers, as the predominant partner they're just seeing us in a whole new light, it's fantastic. >> Joe, one of the things we've been looking at is how Omnichannel's been changing over time. We talked about this show used to be VoiceCon. >> Yup. >> And a few years ago voice was a little bit lower on people's radar, but today a lot of voice, a lot of video. Of course it plays right into your heritage at the company. I'd love to hear what you're hearing from your customers as to the trends of the importance of voice and the ever growing importance of video. >> I think you nailed it in many ways, Stu. I think everybody has figured out that if voice isn't perfect the collaboration session isn't perfect. Even in a video conferencing call, we can put up with the video pixelating a little bit, as long as the voice is excellent. If the voice goes down, you don't have a session. So voice has to be fantastic. The end point plays a huge part in that. Working very carefully with our partners to make sure voice is absolute, is just fantastic. One of the other things on video that I think is really interesting is, we are really moving to, I guess I would say, a post speeds and feeds world. A few years ago all we heard is, are you VGA, are you force F? To use old words. Are you 1080p, are you 4K? Our product that won best of show yesterday in the product category, the Polycom Studio, a brand new video product for The Huddle Room. Really fascinating. Incredible good video, dead simple to use. I've probably been involved in 60 or 100 demos down here in the booth and done dozens of briefings on it. Nobody has asked me, what's the resolution of the camera? (Stu chuckling) What codec does it use? We've moved into a world of, it looks excellent, tell me about ease of use, tell me about the training. So I really think we're moving to a different world with that consumer expectation you talked about earlier of don't really care about those specifications anymore, it has to just work. >> That's a theme also Joe that we've heard from every guest that we've had on, as well as on the main stage. That that's what consumers, we are so demanding, we are so empowered, we have all this information and we expect that, to transact business as simply as we do things if we're buying something on Amazon or downloading something from Spotify, that simplicity is key. People say, it just has to work. Not so easy to be able to deliver, but it sounds like what you're saying is, people in your booth are getting it and it's so obvious to them that some of those speeds and feeds they just don't matter because it's so effective. >> Well you're absolutely right, the only thing I would disagree on is how hard it is. It really is just a matter of pivoting the company. So this has been a huge part of the Poly story. A couple of years ago as we were starting this journey of Plantronics and then as we brought Polycom in to form Poly we've really turned it on it's head. I mean our product managers, our engineers, we've got them out there with users, we ask users, not leading questions, but just in your wildest dreams, how do you see this working? Show me how you would do this as a consumer and we'll add the absolute minimum pieces in to add enterprise reliability, enterprise security, privacy, et cetera, et cetera. But we're really starting from that end user perspective and absolutely delighting them. And then adding what IT wants as opposed to the other way around which is where I think this industry was stuck for 10 or 15 years. >> Alright. So Joe, as a public company, I'm not going to ask too much but if we look down the road what should we be looking now that you've got the full resources together, you've got the rebranding, what should we expect as industry watchers to see from Poly kind of the next six to 12 months? >> So I think you'll see three or four things. We've talked about it publicly before. Number one, you'll see us just finish refreshing the product portfolio so every single product has the Poly look, has the Poly name, very consumer friendly, consumer forward, a consumer forward design and simplicity. So, best products across the board on the hardware side. Incredible ability to manage the products where you can understand every single one of them and then bringing those analytics and AI type functionality to these products that make the user their best self. That don't do weird things for them, that are a little scary, but really, really, really just anticipate their needs, help them do exactly what they want and you'll see even deeper and more partnerships. We are a partner company, we're going to live and die by partnerships, and we're going to be the best at it. >> Well Joe thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE. Again, congratulations on a momentous week with the launch of Poly, we look forward to hearing great news to come in the future. >> Fantastic, thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. >> Yup. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now at AWS re:Invent. Seven kind of satellite venues also encompassing this show with 40,000 plus attendees. This show getting bigger and better than ever, and theCUBE back for out seventh AWS re:Invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. Good to have you have you here in the Sands along with Holger Reisinger who's the SVP of Large Enterprise Solutions at Jabra. And Holger thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I think with all this noise we could use some headsets right now, right? >> I totally agree. >> I think we could, yeah. Alright, let's talk about the, it's a situation we've all faced, right? You're making a call about a particular problem to a company you get into the call center, your focus right now is making that interaction work. To make it go smoothly, to make it go well. Tell us what Jabra is doing to make us hang up that phone and feel a lot better about that experience. So, first and foremost, when customers are calling contact center operations these days they have been on a pretty intense journey, on a digital journey collecting a lot of information. So when they call us, it's because it really is important to them, it matters. For the agent that means that the call is much more complex because we have a lot of systems in place that automate basic conversations, maybe handled by a robot, so when it hits an agent then it's probably a more heated conversation, more emotional. And this is where we try to make a difference with out devices. >> Yeah, so tell us more about that. I mean Jabra is well known for being a headset manufacturer and you're doing a lot of work with software. We were talking just before the segment about some of what you're doing there around sentiment analysis which is pretty interesting. But a lot of what you're talking about here is around people and process and less about the technology. So, what's Jabra's vision for your role wtih helping customers about that entire experience and not just about the technology? >> Well I would say it's always a combination of technology. When it comes to people it's about behavior, and then when it comes to being the face to the customers maybe using the opportunity to get engaged with your customers by them escalating something to you. I think it's about culture, how you want your company to be portrayed in the public. So I would say it's always a combination of those things. Our devices per definition we call them variable technology. They are personal devices. They are more and more intelligent nowadays, right? So they're not just an accessory to a phone system transmitting human audio. They are now a business critical element of the whole infrastructure. The are digital. They are intelligent. And they can probably also listen to how people say things and not just what has been said in that conversation. >> So what is it about Jabra's technology that augments that human experience? So, I'm calling an agent, and I want to talk to them about a problem which is very personal to me, sometimes I'm grumpy about it because I've had a bad experience. So what is it about Jabra's technology that helps that agent to resolve the issue so that I, again as John said, that I walk away from that experience and I feel good about myself? >> Yes. So first of all this happens because we are integrated into something like Amazon Connect, right? Amazon Connect running on AWSS, a lot of technology in the backend working for that situation so you can get the call transcribed. You can look for certain key words. This is very much about what people are saying. We can provide very high intelligibility or clarity of human voice. So we have algorithms, AI technology that can also listen to how people say things. So there's a big difference if you apply let's say irony or sarcasm. So that is an information we can pass on to the agent to be more alert, to be more immersed in the conversation he has with the customer. And this is mainly coming by the signal quality we deliver thorough our devices. So we have crystal clear human voice. We can stream that as raw information directly to the cloud, and it can be immediately analyzed and handled there. >> And can you detect tone? Or emotion, sentiment, those kinds of things? >> Yes, exactly. >> If my volume goes up, or I can say the same thing three different ways, and you can discern maybe my emotional tone by assigning what? >> That's exactly what we are doing. So we can extract human sentiment from human voice. And it doesn't require a lot of data, sometimes one and a half two seconds are enough. It's language independent by the way. So that's really exciting. So we are providing proof of concept where you can as a new KPI for the contact center let's say measure agent friendliness against customer anger. So instead of doing a lot of recording and transcription, analytics, you can measure that in real time and show it as a graph in front of the agent, and the agent can adjust to that conversation. >> Now, there's a lot of face-to-face going on here, right? We have 40,000 people; a lot of pressing to the flesh. But as you know, I mean there's a lot of communication and a lot of meetings that are migrating online, right? So I assume you're pretty active in that space as well. >> Sure. So I mean, you're now leaving the contact center space and in general, saying having online conversations, online collaboration not just between agent. Yes, I mean that's how our core business. We are the leader in unified communication. In the old days it was you and me talking, having conversation. Now you collaborate; you share applications. You use technology giants like Amazon Chime. You might add video to it. So we deliver the crystal clear audio for these type of collaboration situations. >> As someone who lives on the other side of the world it's quite handy having these remote technologies to be able to converse with my colleagues up here in the Northern Hemisphere. So certainly being able to hear them clearly is quite important. >> But there's also an issue associated with that, right? I mean we put people into open offices because we want them to collaborate more locally, and that actually causes a problem for most of the people like here in these surroundings, it's extremely noisy. So I have difficulties to right now concentrate on the questions you are asking me. And it's the same thing in an open office, right? So you try to focus first and foremost on the conversation you are having with the person on the line. So we need to help you to basically cancel out the surrounding noise. At the same time we want to provide privacy for that dialog so we also have to reduce the noise in that conversation that the person on the phone we are talking to feels safe and secure about the conversation he is having with me. So managing noise in this open office environment, managing noise on the line is the key technology we are dealing with, and our devices are providing. >> So you're here at AWS. You're here clearly talking about your partnership with AWS and your use of cloud technologies. So what would you like to see from Amazon that would help you realize the vision for Jabra? >> So I mean we have a very close cooperation with Amazon and pushing Connect, and pushing digital contact centers. Pushing the ease of making things more digital, and by that easy to use as a company, but also to understand as a user of that technology. This is exactly the direction we want to want to be and want to go. Because our devices are mainly digital nowadays. I mean there's a lot of computing that is happening in the device in order to get the best sound the best pick-up of human voce, but also provide crystal clear sound when we receive that audio. So anything Amazon is doing to drive things digital is definitely in our favor. But also what we like to do more is engaging with Amazon developers. So our strategy is to be very open with any technology, including the one from Amazon, being agnostic to what our joint customers are using, providing SDKs and APIs for developers that are simple for them to use. And them building together a great solution for out joint customers. >> You know we always like to close down with the thought about where do you go from here? Or what hurdle do you want to get over next? Cause you've talked about a lot of fantastic capabilities that you already have, what do you want to do better? And how will AWS help get you there? >> So I mean provide the right information exactly to the context the caller and the agent is in. That we can really augment AI and all the technology that works in the backend with the brain of the agent and with the user. So make it easy for them have great conversations with each other. Augment computer intelligence and human intelligence for great customer conversations, ultimately leading to better satisfaction. >> And how does AWS play into that then? >> I mean that's the data center. This is where all the information is sitting. It can become audible. It can be over-layed to the conversation the agent is having so it can provide useful information while we are listening to the customer because our hearing is very powerful. It's faster than our vision. It is multitasking; we can have 1.6 conversation at a time so we can listen to a machine, we can listen to the person we are talking to, and we can provide smarter information and make better decisions based on that. >> I kind of feel like we're having 50 conversations at once right now, right? >> Yeah, that's challenging of us for sure. >> Holger thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> We appreciate that. Thanks for walking us through it. >> Thanks >> We're at AWS re:Invent, and we are theCUBE, and we're live in Las Vegas. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (Caribbean music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here for exclusive CUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, a great conference where entrepreneurs and leaders are all here, coming together at a global level. You've got investors, you've got entrepreneurs, you've got the ecosystem developing. We've got it covered for you, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Next guest, Joe Mohen, CEO of Chimes, industry executive, a lot of experience doing an ICO, doing some great work, Joe welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So, tell us first what Chimes is doing. You've got an interesting approach with music. What are you guys doing? Is there an ICO in the future? Have you done an ICO? Give the quick update. >> Okay, sure. Chimes is a digital media company, and we are consolidating music-related search results on Google in a similar way to what Amazon did with IMDB, consolidating film and television results many years ago. Amazon built an audience of about quarter of a billion to half a billion monthly users, and we expect we can create an audience on that order of magnitude over time. Just like IMDB is the third largest entertainment website in the world, it is our objective to create the fourth largest one. >> What's the value proposition there? Acquire audience, use that audience to tokenize? How does the token economics fit into all this? >> Well, first, like any media company, the first thing you have to get is an audience, right? I remember I interviewed for a job at CBS when I was out of college, and in the interview they said, "Do you know what we make here?" And I said, "You make TV shows." They go, "No, we make audiences." So we have to make an audience with a good product. The audience will be driven primarily by search, okay? But we also do have a double ICO in our future. First, we monetize the big audience. You can monetize with advertising, but that's not enough to make big money anymore, right, we all know that. So we have a layer of crypto products over and above that that we're going to be launching, including, for example, inter-country commerce, hiring producers in another country, hiring songwriters, et cetera, but automating that so we can do it on scale with smart contract. So we are creating a micro-currency that we can use on the website. We're doing an ICO for that but that's not for the purpose of raising capital. >> That's more part of the business model. >> That's part of the business model. >> That's not the financial aspect of it. >> Correct, and that's done so we can scale international commerce with automation. We're doing an actual ICO for the equity, for securities tokens as well. I've done a full IPO myself. My first company, I had Microsoft and Novell as my shareholders and it was a full S1, full registration. >> Interviewer: You went through the whole process. >> Yeah, but I also did a Form 10 once, ten years ago, for another reason. So what we're doing is possibly the first, certainly one of the first, but I think the first registration with the SEC of a company actually doing an ICO. And we're doing that using, I don't want to call it a loophole in securities laws, but there is a provision in the 1934 Securities Act called Section 12G. And what this does is it allows us basically to go public by telling the SEC we're doing it without having to delay it to wait for their permission. A Form 10 looks just like an S1, but when you file it, it's automatically effective 60 days after you file it, period. And so what we're doing is-- >> Period, full stop, no issues, no questions. >> Joe: No issue, right. >> So do you have to fill out all the same paperwork, the S1, >> Correct. >> the normal format, do the business plan, the normal paperwork? >> Joe: No, right, in 1930-- >> But there's no comments coming back? You just chip it to them? >> Comments come back and you have to clear them, just like with a prospectus, just like with an S1, however that doesn't delay it becoming effective. It's effective 60 days later. >> So they can be commenting during the 60 day time clock going on, but after 60 days, you're in. >> It's effective. So we'll continue to clear comments, but the thing is, with tokens, who knows how long that'll take? Is the SEC going to shepherd something through with crypto, or are they going to make it take five years? I don't know! Who knows? So, the thing is, we are complying with all of the laws for registration, but 60 days after we file it, it's effective. What we're doing is, in the pre-sale for the tokens, we're not issuing the tokens themselves to the buyers of the pre-sale for six months. The reason for that is they will have met the statutory holding period. So once the Form 10 is effective, those buyers can sell freely on token exchanges-- >> And what's the statutory holding period, six months? >> Generally six months. There's a few exceptions for affiliates, like an insider like me. >> I'm confused, a holding period kicks in before or after six months? >> After six months, the statutory holding period is satisfied. >> So you're going to wait to delay them anyway six months. >> Joe: Yes. >> So that covers the holding period. >> Correct, and then we file the Form 10, and 60 days later, they can trade and anybody can buy them. >> So do you file a Form 10 before the six month holding period? >> It'll be at about the same time. The reason being is because we have to get all the ducks in a row to be a public company. >> Cutting edge advice here, this is fantastic. So you're basically going to be the first ICO that actually files with the SEC. >> Correct. >> I mean, who does that, nobody. You! >> Watch us! >> John: That's awesome. >> Basically, we're using a provision, it's like we went back in time to 1934, got them to put something in the 1934 Securities Act for the purposes of ICO's, and then we came back to 2018 with the time machine-- >> Are you from the future? Back to the future! You went back and jerry rigged it. Hey, we should put this Form 10 in there! >> Joe: There you go! That's right. >> It could come in handy some day during the crypto bubble. >> Joe: That's right. >> So let's back to the cryptocurrency thing. I think you're onto something that I think is a tell sign that I haven't seen yet. I've been seeing some formation of it. You are using two types of tokens. Your business model is do security token for funding, trade that puppy through the Form 10. Utility token, a separate ICO for the product, and that's going to have one token, two tokens? >> There's one utility token, so to speak, one currency token, and that has its own regulations that you have to manage to also. But that's designed to appreciate, but not to go up 17 times. >> Okay, I want to dig into that for a second, because you mentioned scale. You're going to scale your business model with the utility token. That's the purpose of the utility token. So let's get into how you're going to do these smart contracts. Let's just say that a producer in Europe somewhere, in Italy, says, "Hey, I'm going to do something "with Joe in the UK." And they form a collaboration. >> Joe: That's right. >> Do they use that utility token or a new token gets created? >> No, that utility token. It's called a Chime, the Chime token. And what happens with that token is you can build in the contract administration through the token. Right now, you can do international deals. People do them every day. The difficulty is if you've got an audience of a half a billion people a month, for example, to do that on scale and automate it... Right now, if you do a deal with somebody in Japan, you, the American, has to have an American lawyer and a Japanese lawyer. And if there's a dispute, good luck suing. I, one time, a customer in Hong Kong, owed me a million and a half bucks and he's like, "Sue me." I'm in New York, he's in Hong Kong, and good luck. >> Did you do the New York thing? I'm flying over there and going to break your legs! >> We bitched and complained, threatened them, and ultimately we settled on 30 cents on the dollar, so we did, that's exactly what happened. With a situation like this, with smart contracts, neither side has to hire two sets of lawyers in the other country-- >> So Chime takes care of that. You want Chime to take care of that administrative inefficiency? >> Correct. The company might still get involved in administering exceptions but not everyone single one. What the smart contract does is it allows you to scale international business. The key is international business, and that's a new efficiency into the market, and that's a great-- >> And in the business model, what does that scale mean to you for operationalizing it? More people, do you have to hire them? >> More cash. No, less people and more cash because there's more automation, right? It means more software development-- >> Where's the cash coming from? >> We have a lot of revenue products. Like the obvious, like every other website, we have subscription revenue and advertising revenue. Subscription revenue comes from like... You know how IMDB is the LinkedIn of the TV and film business? So we'll have that too. >> It's not really large, though. It can be. >> Amazon could make it larger if they wanted to. They have their reasons for doing it the way they do it. But, in our case, I'll give you an example of some revenue products. Let's say you want to crowdfund a project. So let's say you want a bunch of Taylor Swift fans to crowdfund a project for her to do a duet with Kanye West. Sounds preposterous, but it's goofy enough. You'd be amazed, Stormy Daniels is crowdfunding a project for her legal bills with Donald Trump, and I betcha it's going to get funded, right? >> John: I would agree. >> So there's a lot of nutty stuff that gets crowdfunded. >> The wisdom of the crowd is actually efficient. >> Yes, that's right, and the whims of the crowd. But also, I'll give you another example. Let's say people want, if they go to a webpage about an artist, the band All American Rejects, for example, and Wheeler, one of the band members... Ten years ago, you could have given your niece a gift of a CD of All American Rejects. Well, good luck now. They wouldn't even know what a CD is in many cases, right? But what you could do is say, "Hey, you know what? "I'll give you a gift of a Google Hangouts chat with him, "And I'll pay $200 for that, or $500 for it." >> It's probably a bot, but anyway, how do you make this happen? This is really important. You're creating value by allowing people to collaborate in a way that's different, so that scales. Is that going to be done in the Chime contract or it's all going to be part of one currency? >> One currency, that's right. We're very careful. We brought in as an advisor, Rod Garrett, who gave one of the keynotes here yesterday. Rod Garrett is the money supply economist from UCSB, but he was also former VP of the New York Fed, he was the leader at the New York Fed for cryptocurrency. Rod is one of the smartest people I've ever met. >> You know him? >> Very well now, and you know what, Rod can explain the most complex things in simple words, which means he actually understands them. So we've actually used Fisher's equation to help model the utility token value over time. And, again, it's designed to appreciate, but we don't want nutty appreciation because then it'll be useless as a currency, right? We have fixed supply, the Bitcoin principle, the fixed supply and stable market so we can keep it reasonably stable. >> You're using the utility token to create value on your network so the creators can capture that value. >> Correct. >> That's what you're doing with the utility. The security is the money making side. How are you backing the security token, with equity or cash flow? >> Equity, and very important, really important, if you did a percentage of revenue or royalties, it wouldn't work, and I'll tell you why. It wouldn't scale, because we're looking five years out, 10 years out, for this to be a good investment. We want investors to buy it. And if you, let's say you need to do a secondary, because an acquisition becomes available, because you're low on money or whatever. Then how do you do a secondary if you've already given away 20% of your revenue to token holders. What if you have to do a secondary or tertiary capital round? How many rounds were necessary for Spotify, I happen to know Spotify, it was six, right? Facebook, Google, how many founds of financing did they do? A lot, and by the way, they still might do more. >> So basically the revenue share is hair on the deal. It really puts a lot of hair on the deal. >> Destroys it, in my opinion, destroys it. It's a dressing thing, but look, if you're really going to grow to a major company and have, be it five or 10 year success, it kills it. This is my opinion. >> What percentage of equity, say they're going to do a 50 million dollar raise, hard cap, soft cap, say 25, that's what seems to be the norm right now, what would be a percentage of equity converting to tokens that you'd see? >> In Chimes' case, we have a Common A class of stock. We're creating a preferred class of stock called a Series T which, if fully sold, would be about 43% of the equity of the company. They had to do it preferred stock, because there's too many, in Delaware Corporate Law, which all the tech companies are all Delaware, common stock would be very difficult to make a token. You can do whatever you want with preferred. So the preferred is more flexible, so it's actual equity, actual shares, it's not a derivative, it's not a rev share, it's not a royalty, it's actual equity. >> It's paper that converts nicely and it scales on the business side. >> So you say, "What's the evaluation?" >> We're selling 100 million dollars worth of the equity, or we're offering 100 million dollars of the equity, the pre-sale evaluation is a little over 200 million. In Chimes' cases, that's because we're not a startup, we're an early stage company. >> How old is the company? >> Pardon me? >> How old is the company? >> Three and a half years. >> So you weren't born yesterday. >> We acquired music databases that were built at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in Europe, funded by the richest guy in Europe, who built it out and then got tired of it, tired of funding it, and then we were able to pick it up basically for equity deals. We picked it up and we're buying a second music database also that's a very big one. So it's not like we're a startup with an idea and a business plan. >> No, you've got assets, and you've got momentum, good management, you obviously know what you're doing. It's awesome. You've got a great scalability mindset. You've got a nicely packaged, clear target. >> That's right, so we're probably a little bit different than a lot of crypto startups, in that, a lot of brilliant entrepreneurs that you see here, but we've been around the block with having to do IPO's, having to do exits, having to do... And you know, I'm a contrarian, right? I was getting a lot of advice yesterday from a lot of really smart people saying, "Hey, raise the money overseas through a foundation." >> "Everyone's doing it!" >> Look, I'm going to take a contrarian approach. >> I'm just going to comply with the law, by doing the registration. And they say, "What if your utility token has to comply "with money transfer laws?" Then we'll comply with them! It's like look, the contrarian approach is, whatever the law is, follow it! It gives us the flex-- >> The thing is you're actually doing what they want you to do, notifying them of what you're doing, and you have a utility! >> By separating out the token into two, one that has the attributes of currency, one that has the attributes of an equity, neither one is screwing up the other. >> I agree, that's really smart, and very novel. A lot of smart people are going down that road because it's actually known things people can understand. Security token is paperwork that you can do. >> Yes, but I'll tell you the other thing that feels very important, a pretty important point to make. By doing registration, the resale can go to anybody. My personal opinion, is you know these second market type of approaches that you can only resale them to accredited investors or to foreign investors or whatever, I think that's mistake. I think what happens is people who take that approach are going to find that the resale value of the token, or the token that has securities is going to be about 10% of what it would have been otherwise. >> If they only do accredited? >> Well yeah, because here's the thing. First, it's not only that they got to be accredited-- >> How do you get around the security token? >> Because it's registered. The waitress working the bar here can buy a publicly traded equity if it's registered, right? She can buy a publicly traded token-- >> That's the Form 10 that you were talking about. >> Right, Form 10 registers the company. The initial batch of trading will be done under 144 because the token holds will evolve over six months, so they can sell them at their leisure, right? There are exceptions, by the way, like an affiliate might have to do some form filing. I would have to file a Form 3, you know, the usual stuff. But, a regular token investor, he can do whatever he wants. And I can call them investors. I can do business in the United States. I don't have to pretend I'm domiciled in a country you've never heard of, right? So it's like look, I'm an American, my staff is mostly American, we do business in America, let's follow American law instead of-- >> Joe, this is a great conversation. We're getting down and dirty under the hood, capital structure, business models, Chimes' really interesting approach. Joe, thanks for sharing that great data here on theCUBE. Section 12G of the 1934 Securities Act. Form 10 is the secret weapon that was built by aliens before us to allow us to get this special clause in there for crypto. I'd love to continue this conversation another time. I think there's four or five things we just identified, great great topics, thanks for sharing. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Puerto Rico, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more after this short break. (digital jingle)

>> Announcer: Please welcome Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Ariel Kelman. (applause) (techno music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I hope you guys are having a great day here. It is my pleasure to introduce to come up on stage here, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy. (applause) (techno music) >> Okay. Let's get started. I have a bunch of questions here for you, Andy. >> Just like one of our meetings, Ariel. >> Just like one of our meetings. So, I thought I'd start with a little bit of a state of the state on AWS. Can you give us your quick take? >> Yeah, well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for being here. We really appreciate it. We know how busy you guys are. So, hope you're having a good day. You know, the business is growing really quickly. In the last financials, we released, in Q four of '16, AWS is a 14 billion dollar revenue run rate business, growing 47% year over year. We have millions of active customers, and we consider an active customer as a non-Amazon entity that's used the platform in the last 30 days. And it's really a very broad, diverse customer set, in every imaginable size of customer and every imaginable vertical business segment. And I won't repeat all the customers that I know Werner went through earlier in the keynote, but here are just some of the more recent ones that you've seen, you know NELL is moving their their digital and their connected devices, meters, real estate to AWS. McDonalds is re-inventing their digital platform on top of AWS. FINRA is moving all in to AWS, yeah. You see at Reinvent, Workday announced AWS was its preferred cloud provider, and to start building on top of AWS further. Today, in press releases, you saw both Dunkin Donuts and Here, the geo-spatial map company announced they'd chosen AWS as their provider. You know and then I think if you look at our business, we have a really large non-US or global customer base and business that continues to expand very dramatically. And we're also aggressively increasing the number of geographic regions in which we have infrastructure. So last year in 2016, on top of the broad footprint we had, we added Korea, India, and Canada, and the UK. We've announced that we have regions coming, another one in China, in Ningxia, as well as in France, as well as in Sweden. So we're not close to being done expanding geographically. And then of course, we continue to iterate and innovate really quickly on behalf of all of you, of our customers. I mean, just last year alone, we launched what we considered over 1,000 significant services and features. So on average, our customers wake up every day and have three new capabilities they can choose to use or not use, but at their disposal. You've seen it already this year, if you look at Chime, which is our new unified communication service. It makes meetings much easier to conduct, be productive with. You saw Connect, which is our new global call center routing service. If you look even today, you look at Redshift Spectrum, which makes it easy to query all your data, not just locally on disk in your data warehouse but across all of S3, or DAX, which puts a cash in front of DynamoDB, we use the same interface, or all the new features in our machine learning services. We're not close to being done delivering and iterating on your behalf. And I think if you look at that collection of things, it's part of why, as Gartner looks out at the infrastructure space, they estimate the AWS is several times the size business of the next 14 providers combined. It's a pretty significant market segment leadership position. >> You talked a lot about adopts in there, a lot of customers moving to AWS, migrating large numbers of workloads, some going all in on AWS. And with that as kind of backdrop, do you still see a role for hybrid as being something that's important for customers? >> Yeah, it's funny. The quick answer is yes. I think the, you know, if you think about a few years ago, a lot of the rage was this debate about private cloud versus what people call public cloud. And we don't really see that debate very often anymore. I think relatively few companies have had success with private clouds, and most are pretty substantially moving in the direction of building on top of clouds like AWS. But, while you increasingly see more and more companies every month announcing that they're going all in to the cloud, we will see most enterprises operate in some form of hybrid mode for the next number of years. And I think in the early days of AWS and the cloud, I think people got confused about this, where they thought that they had to make this binary decision to either be all in on the public cloud and AWS or not at all. And of course that's not the case. It's not a binary decision. And what we know many of our enterprise customers want is they want to be able to run the data centers that they're not ready to retire yet as seamlessly as they can alongside of AWS. And it's why we've built a lot of the capabilities we've built the last several years. These are things like PPC, which is our virtual private cloud, which allows you to cordon off a portion of our network, deploy resources into it and connect to it through VPN or Direct Connect, which is a private connection between your data centers and our regions or our storage gateway, which is a virtual storage appliance, or Identity Federation, or a whole bunch of capabilities like that. But what we've seen, even though the vast majority of the big hybrid implementations today are built on top of AWS, as more and more of the mainstream enterprises are now at the point where they're really building substantial cloud adoption plans, they've come back to us and they've said, well, you know, actually you guys have made us make kind of a binary decision. And that's because the vast majority of the world is virtualized on top of VMWare. And because VMWare and AWS, prior to a few months ago, had really done nothing to try and make it easy to use the VMWare tools that people have been using for many years seamlessly with AWS, customers were having to make a binary choice. Either they stick with the VMWare tools they've used for a while but have a really tough time integrating with AWS, or they move to AWS and they have to leave behind the VMWare tools they've been using. And it really was the impetus for VMWare and AWS to have a number of deep conversations about it, which led to the announcement we made late last fall of VMWare and AWS, which is going to allow customers who have been using the VMWare tools to manage their infrastructure for a long time to seamlessly be able to run those on top of AWS. And they get to do so as they move workloads back and forth and they evolve their hybrid implementation without having to buy any new hardware, which is a big deal for companies. Very few companies are looking to find ways to buy more hardware these days. And customers have been very excited about this prospect. We've announced that it's going to be ready in the middle of this year. You see companies like Amadeus and Merck and Western Digital and the state of Louisiana, a number of others, we've a very large, private beta and preview happening right now. And people are pretty excited about that prospect. So we will allow customers to run in the mode that they want to run, and I think you'll see a huge transition over the next five to 10 years. >> So in addition to hybrid, another question we get a lot from enterprises around the concept of lock-in and how they should think about their relationship with the vendor and how they should think about whether to spread the workloads across multiple infrastructure providers. How do you think about that? >> Well, it's a question we get a lot. And Oracle has sure made people care about that issue. You know, I think people are very sensitive about being locked in, given the experience that they've had over the last 10 to 15 years. And I think the reality is when you look at the cloud, it really is nothing like being locked into something like Oracle. The APIs look pretty similar between the various providers. We build an open standard, it's like Linux and MySQL and Postgres. All the migration tools that we build allow you to migrate in or out of AWS. It's up to customers based on how they want to run their workload. So it is much easier to move away from something like the cloud than it is from some of the old software services that has created some of this phobia. But I think when you look at most CIOs, enterprise CIOs particularly, as they think about moving to the cloud, many of them started off thinking that they, you know, very well might split their workloads across multiple cloud providers. And I think when push comes to shove, very few decide to do so. Most predominately pick an infrastructure provider to run their workloads. And the reason that they don't split it across, you know, pretty evenly across clouds is a few reasons. Number one, if you do so, you have to standardize in the lowest common denominator. And these platforms are in radically different stages at this point. And if you look at something like AWS, it has a lot more functionality than anybody else by a large margin. And we're also iterating more quickly than you'll find from the other providers. And most folks don't want to tie the hands of their developers behind their backs in the name of having the ability of splitting it across multiple clouds, cause they actually are, in most of their spaces, competitive, and they have a lot of ideas that they want to actually build and invent on behalf of their customers. So, you know, they don't want to actually limit their functionality. It turns out the second reason is that they don't want to force their development teams to have to learn multiple platforms. And most development teams, if any of you have managed multiple stacks across different technologies, and many of us have had that experience, it's a pain in the butt. And trying to make a shift from what you've been doing for the last 30 years on premises to the cloud is hard enough. But then forcing teams to have to get good at running across two or three platforms is something most teams don't relish, and it's wasteful of people's time, it's wasteful of natural resources. That's the second thing. And then the third reason is that you effectively diminish your buying power because all of these cloud providers have volume discounts, and then you're splitting what you buy across multiple providers, which gives you a lower amount you buy from everybody at a worse price. So when most CIOs and enterprises look at this carefully, they don't actually end up splitting it relatively evenly. They predominately pick a cloud provider. Some will just pick one. Others will pick one and then do a little bit with a second, just so they know they can run with a second provider, in case that relationship with the one they choose to predominately run with goes sideways in some fashion. But when you really look at it, CIOs are not making that decision to split it up relatively evenly because it makes their development teams much less capable and much less agile. >> Okay, let's shift gears a little bit, talk about a subject that's on the minds of not just enterprises but startups and government organizations and pretty much every organization we talk to. And that's AI and machine learning. Reinvent, we introduced our Amazon AI services and just this morning Werner announced the general availability of Amazon Lex. So where are we overall on machine learning? >> Well it's a hugely exciting opportunity for customers, and I think, we believe it's exciting for us as well. And it's still in the relatively early stages, if you look at how people are using it, but it's something that we passionately believe is going to make a huge difference in the world and a huge difference with customers, and that we're investing a pretty gigantic amount of resource and capability for our customers. And I think the way that we think about, at a high level, the machine learning and deep learning spaces are, you know, there's kind of three macro layers of the stack. I think at that bottom layer, it's generally for the expert machine learning practitioners, of which there are relatively few in the world. It's a scarce resource relative to what I think will be the case in five, 10 years from now. And these are folks who are comfortable working with deep learning engines, know how to build models, know how to tune those models, know how to do inference, know how to get that data from the models into production apps. And for that group of people, if you look at the vast majority of machine learning and deep learning that's being done in the cloud today, it's being done on top of AWS, are P2 instances, which are optimized for deep learning and our deep learning AMIs, that package, effectively the deep learning engines and libraries inside those AMIs. And you see companies like Netflix, Nvidia, and Pinterest and Stanford and a whole bunch of others that are doing significant amounts of machine learning on top of those optimized instances for machine learning and the deep learning AMIs. And I think that you can expect, over time, that we'll continue to build additional capabilities and tools for those expert practitioners. I think we will support and do support every single one of the deep learning engines on top of AWS, and we have a significant amount of those workloads with all those engines running on top of AWS today. We also are making, I would say, a disproportionate investment of our own resources and the MXNet community just because if you look at running deep learning models once you get beyond a few GPUs, it's pretty difficult to have those scale as you get into the hundreds of GPUs. And most of the deep learning engines don't scale very well horizontally. And so what we've found through a lot of extensive testing, cause remember, Amazon has thousands of deep learning experts inside the company that have built very sophisticated deep learning capabilities, like the ones you see in Alexa, we have found that MXNet scales the best and almost linearly, as we continue to add nodes, as we continue to horizontally scale. So we have a lot of investment at that bottom layer of the stack. Now, if you think about most companies with developers, it's still largely inaccessible to them to do the type of machine learning and deep learning that they'd really like to do. And that's because the tools, I think, are still too primitive. And there's a number of services out there, we built one ourselves in Amazon Machine Learning that we have a lot of customers use, and yet I would argue that all of those services, including our own, are still more difficult than they should be for everyday developers to be able to build machine learning and access machine learning and deep learning. And if you look at the history of what AWS has done, in every part of our business, and a lot of what's driven us, is trying to democratize technologies that were really only available and accessible before to a select, small number of companies. And so we're doing a lot of work at what I would call that middle layer of the stack to get rid of a lot of the muck associated with having to do, you know, building the models, tuning the models, doing the inference, figuring how to get the data into production apps, a lot of those capabilities at that middle layer that we think are really essential to allow deep learning and machine learning to reach its full potential. And then at the top layer of the stack, we think of those as solutions. And those are things like, pass me an image and I'll tell you what that image is, or show me this face, does it match faces in this group of faces, or pass me a string of text and I'll give you an mpg file, or give me some words and what your intent is and then I'll be able to return answers that allow people to build conversational apps like the Lex technology. And we have a whole bunch of other services coming in that area, atop of Lex and Polly and Recognition, and you can imagine some of those that we've had to use in Amazon over the years that we'll continue to make available for you, our customers. So very significant level of investment at all three layers of that stack. We think it's relatively early days in the space but have a lot of passion and excitement for that. >> Okay, now for ML and AI, we're seeing customers wanting to load in tons of data, both to train the models and to actually process data once they've built their models. And then outside of ML and AI, we're seeing just as much demand to move in data for analytics and traditional workloads. So as people are looking to move more and more data to the cloud, how are we thinking about making it easier to get data in? >> It's a great question. And I think it's actually an often overlooked question because a lot of what gets attention with customers is all the really interesting services that allow you to do everything from compute and storage and database and messaging and analytics and machine learning and AI. But at the end of the day, if you have a significant amount of data already somewhere else, you have to get it into the cloud to be able to take advantage of all these capabilities that you don't have on premises. And so we have spent a disproportionate amount of focus over the last few years trying to build capabilities for our customers to make this easier. And we have a set of capabilities that really is not close to matched anywhere else, in part because we have so many customers who are asking for help in this area that it's, you know, that's really what drives what we build. So of course, you could use the good old-fashioned wire to send data over the internet. Increasingly, we find customers that are trying to move large amounts of data into S3, is using our S3 transfer acceleration service, which basically uses our points of presence, or POPs, all over the world to expedite delivery into S3. You know, a few years ago, we were talking to a number of companies that were looking to make big shifts to the cloud, and they said, well, I need to move lots of data that just isn't viable for me to move it over the wire, given the connection we can assign to it. It's why we built Snowball. And so we launched Snowball a couple years ago, which is really, it's a 50 terabyte appliance that is encrypted, the data's encrypted three different ways, and you ingest the data from your data center into Snowball, it has a Kindle connected to it, it allows you to, you know, that makes sure that you send it to the right place, and you can also track the progress of your high-speed ingestion into our data centers. And when we first launched Snowball, we launched it at Reinvent a couple years ago, I could not believe that we were going to order as many Snowballs to start with as the team wanted to order. And in fact, I reproached the team and I said, this is way too much, why don't we first see if people actually use any of these Snowballs. And so the team thankfully didn't listen very carefully to that, and they really only pared back a little bit. And then it turned out that we, almost from the get-go, had ordered 10X too few. And so this has been something that people have used in a very broad, pervasive way all over the world. And last year, at the beginning of the year, as we were asking people what else they would like us to build in Snowball, customers told us a few things that were pretty interesting to us. First, one that wasn't that surprising was they said, well, it would be great if they were bigger, you know, if instead of 50 terabytes it was more data I could store on each device. Then they said, you know, one of the problems is when I load the data onto a Snowball and send it to you, I have to still keep my local copy on premises until it's ingested, cause I can't risk losing that data. So they said it would be great if you could find a way to provide clustering, so that I don't have to keep that copy on premises. That was pretty interesting. And then they said, you know, there's some of that data that I'd actually like to be loading synchronously to S3, and then, or some things back from S3 to that data that I may want to compare against. That was interesting, having that endpoint. And then they said, well, we'd really love it if there was some compute on those Snowballs so I can do analytics on some relatively short-term signals that I want to take action on right away. Those were really the pieces of feedback that informed Snowball Edge, which is the next version of Snowball that we launched, announced at Reinvent this past November. So it has, it's a hundred-terabyte appliance, still the same level of encryption, and it has clustering so that you don't have to keep that copy of the data local. It allows you to have an endpoint to S3 to synchronously load data back and forth, and then it has a compute inside of it. And so it allows customers to use these on premises. I'll give you a good example. GE is using these for their wind turbines. And they collect all kinds of data from those turbines, but there's certain short-term signals they want to do analytics on in as close to real time as they can, and take action on those. And so they use that compute to do the analytics and then when they fill up that Snowball Edge, they detach it and send it back to AWS to do broad-scale analytics in the cloud and then just start using an additional Snowball Edge to capture that short-term data and be able to do those analytics. So Snowball Edge is, you know, we just launched it a couple months ago, again, amazed at the type of response, how many customers are starting to deploy those all over the place. I think if you have exabytes of data that you need to move, it's not so easy. An exabyte of data, if you wanted to move from on premises to AWS, would require 10,000 Snowball Edges. Those customers don't want to really manage a fleet of 10,000 Snowball Edges if they don't have to. And so, we tried to figure out how to solve that problem, and it's why we launched Snowmobile back at Reinvent in November, which effectively, it's a hundred-petabyte container on a 45-foot trailer that we will take a truck and bring out to your facility. It comes with its own power and its own network fiber that we plug in to your data center. And if you want to move an exabyte of data over a 10 gigabit per second connection, it would take you 26 years. But using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take you six months. So really different level of scale. And you'd be surprised how many companies have exabytes of data at this point that they want to move to the cloud to get all those analytics and machine learning capabilities running on top of them. Then for streaming data, as we have more and more companies that are doing real-time analytics of streaming data, we have Kinesis, where we built something called the Kinesis Firehose that makes it really simple to stream all your real-time data. We have a storage gateway for companies that want to keep certain data hot, locally, and then asynchronously be loading the rest of their data to AWS to be able to use in different formats, should they need it as backup or should they choose to make a transition. So it's a very broad set of storage capabilities. And then of course, if you've moved a lot of data into the cloud or into anything, you realize that one of the hardest parts that people often leave to the end is ETL. And so we have announced an ETL service called Glue, which we announced at Reinvent, which is going to make it much easier to move your data, be able to find your data and map your data to different locations and do ETL, which of course is hugely important as you're moving large amounts. >> So we've talked a lot about moving things to the cloud, moving applications, moving data. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something not on the cloud, connected devices. >> Yeah. >> Where do they fit in and how do you think about edge? >> Well, you know, I've been working on AWS since the start of AWS, and we've been in the market for a little over 11 years at this point. And we have encountered, as I'm sure all of you have, many buzzwords. And of all the buzzwords that everybody has talked about, I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the one that has delivered fastest on its promise has been IOT and connected devices. Just amazing to me how much is happening at the edge today and how fast that's changing with device manufacturers. And I think that if you look out 10 years from now, when you talk about hybrid, I think most companies, majority on premise piece of hybrid will not be servers, it will be connected devices. There are going to be billions of devices all over the place, in your home, in your office, in factories, in oil fields, in agricultural fields, on ships, in cars, in planes, everywhere. You're going to have these assets that sit at the edge that companies are going to want to be able to collect data on, do analytics on, and then take action. And if you think about it, most of these devices, by their very nature, have relatively little CPU and have relatively little disk, which makes the cloud disproportionately important for them to supplement them. It's why you see most of the big, successful IOT applications today are using AWS to supplement them. Illumina has hooked up their genome sequencing to AWS to do analytics, or you can look at Major League Baseball Statcast is an IOT application built on top of AWS, or John Deer has over 200,000 telematically enabled tractors that are collecting real-time planting conditions and information that they're doing analytics on and sending it back to farmers so they can figure out where and how to optimally plant. Tata Motors manages their truck fleet this way. Phillips has their smart lighting project. I mean, there're innumerable amounts of these IOT applications built on top of AWS where the cloud is supplementing the device's capability. But when you think about these becoming more mission-critical applications for companies, there are going to be certain functions and certain conditions by which they're not going to want to connect back to the cloud. They're not going to want to take the time for that round trip. They're not going to have connectivity in some cases to be able to make a round trip to the cloud. And what they really want is customers really want the same capabilities they have on AWS, with AWS IOT, but on the devices themselves. And if you've ever tried to develop on these embedded devices, it's not for mere mortals. It's pretty delicate and it's pretty scary and there's a lot of archaic protocols associated with it, pretty tough to do it all and to do it without taking down your application. And so what we did was we built something called Greengrass, and we announced it at Reinvent. And Greengrass is really like a software module that you can effectively have inside your device. And it allows developers to write lambda functions, it's got lambda inside of it, and it allows customers to write lambda functions, some of which they want to run in the cloud, some of which they want to run on the device itself through Greengrass. So they have a common programming model to build those functions, to take the signals they see and take the actions they want to take against that, which is really going to help, I think, across all these IOT devices to be able to be much more flexible and allow the devices and the analytics and the actions you take to be much smarter, more intelligent. It's also why we built Snowball Edge. Snowball Edge, if you think about it, is really a purpose-built Greengrass device. We have Greengrass, it's inside of the Snowball Edge, and you know, the GE wind turbine example is a good example of that. And so it's to us, I think it's the future of what the on-premises piece of hybrid's going to be. I think there're going to be billions of devices all over the place and people are going to want to interact with them with a common programming model like they use in AWS and the cloud, and we're continuing to invest very significantly to make that easier and easier for companies. >> We've talked about several feature directions. We talked about AI, machine learning, the edge. What are some of the other areas of investment that this group should care about? >> Well there's a lot. (laughs) That's not a suit question, Ariel. But there's a lot. I think, I'll name a few. I think first of all, as I alluded to earlier, we are not close to being done expanding geographically. I think virtually every tier-one country will have an AWS region over time. I think many of the emerging countries will as well. I think the database space is an area that is radically changing. It's happening at a faster pace than I think people sometimes realize. And I think it's good news for all of you. I think the database space over the last few decades has been a lonely place for customers. I think that they have felt particularly locked into companies that are expensive and proprietary and have high degrees of lock-in and aren't so customer-friendly. And I think customers are sick of it. And we have a relational database service that we launched many years ago and has many flavors that you can run. You can run MySQL, you can run Postgres, you can run MariaDB, you can run SQLServer, you can run Oracle. And what a lot of our customers kept saying to us was, could you please figure out a way to have a database capability that has the performance characteristics of the commercial-grade databases but the customer-friendly and pricing model of the more open engines like the MySQL and Postgres and MariaDB. What you do on your own, we do a lot of it at Amazon, but it's hard, I mean, it takes a lot of work and a lot of tuning. And our customers really wanted us to solve that problem for them. And it's why we spent several years building Aurora, which is our own database engine that we built, but that's fully compatible with MySQL and with Postgres. It's at least as fault tolerant and durable and performant as the commercial-grade databases, but it's a tenth of the cost of those. And it's also nice because if it turns out that you use Aurora and you decide for whatever reason you don't want to use Aurora anymore, because it's fully compatible with MySQL and Postgres, you just dump it to the community versions of those, and off you are. So there's really hardly any transition there. So that is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS. I'm amazed at how quickly it's grown. I think you may have heard earlier, we've had 23,000 database migrations just in the last year or so. There's a lot of pent-up demand to have database freedom. And we're here to help you have it. You know, I think on the analytic side, it's just never been easier and less expensive to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today. Part of that has to do with the economics of the cloud. But a lot of it has to do with the really broad analytics capability that we provide you. And it's a much broader capability than you'll find elsewhere. And you know, you can manage Hadoop and Spark and Presto and Hive and Pig and Yarn on top of AWS, or we have a managed elastic search service, and you know, of course we have a very high scale, very high performing data warehouse in Redshift, that just got even more performant with Spectrum, which now can query across all of your S3 data, and of course you have Athena, where you can query S3 directly. We have a service that allows you to do real-time analytics of streaming data in Kinesis. We have a business intelligence service in QuickSight. We have a number of machine learning capabilities I talked about earlier. It's a very broad array. And what we find is that it's a new day in analytics for companies. A lot of the data that companies felt like they had to throw away before, either because it was too expensive to hold or they didn't really have the tools accessible to them to get the learning from that data, it's a totally different day today. And so we have a pretty big investment in that space, I mentioned Glue earlier to do ETL on all that data. We have a lot more coming in that space. I think compute, super interesting, you know, I think you will find, I think we will find that companies will use full instances for many, many years and we have, you know, more than double the number of instances than you'll find elsewhere in every imaginable shape and size. But I would also say that the trend we see is that more and more companies are using smaller units of compute, and it's why you see containers becoming so popular. We have a really big business in ECS. And we will continue to build out the capability there. We have companies really running virtually every type of container and orchestration and management service on top of AWS at this point. And then of course, a couple years ago, we pioneered the event-driven serverless capability in compute that we call Lambda, which I'm just again, blown away by how many customers are using that for everything, in every way. So I think the basic unit of compute is continuing to get smaller. I think that's really good for customers. I think the ability to be serverless is a very exciting proposition that we're continuing to to fulfill that vision that we laid out a couple years ago. And then, probably, the last thing I'd point out right now is, I think it's really interesting to see how the basic procurement of software is changing. In significant part driven by what we've been doing with our Marketplace. If you think about it, in the old world, if you were a company that was buying software, you'd have to go find bunch of the companies that you should consider, you'd have to have a lot of conversations, you'd have to talk to a lot of salespeople. Those companies, by the way, have to have a big sales team, an expensive marketing budget to go find those companies and then go sell those companies and then both companies engage in this long tap-dance around doing an agreement and the legal terms and the legal teams and it's just, the process is very arduous. Then after you buy it, you have to figure out how you're going to actually package it, how you're deploy to infrastructure and get it done, and it's just, I think in general, both consumers of software and sellers of software really don't like the process that's existed over the last few decades. And then you look at AWS Marketplace, and we have 35 hundred product listings in there from 12 hundred technology providers. If you look at the number of hours, that software that's been running EC2 just in the last month alone, it's several hundred million hours, EC2 hours, of that software being run on top of our Marketplace. And it's just completely changing how software is bought and procured. I think that if you talk to a lot of the big sellers of software, like Splunk or Trend Micro, there's a whole number of them, they'll tell you it totally changes their ability to be able to sell. You know, one of the things that really helped AWS in the early days and still continues to help us, is that we have a self-service model where we don't actually have to have a lot of people talk to every customer to get started. I think if you're a seller of software, that's very appealing, to allow people to find your software and be able to buy it. And if you're a consumer, to be able to buy it quickly, again, without the hassle of all those conversations and the overhead associated with that, very appealing. And I think it's why the marketplace has just exploded and taken off like it has. It's also really good, by the way, for systems integrators, who are often packaging things on top of that software to their clients. This makes it much easier to build kind of smaller catalogs of software products for their customers. I think when you layer on top of that the capabilities that we've announced to make it easier for SASS providers to meter and to do billing and to do identity is just, it's a very different world. And so I think that also is very exciting, both for companies and customers as well as software providers. >> We certainly touched on a lot here. And we have a lot going on, and you know, while we have customers asking us a lot about how they can use all these new services and new features, we also tend to get a lot of questions from customers on how we innovate so quickly, and they can think about applying some of those lessons learned to their own businesses. >> So you're asking how we're able to innovate quickly? >> Mmm hmm. >> I think there's a few things that have helped us, and it's different for every company. But some of these might be helpful. I'll point to a few. I think the first thing is, I think we disproportionately index on hiring builders. And we think of builders as people who are inventors, people who look at different customer experiences really critically, are honest about what's flawed about them, and then seek to reinvent them. And then people who understand that launch is the starting line and not the finish line. There's very little that any of us ever built that's a home run right out of the gate. And so most things that succeed take a lot of listening to customers and a lot of experimentation and a lot of iterating before you get to an equation that really works. So the first thing is who we hire. I think the second thing is how we organize. And we have, at Amazon, long tried to organize into as small and separable and autonomous teams as we can, that have all the resources in those teams to own their own destiny. And so for instance, the technologists and the product managers are part of the same team. And a lot of that is because we don't want the finger pointing that goes back and forth between the teams, and if they're on the same team, they focus all their energy on owning it together and understanding what customers need from them, spending a disproportionate amount of time with customers, and then they get to own their own roadmaps. One of the reasons we don't publish a 12 to 18 month roadmap is we want those teams to have the freedom, in talking to customers and listening to what you tell us matters, to re-prioritize if there are certain things that we assumed mattered more than it turns out it does. So, you know I think that the way that we organize is the second piece. I think a third piece is all of our teams get to use the same AWS building blocks that all of you get to use, which allow you to move much more quickly. And I think one of the least told stories about Amazon over the last five years, in part because people have gotten interested in AWS, is people have missed how fast our consumer business at Amazon has iterated. Look at the amount of invention in Amazon's consumer business. And they'll tell you that a big piece of that is their ability to use the AWS building blocks like they do. I think a fourth thing is many big companies, as they get larger, what starts to happen is what people call the institutional no, which is that leaders walk into meetings on new ideas looking to find ways to say no, and not because they're ill intended but just because they get more conservative or they have a lot on their plate or things are really managed very centrally, so it's hard to imagine adding more to what you're already doing. At Amazon, it's really the opposite, and in part because of the way we're organized in such a decoupled, decentralized fashion, and in part because it's just part of our DNA. When the leaders walk into a meeting, they are looking for ways to say yes. And we don't say yes to everything, we have a lot of proposals. But we say yes to a lot more than I think virtually any other company on the planet. And when we're having conversations with builders who are proposing new ideas, we're in a mode where we're trying to problem-solve with them to get to yes, which I think is really different. And then I think the last thing is that we have mechanisms inside the company that allow us to make fast decisions. And if you want a little bit more detail, you should read our founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter, which just was released. He talks about the fast decision-making that happens inside the company. It's really true. We make fast decisions and we're willing to fail. And you know, we sometimes talk about how we're working on several of our next biggest failures, and we hope that most of the things we're doing aren't going to fail, but we know, if you're going to push the envelope and if you're going to experiment at the rate that we're trying to experiment, to find more pillars that allow us to do more for customers and allow us to be more relevant, you are going to fail sometimes. And you have to accept that, and you have to have a way of evaluating people that recognizes the inputs, meaning the things that they actually delivered as opposed to the outputs, cause on new ventures, you don't know what the outputs are going to be, you don't know consumers or customers are going to respond to the new thing you're trying to build. So you have to be able to reward employees on the inputs, you have to have a way for them to continue to progress and grow in their career even if they work on something didn't work. And you have to have a way of thinking about, when things don't work, how do I take the technology that I built as part of that, that really actually does work, but I didn't get it right in the form factor, and use it for other things. And I think that when you think about a culture like Amazon, that disproportionately hires builders, organizes into these separable, autonomous teams, and allows them to use building blocks to move fast, and has a leadership team that's looking to say yes to ideas and is willing to fail, you end up finding not only do you do more inventing but you get the people at every level of the organization spending their free cycles thinking about new ideas because it actually pays to think of new ideas cause you get a shot to try it. And so that has really helped us and I think most of our customers who have made significant shifts to AWS and the cloud would argue that that's one of the big transformational things they've seen in their companies as well. >> Okay. I want to go a little bit deeper on the subject of culture. What are some of the things that are most unique about the AWS culture that companies should know about when they're looking to partner with us? >> Well, I think if you're making a decision on a predominant infrastructure provider, it's really important that you decide that the culture of the company you're going to partner with is a fit for yours. And you know, it's a super important decision that you don't want to have to redo multiple times cause it's wasted effort. And I think that, look, I've been at Amazon for almost 20 years at this point, so I have obviously drank the Kool Aid. But there are a few things that I think are truly unique about Amazon's culture. I'll talk about three of them. The first is I think that we are unusually customer-oriented. And I think a lot of companies talk about being customer-oriented, but few actually are. I think most of the big technology companies truthfully are competitor-focused. They kind of look at what competitors are doing and then they try to one-up one another. You have one or two of them that I would say are product-focused, where they say, hey, it's great, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer have ideas on a product, but leave that to the experts, and you know, you'll like the products we're going to build. And those strategies can be good ones and successful ones, they're just not ours. We are driven by what customers tell us matters to them. We don't build technology for technology's sake, we don't become, you know, smitten by any one technology. We're trying to solve real problems for our customers. 90% of what we build is driven by what you tell us matters. And the other 10% is listening to you, and even if you can't articulate exactly what you want, trying to read between the lines and invent on your behalf. So that's the first thing. Second thing is that we are pioneers. We really like to invent, as I was talking about earlier. And I think most big technology companies at this point have either lost their will or their DNA to invent. Most of them acquire it or fast follow. And again, that can be a successful strategy. It's just not ours. I think in this day and age, where we're going through as big a shift as we are in the cloud, which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime, as dynamic as it is, being able to partner with a company that has the most functionality, it's iterating the fastest, has the most customers, has the largest ecosystem of partners, has SIs and ISPs, that has had a vision for how all these pieces fit together from the start, instead of trying to patch them together in a following act, you have a big advantage. I think that the third thing is that we're unusually long-term oriented. And I think that you won't ever see us show up at your door the last day of a quarter, the last day of a year, trying to harass you into doing some kind of deal with us, not to be heard from again for a couple years when we either audit you or try to re-up you for a deal. That's just not the way that we will ever operate. We are trying to build a business, a set of relationships, that will outlast all of us here. And I think something that always ties it together well is this trusted advisor capability that we have inside our support function, which is, you know, we look at dozens of programmatic ways that our customers are using the platform and reach out to you if you're doing something we think's suboptimal. And one of the things we do is if you're not fully utilizing resources, or hardly, or not using them at all, we'll reach out and say, hey, you should stop paying for this. And over the last couple of years, we've sent out a couple million of these notifications that have led to actual annualized savings for customers of 350 million dollars. So I ask you, how many of your technology partners reach out to you and say stop spending money with us? To the tune of 350 million dollars lost revenue per year. Not too many. And I think when we first started doing it, people though it was gimmicky, but if you understand what I just talked about with regard to our culture, it makes perfect sense. We don't want to make money from customers unless you're getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that we think has been broken for the prior few decades. And then we're trying to build a relationship with you that outlasts all of us, and we think the best way to do that is to provide value and do right by customers over a long period of time. >> Okay, keeping going on the culture subject, what about some of the quirky things about Amazon's culture that people might find interesting or useful? >> Well there are a lot of quirky parts to our culture. And I think any, you know lots of companies who have strong culture will argue they have quirky pieces but I think there's a few I might point to. You know, I think the first would be the first several years I was with the company, I guess the first six years or so I was at the company, like most companies, all the information that was presented was via PowerPoint. And we would find that it was a very inefficient way to consume information. You know, you were often shaded by the charisma of the presenter, sometimes you would overweight what the presenters said based on whether they were a good presenter. And vice versa. You would very rarely have a deep conversation, cause you have no room on PowerPoint slides to have any depth. You would interrupt the presenter constantly with questions that they hadn't really thought through cause they didn't think they were going to have to present that level of depth. You constantly have the, you know, you'd ask the question, oh, I'm going to get to that in five slides, you want to do that now or you want to do that in five slides, you know, it was just maddening. And we would often find that most of the meetings required multiple meetings. And so we made a decision as a company to effectively ban PowerPoints as a communication vehicle inside the company. Really the only time I do PowerPoints is at Reinvent. And maybe that shows. And what we found is that it's a much more substantive and effective and time-efficient way to have conversations because there is no way to fake depth in a six-page narrative. So what we went to from PowerPoint was six-page narrative. You can write, have as much as you want in the appendix, but you have to assume nobody will read the appendices. Everything you have to communicate has to be done in six pages. You can't fake depth in a six-page narrative. And so what we do is we all get to the room, we spend 20 minutes or so reading the document so it's fresh in everybody's head. And then where we start the conversation is a radically different spot than when you're hearing a presentation one kind of shallow slide at a time. We all start the conversation with a fair bit of depth on the topic, and we can really hone in on the three or four issues that typically matter in each of these conversations. So we get to the heart of the matter and we can have one meeting on the topic instead of three or four. So that has been really, I mean it's unusual and it takes some time getting used to but it is a much more effective way to pay attention to the detail and have a substantive conversation. You know, I think a second thing, if you look at our working backwards process, we don't write a lot of code for any of our services until we write and refine and decide we have crisp press release and frequently asked question, or FAQ, for that product. And in the press release, what we're trying to do is make sure that we're building a product that has benefits that will really matter. How many times have we all gotten to the end of products and by the time we get there, we kind of think about what we're launching and think, this is not that interesting. Like, people are not going to find this that compelling. And it's because you just haven't thought through and argued and debated and made sure that you drew the line in the right spot on a set of benefits that will really matter to customers. So that's why we use the press release. The FAQ is to really have the arguments up front about how you're building the product. So what technology are you using? What's the architecture? What's the customer experience? What's the UI look like? What's the pricing dimensions? Are you going to charge for it or not? All of those decisions, what are people going to be most excited about, what are people going to be most disappointed by. All those conversations, if you have them up front, even if it takes you a few times to go through it, you can just let the teams build, and you don't have to check in with them except on the dates. And so we find that if we take the time up front we not only get the products right more often but the teams also deliver much more quickly and with much less churn. And then the third thing I'd say that's kind of quirky is it is an unusually truth-seeking culture at Amazon. I think we have a leadership principle that we say have backbone, disagree, and commit. And what it means is that we really expect people to speak up if they believe that we're headed down a path that's wrong for customers, no matter who is advancing it, what level in the company, everybody is empowered and expected to speak up. And then once we have the debate, then we all have to pull the same way, even if it's a different way than you were advocating. And I think, you always hear the old adage of where, two people look at a ceiling and one person says it's 14 feet and the other person says, it's 10 feet, and they say, okay let's compromise, it's 12 feet. And of course, it's not 12 feet, there is an answer. And not all things that we all consider has that black and white answer, but most things have an answer that really is more right if you actually assess it and debate it. And so we have an environment that really empowers people to challenge one another and I think it's part of why we end up getting to better answers, cause we have that level of openness and rigor. >> Okay, well Andy, we have time for one more question. >> Okay. >> So other than some of the things you've talked about, like customer focus, innovation, and long-term orientation, what is the single most important lesson that you've learned that is really relevant to this audience and this time we're living in? >> There's a lot. But I'll pick one. I would say I'll tell a short story that I think captures it. In the early days at Amazon, our sole business was what we called an owned inventory retail business, which meant we bought the inventory from distributors or publishers or manufacturers, stored it in our own fulfillment centers and shipped it to customers. And around the year 1999 or 2000, this third party seller model started becoming very popular. You know, these were companies like Half.com and eBay and folks like that. And we had a really animated debate inside the company about whether we should allow third party sellers to sell on the Amazon site. And the concerns internally were, first of all, we just had this fundamental belief that other sellers weren't going to care as much about the customer experience as we did cause it was such a central part of everything we did DNA-wise. And then also we had this entire business and all this machinery that was built around owned inventory business, with all these relationships with publishers and distributors and manufacturers, who we didn't think would necessarily like third party sellers selling right alongside us having bought their products. And so we really debated this, and we ultimately decided that we were going to allow third party sellers to sell in our marketplace. And we made that decision in part because it was better for customers, it allowed them to have lower prices, so more price variety and better selection. But also in significant part because we realized you can't fight gravity. If something is going to happen, whether you want it to happen or not, it is going to happen. And you are much better off cannibalizing yourself or being ahead of whatever direction the world is headed than you are at howling at the wind or wishing it away or trying to put up blockers and find a way to delay moving to the model that is really most successful and has the most amount of benefits for the customers in question. And that turned out to be a really important lesson for Amazon as a company and for me, personally, as well. You know, in the early days of doing Marketplace, we had all kinds of folks, even after we made the decision, that despite the have backbone, disagree and commit weren't really sure that they believed that it was going to be a successful decision. And it took several months, but thankfully we really were vigilant about it, and today in roughly half of the units we sell in our retail business are third party seller units. Been really good for our customers. And really good for our business as well. And I think the same thing is really applicable to the space we're talking about today, to the cloud, as you think about this gigantic shift that's going on right now, moving to the cloud, which is, you know, I think in the early days of the cloud, the first, I'll call it six, seven, eight years, I think collectively we consumed so much energy with all these arguments about are people going to move to the cloud, what are they going to move to the cloud, will they move mission-critical applications to the cloud, will the enterprise adopt it, will public sector adopt it, what about private cloud, you know, we just consumed a huge amount of energy and it was, you can see both in the results in what's happening in businesses like ours, it was a form of fighting gravity. And today we don't really have if conversations anymore with our customers. They're all when and how and what order conversations. And I would say that this going to be a much better world for all of us, because we will be able to build in a much more cost effective fashion, we will be able to build much more quickly, we'll be able to take our scarce resource of engineers and not spend their resource on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure and instead on what truly differentiates your business. And you'll have a global presence, so that you have lower latency and a better end user customer experience being deployed with your applications and infrastructure all over the world. And you'll be able to meet the data sovereignty requirements of various locales. So I think it's a great world that we're entering right now, I think we're at a time where there's a lot less confusion about where the world is headed, and I think it's an unprecedented opportunity for you to reinvent your businesses, reinvent your applications, and build capabilities for your customers and for your business that weren't easily possible before. And I hope you take advantage of it, and we'll be right here every step of the way to help you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (applause) >> Thank you, Andy. And thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time today. >> Thank you. (applause) (upbeat music)