(bright gentle music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (bright gentle music) >> Hey, everyone. Good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE's coverage, day one of MWC 23 from Barcelona, and we're having a great day so far. The theme of this conference, Dave, is velocity. I feel like we've been shot out of a cannon of CUBE content already on day one. We've been talking with... Today's ecosystem day. We've been talking about the ecosystem, the importance of open ecosystem, and why. And we're going to be unpacking that a little bit more next. >> You know, Lisa, what used to be Mobile World Congress and is now MWC, it was never really intended to be sort of a consumer show, but with the ascendancy of smartphones. It kind of... They sucked all the air out of the room. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> But really, we're seeing the enterprise come really into focus now as the telco stack disaggregates, and enterprise is complicated. >> Enterprise is complicated, telecom is complicated. We have a guest here to unpack that with us. Chris Falloon joins us the Senior Managing Director of telecom practice at Dell. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> So you've been in the telecom industry for a long time. Talk about some of the things that you've witnessed over the last couple of decades and really help us understand the complexity that is telecom. >> Yeah. Well, nothing, nothing more complex. Look, I got... I was privileged to start my career in telco 20 years ago in Canada working with other telecoms globally. And so I got a good picture of how they operate, what's important to them. But I was... It's come full circle for me. I got into IT and come all the way back now to helping telcos figure out how to operate. And so it's been a great journey. >> What are some of the- >> Dave: You kno- >> Oh sorry, Dave. >> Dave: Please, go ahead. >> I was just going to say unpack some of the complexity that we see now. Obviously, we think telecom, we... And you talked about the consumerization... We have this expectation that we can get anything on our mobile devices 24/7 from any part of the world, but there's a lot of complexity in the industry as it's evolving. What are some of the complexities and how is Dell helping address that? >> Look, I think the transformation from traditional monolithic architectures to cloud-based architectures is maybe the most... The single largest complex transformation any industry's done in the last 20 years. And it's not just a technology transformation, it's critically an operational transformation. And so I think that's really at the heart of it is we've seen a real shift this year. From conversations last year were around how this stuff gets turned on, "Can it work?", "Does it work?", to a conversation around "How does it work?", "How do I operationalize it?", "What are the implications to my teams?". And so we've got teams struggling with knowledge and competency gaps. We've got people figuring out how to get this stuff working at scale. >> Yeah, so I mean, you think about Telcos, you know, a lot of engineers, but a lot of the stuff is done kind of, I call it, in the basement. >> Yeah. >> Kind of hidden, right? And they make it work, right? And that transformation that you're talking about toward this more agile, open ecosystem, moving fast, cloud-native, new services coming in, new monetization models. That does require a different operating model. How similar, given your background in both, you know, IT and Telco, how similar is it to the transformation that occurred in IT in terms of the operation- Operating model, which some companies are still going through? >> Look, I think we're privileged actually to be able to do this 10 years after IT went through it. And there's a lot of patterns that are definitely the same. There's no question there's differences. The applications are far different, the timing and and issues in the RAN are far different, and the distributed size of these deployments is different. But the learnings around how to deploy cloud-native technology, how to organize around these platforms, and back to the operationalization, how to deploy them and operate them at scale, it took IT a decade to figure that out. And hopefully, with the learnings that we've got from that we can rush through it here in a few years or less. >> One of the other big differences, of course, is public policy and regulation, right? You don't really have that so much in the IT world. >> Chris: Right. >> Sometimes you have no regulation. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> You know, Google, Facebook, do whatever you want and we'll figure it out 20 years later. How much of a factor is that in terms of the complexity and are the new Greenfield players... Are they bound by similar sort of restrictions or can they move faster? What's the dynamic there? >> Look, there's no question that Greenfield is faster than Brownfield. Doesn't matter whether that's telco or IT. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, sure. >> I think the... I think we're at a place in history where we're watching some of the early movers testing some of these theories. But I would tell you just... Again, just in the last few days leading up to this event talking with our customers and our partners, it's clear that even the first movers are struggling with the operational complexity of these platforms. And as a... You know, I think Dell's position in IT for the last decade as a platform systems integrator is very much going to continue to play out in the... In... We're being asked to play that role here as we try to bring some of the cloud-native operating competencies to the to the table. >> Hmm. >> And where are you having customer conversations these days? Is it at... Is it at the IT level? Is it higher sense tel... Networking is essential for any business in any organization to be able to deliver what the end user is demanding. >> Of course. Look, I... We've seen a real shift as I mentioned from the technology proof points to the operational proof points. How do we... How do we make sure that not only the business case is valid, but that we can maintain these new changes in these new operating models at scale at the right operating cost? And those are very healthy conversations because the success of this transformation to cloud architecture and edge computing and everything else is predicated on the idea that we can get cloud running at scale in the network. But I think the... It's very much use case driven and we're going to see... We're finally seeing some edge use cases that are driving consumption of those edge use cases, for sure. >> You know, I said earlier, I was in the keynotes and it took 45 minutes to get to the topic of security. >> Hmm. >> It was I think the third or fourth, or even fifth speaker. Finally, 45 minutes in, mention security. And I think that's because security's kind of a given in this world. It's a hardened environment. >> Chris: Yep. >> But that security model changes as well. The cloud brings a shared responsibility model. If it's multicloud, which it is, then it's shared responsibility across multiple clouds. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You know, you've got now developers who are being asked to be responsible for security. So that's another part of the complexity. We're kind of unpacking complexity here, aren't we? >> Chris: That's right. >> Just throwing more things in the cake. >> Look, I... Security is... It's an indication of this shift from what to how, very much includes security. And I think we're seeing security come to the forefront. Dell has a... We, you know, our philosophy is intrinsic security at all levels of the deployment. Everything from the infrastructure all the way through to the delivery and the management. >> Chris: And through the supply chain. >> And through supply chain. All the way through to the delivery of our technology integrated with other people's technology to ensure that the security's intrinsic in those deployments. And those integrations, as we're getting more and more involved in zero-touch deployments and helping carriers stand up these cloud platforms at scale, one of the ways to make sure that it's done repeatably and securely is to integrate those things at the factory or have your, you know, have your infrastructure partner take accountability for doing some of that pre-Day Zero. >> Well, the lab announcement that you guys have is... I've wrote about this. That pretty key, I think, because if you can certify in the lab... That's only other big differences. We talk a lot about the similarities between, you know, enterprise tech of the nineties and the disaggregation of the enterprise stack. But you didn't have so-called converged infrastructure back then. And even when you had converged infrastructure, it was like a skew that was bolted on. Now, you've got engineered systems. You're starting with engineered systems, but you've got to have a lab, so that the ecosystem and you've got self-certification. Those, I think, are key investments that... If you're thinking why Dell... A comp... You need a company like Dell who's got the resources to make those investments and actually kind of force that through. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Dave: Yeah. >> That's right. I think we're... You know, the value of the la... Again, the learnings from these last 10 years of integration is just... That understanding what the major blockers are should provide us with an accelerated roadmap for solving some of these problems as we encounter them over the next year or two in telecoms, no question. >> There's always regional differences in telecom, right? In the United States, you know, years ago, decades ago, sort of, you know, blew apart the telco industry. I would argue, many would I think as well, that that actually made the US less competitive. You got... Certainly have, you know, national interests around the world, across the European continent, certainly in APAC as well. How do you see that of, of... What are you hearing from those different regions? How do you see that affecting the adoption of some of the new technologies that you guys are promoting? >> Yeah, look, there's leaders... There's leaders and laggards in every market, I would say. I think we've been at this now, trying to stand up some of these cloud infrastructures and cloud RAN projects and virtual RAN projects. We've been at that now long enough to know that there's not so much regional patterns as there are patterns of companies that believe deeply that these architectures are going to lead to the right type of innovation and allow them to, you know, to build new markets and new sources of revenue. And those that are deeply committed to that structure are the ones willing to lean in and sort of blaze a path, right? So I would say that pattern is definitely emerged. I don't... We don't see... The larger the organization, certainly the larger the carrier, the deeper their resources on engineering and their ability to pivot and train those resources to become cloud-capable. That's a factor. We see a lot of conversations. Dell's got a very large Day 2 managed services business on the IT side. And, and as we pivot those Day 2 managed services, practices into managing cloud platforms and edge cloud platforms, I think it's the companies that don't have the depth or the skill or the experience are the ones that are that are asking us for the help there, for sure. >> How much has Dell been able to leverage? I mean, in the telecom systems business, I see, you know, a lot of new faces at Dell, a lot of folks like yourself that have telco experience. How about the services business? Were you able to sort of realign your existing folks or is it similar, you had to bring in people from the industry? >> It's both actually. So the... In services, it's critical because they... The org... The industry desperately needs systems integration across the board. And I think if we can convince the industry to treat telco clouds as a horizontal platform, then the idea of a platform integrator is a, you know, is definitely... It's valued. And in fact, it's required, I think, for the success of these projects. The services team at Dell is comprised of the folks who obviously run the pieces of the services business that are really no different in their construct. Building telco clouds is not that different from building IT clouds, so the elements are the same. Those teams are... Those teams persist. But definitely, the apps are different, and the support is different, and the requirements for uptime and availability are different. And so we've brought in services specialists to sort of... Just to create the glue between the customers and our existing sales depth. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that really articulates the value of what Dell is able to deliver in telecom with the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah. Look, it's not that well-known, but you know, the Day Zero Zero-Touch deployment factory integration capabilities that Dell has, we've been deploying that in IT for years. And, you know, we're... We've got a couple of projects globally now where we're not only designing and testing the stack in our labs and with our partners, but we're loading that stack in a known good architecture into third party and Dell hardware in a factory integration setting and shipping it to site with really nothing left to do but connect power and connectivity. And so from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of deploying cloud into thousands of data centers, we have examples of that that are being shipped continent by continent and and being deployed in a... In days and weeks as opposed to months. And so I think the... Taking some of the pain out of deployment and taking some of the... Building some repeatability into those deployments is a very big deal. Those are... Those are great, great projects. The next stage of that, of course, is helping them get to a place where the operations of those platforms is just as easy as the deployment. >> What's going to be different? Go to head... Look ahead to 2030. Let's go backwards from there. What's the world going to be like? What do people need to know in terms of what's coming? >> That's a great question. If... I think if I... If I could see that far ahead, I wouldn't probably be sitting here. (Chris and Lisa laughs) >> Dave: Yeah, but you have wisdom. >> Yeah. >> You know, the experience. >> If we play back... If we play back what's happened in the data centers, you know, in the IT data centers and you mentioned the, you know, the disaggregated systems shift that happened a decade ago. You know, those... Once the applications rearchitected to cloud-native architectures and could take advantage of the platform changes... Once the resiliency is built into the application instead of into the platforms, these things become more and more touchless. And I think the real double digit payback on this shift to cloud-native, we haven't begun to talk about it yet because we haven't... We're not anywhere close to the level of automation that can be achieved once we get to true cloud-native and microservices-based application architecture. That's a big shift and it's going to take a while. It took companies like SAP and others almost a decade to get that done. I think it'll happen faster here, but it's going to take us some time. >> Some of the things that you've heard... This is only day one of the conference, but anything that you've heard today or that you're looking forward to hearing in terms of how telecom is evolving and kind of playing catch-up? >> Yeah, look, I... We really believe this is the year that the edge use cases come alive. I think we're... We're... We've been... Almost every conversation I've been in, we've been asked, you know, sort of where's the... "Where are these use cases that are driving actual deployments and revenue?" and that sort of... And I think carriers are very much interested in trying to figure out customer edge, very much trying to figure out their own edge. Dell, of course, has both of those edges in mind. We've got a very large enterprise edge business unit, as well as our telco BU. And so, that's... I think this is the year we really start to figure out where those... We're seeing good deployments now in production at scale, and I think this is the year that starts to really take shape. >> Well, and it seems like... Just in hearing some of the carriers talk, they want to avoid what happened with the over-the-top vendors, okay. And they want to monetize the data that they have about the network. Looks like they want to charge for API access. >> Chris: Yep. >> 'Kay, developers are going to love that, right? Especially at the volumes that we're seeing here. But I feel like there's a, you know, potential blind spot of disruption coming, you know, like the over-the-top vendors, you know, that created all this innovation. I could see developers... Whether it's at the edge or new services, that customers really want to buy, they really value. Different than, "Hey, I own this data and you need it. I'm going to charge ya for it." versus "Hey, I'm going to create something that's really compelling." You know, an analog would be Netflix or other services that you get with maybe it's private wireless that can do some things. And, you know, that to me is the interesting opportunity here that I feel like is a blind spot for traditional telcos. 'Cause they've kind of got that mindset of, "Okay, you know, we're going to monetize. Let's do it." But they don't have that creativity mindset yet, you know? >> This industry has been given an opportunity to monetize almost every major transformation in technology, and many of them have slipped through our fingers, right? And this one is different because it's inextricably tied to the network. And I think the, you know... If... You mentioned mobile phones earlier I mean, I think what we saw in innovation in mobile was that we had no idea what was going to happen at the edge of that edge until someone created it. And so you have to have those in operating environments have to show up before the developers will spend the time to test them out and figure out what works. And so I... We haven't begun to believe, even understand I don't think, what's coming once we figure out a way to get ultra low latency, reliable connectivity at the edge. >> And I think developers have that open canvas and they're going to paint- >> That's right. >> What that edge looks like. And that's what... I mean, I kind of get concerned about... You know, to me the way to deal with developers, you give 'em a platform. Say, "Go create." >> Chris: That's right. >> As opposed to "Okay, pay to get access.", which you're going to have to, but I mean, there's other third parties that are going to fund that. I get it. >> Chris: Yeah. >> But there's a big open field that is going to get plowed here. >> Yes. >> And it's going to throw off some, you know, serious benefits to consumers. >> Yeah, and that's what we all want. We have that expectation that- >> Chris: Absolutely. >> It's going to... There's going to be a... With them... It's going to be, "What's in it for me?", right? >> "What's in it for me?" Yeah, that's right. >> Absolutely. >> Chris: That's right. >> Chris, I was going to say thank you so much. You want to add one more thing? >> Chris: No, I'm good. Thank you. >> I was just going to thank you so much for stopping by and talking to us about Dell's presence in telecom, how you're helping customers manage the complexity and the opportunities that really are there. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. >> Dave: Thank you. >> Lisa: All right, our pleasure. >> Thanks, guys. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona at MWC 23. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright gentle music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE, in Palo Alto for "CUBE Conversation" with Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at Platform9. I've got a series of questions, had a great conversation earlier. Chris, I have a couple questions for you, what do you think? >> Let's do it, John. >> Okay, how does Platform9 Solution, you- can it be used on any infrastructure anywhere, cloud, edge, on-premise? >> It can, that's the beauty of our control plane, right? It was born in the cloud, and we primarily deliver that SaaS, which allows it to work in your data center, on bare metal, on VMs, or with public cloud infrastructure. We now give you the ability to take that control plane, install it in your data center, and then use it with anything, or even in air gap. And that includes capabilities with bare metal orchestration as well. >> Second question. How does Platform9 ensure maximum uptime, and proactive issue resolution? >> Oh, that's a good question. So if you come to Platform nine we're going to talk about always on assurance. What is driving that is a system of three components around self-healing, monitoring, and proactive assistance. So our software will heal broken things on nodes, right? If something stops running that should be running, it will attempt to restart that. We also have monitoring that's deployed with everything. So you build a cluster in AWS, well, we put open source monitoring agents, that are actually Prometheus, on every single node. That means it's resilient, right? So if you lose a node, you don't lose monitoring. But that data importantly comes back to our control plane, and that's the control plane that you can put in your data center as well. That data is what alerts us, and you as a user, anytime of the day that something's going wrong. Let's say etcd latency, good example, etcd is going slow. We'll find out, we might not be able to take restorative action immediately, but we're definitely going to reach out and say,, "You have a problem, let's get ahead of this and let's prevent that from becoming a bigger problem." And that's what we're delivering. When we say always on assurance, we're talking about self-healing, we're talking about remote monitoring, we're talking about being proactive with our customers, not waiting for the phone call or the support desk ticket saying, "Oh we think something's not working." Or worse, the customer has an outage. >> Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you explain the process for implementing Platform9 within a company's existing infrastructure. >> Are we doing air gap, or on-prem or SaaS approached? SaaS approach I think is by far the easiest, right? We can build a dedicated Platform9 control plane instance in a manner of minutes, for any customer. So when we do a proof of concept or onboarding, we just literally put in an email address, put in the name you want for your fully qualified domain name, and your instance is up. From that point onwards, the user can just log in, and using our CLI, talk to any number of, say, virtual machines, or physical servers in their environment for, you know, doing this in a data center or colo, and say, "I want these to be my Kubernetes control plane nodes. Here's the five of them. Here's the VIP for the load balancing, the API server and here are all of my compute nodes." And that CLI will work with the SaaS control plane, and go and build the cluster. That's as simple as it, CentOS, Ubuntu, just plain old operating system. Our software takes care of all the prerequisites, installing all the pieces, putting down MetalLB, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Kubernetes dashboard, etcd backups. You built some servers. That's essentially what you've done, and the rest is being handled by Platform9. It's as simple as that. >> Great, thanks for that. What are the two traditional paths for companies considering the cloud native journey? The two paths. >> The traditional paths. I think that's your engineering team running so fast that before you even realize that you've got, you know, 10 EKS clusters. Or, hey, we can do this. You know, I've got the I can build it mentality. Let's go DIY completely open source Kubernetes on our infrastructure, and we're going to piecemeal build it all up together. They're, I think the pathways that people traditionally look at this journey, as opposed to having that third alternative saying can I just consume it on my infrastructure, be it cloud or on-premise or at the edge. >> Third is the new way, you guys do that. >> That's been our focus since the company was, you know, brought together back in the open OpenStack days. >> Awesome, what's the makeup of your customer base? Is there a certain pattern to the size or environments that you guys work with? Is there a pattern or consistency to your customer base? >> It's a spread, right? We've got large enterprises like Juniper, and we go all the way down to people with 20, 30, 50 nodes in total. We've got people in banking and finance, we've got things all the way through to telecommunications and storage infrastructure. >> What's your favorite feature of Platform9? >> My favorite feature? You know, if I ask, should I say this as a pre-sales engineer, let me show you a favorite thing. My immediate response is, I should never do this. (John laughs) To me it's just being able to define my cluster and say, go. And in five minutes I have that environment, I can see everything that's running, right? It's all unified, it's one spot, right? I'm a cluster admin. I said I wanted three control plane, 25 workers. Here's the infrastructure, it creates it, and once it's built, I can see everything that's running, right? All the applications that are there. One UI, I don't have to go click around. I'm not trying to solve things or download things. It's the fact that it's unified and just delivered in one hit. >> What is the one thing that people should know about Platform9 that they might not know about it? >> I think it's that we help developers and engineers as much as we can help our operations teams. I think, for a long time we've sort of targeted that user and said, hey, we, we really help you. It's like, but why are they doing this? Why are they building any infrastructure or any cloud platform? Well, it's to run applications and services, to help their customers, but how do they get there? There's people building and writing those things, and we're helping them, right? For the last two years, we've been really focused on making it simple, and I think that's an important thing to know. >> Chris, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, John. >> Okay, that's theCUBE Q&A session here with Platform9. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome back to this Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Got a great conversation around Cloud Native, Cloud Native Journey, how enterprises are looking at Cloud Native and putting it all together. And it comes down to operations, developer productivity, and security. It's the hottest topic in technology. We got Chris Jones here in the studio, director of Product Management for Platform9. Chris, thanks for coming in. >> Hey, thanks. >> So when we always chat about, when we're at KubeCon. KubeConEU is coming up and in a few, in a few months, the number one conversation is developer productivity. And the developers are driving all the standards. It's interesting to see how they just throw everything out there and whatever gets adopted ends up becoming the standard, not the old school way of kind of getting stuff done. So that's cool. Security Kubernetes and Containers are all kind of now that next level. So you're starting to see the early adopters moving to the mainstream. Enterprises, a variety of different approaches. You guys are at the center of this. We've had a couple conversations with your CEO and your tech team over there. What are you seeing? You're building the products. What's the core product focus right now for Platform9? What are you guys aiming for? >> The core is that blend of enabling your infrastructure and PlatformOps or DevOps teams to be able to go fast and run in a stable environment, but at the same time enable developers. We don't want people going back to what I've been calling Shadow IT 2.0. It's, hey, I've been told to do something. I kicked off this Container initiative. I need to run my software somewhere. I'm just going to go figure it out. We want to keep those people productive. At the same time we want to enable velocity for our operations teams, be it PlatformOps or DevOps. >> Take us through in your mind and how you see the industry rolling out this Cloud Native journey. Where do you see customers out there? Because DevOps have been around, DevSecOps is rocking, you're seeing AI, hot trend now. Developers are still in charge. Is there a change to the infrastructure of how developers get their coding done and the infrastructure, setting up the DevOps is key, but when you add the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise, what changes? What is the, what is the, I guess what is the Cloud Native journey for an enterprise these days? >> The Cloud Native journey or the change? When- >> Let's start with the, let's start with what they want to do. What's the goal and then how does that happen? >> I think the goal is that promise land. Increased resiliency, better scalability, and overall reduced costs. I've gone from physical to virtual that gave me a higher level of density, packing of resources. I'm moving to Containers. I'm removing that OS layer again. I'm getting a better density again, but all of a sudden I'm running Kubernetes. What does that, what does that fundamentally do to my operations? Does it magically give me scalability and resiliency? Or do I need to change what I'm running and how it's running so it fits that infrastructure? And that's the reality, is you can't just take a Container and drop it into Kubernetes and say, hey, I'm now Cloud Native. I've got reduced cost, or I've got better resiliency. There's things that your engineering teams need to do to make sure that application is a Cloud Native. And then there's what I think is one of the largest shifts of virtual machines to containers. When I was in the world of application performance monitoring, we would see customers saying, well, my engineering team have this Java app, and they said it needs a VM with 12 gig of RAM and eight cores, and that's what we gave it. But it's running slow. I'm working with the application team and you can see it's running slow. And they're like, well, it's got all of its resources. One of those nice features of virtualization is over provisioning. So the infrastructure team would say, well, we gave it, we gave it all a RAM it needed. And what's wrong with that being over provisioned? It's like, well, Java expects that RAM to be there. Now all of a sudden, when you move to the world of containers, what we've got is that's not a set resource limit, really is like it used to be in a VM, right? When you set it for a container, your application teams really need to be paying attention to your resource limits and constraints within the world of Kubernetes. So instead of just being able to say, hey, I'm throwing over the fence and now it's just going to run on a VM, and that VMs got everything it needs. It's now really running on more, much more of a shared infrastructure where limits and constraints are going to impact the neighbors. They are going to impact who's making that decision around resourcing. Because that Kubernetes concept of over provisioning and the virtualization concept of over provisioning are not the same. So when I look at this problem, it's like, well, what changed? Well, I'll do my scale tests as an application developer and tester, and I'd see what resources it needs. I asked for that in the VM, that sets the high watermark, job's done. Well, Kubernetes, it's no longer a VM, it's a Kubernetes manifest. And well, who owns that? Who's writing it? Who's setting those limits? To me, that should be the application team. But then when it goes into operations world, they're like, well, that's now us. Can we change those? So it's that amalgamation of the two that is saying, I'm a developer. I used to pay attention, but now I need to pay attention. And an infrastructure person saying, I used to just give 'em what they wanted, but now I really need to know what they've wanted, because it's going to potentially have a catastrophic impact on what I'm running. >> So what's the impact for the developer? Because, infrastructure's code is what everybody wants. The developer just wants to get the code going and they got to pay attention to all these things, or don't they? Is that where you guys come in? How do you guys see the problem? Actually scope the problem that you guys solve? 'Cause I think you're getting at I think the core issue here, which is, I've got Kubernetes, I've got containers, I've got developer productivity that I want to focus on. What's the problem that you guys solve? >> Platform operation teams that are adopting Cloud Native in their environment, they've got that steep learning curve of Kubernetes plus this fundamental change of how an app runs. What we're doing is taking away the burden of needing to operate and run Kubernetes and giving them the choice of the flexibility of infrastructure and location. Be that an air gap environment like a, let's say a telco provider that needs to run a containerized network function and containerized workloads for 5G. That's one thing that we can deploy and achieve in a completely inaccessible environment all the way through to Platform9 running traditionally as SaaS, as we were born, that's remotely managing and controlling your Kubernetes environments on-premise AWS. That hybrid cloud experience that could be also Bare Metal, but it's our platform running your environments with our support there, 24 by seven, that's proactively reaching out. So it's removing a lot of that burden and the complications that come along with operating the environment and standing it up, which means all of a sudden your DevOps and platform operations teams can go and work with your engineers and application developers and say, hey, let's get, let's focus on the stuff that, that we need to be focused on, which is running our business and providing a service to our customers. Not figuring out how to upgrade a Kubernetes cluster, add new nodes, and configure all of the low level. >> I mean there are, that's operations that just needs to work. And sounds like as they get into the Cloud Native kind of ops, there's a lot of stuff that kind of goes wrong. Or you go, oops, what do we buy into? Because the CIOs, let's go, let's go Cloud Native. We want to, we got to get set up for the future. We're going to be Cloud Native, not just lift and shift and we're going to actually build it out right. Okay, that sounds good. And when we have to actually get done. >> Chris: Yeah. >> You got to spin things up and stand up the infrastructure. What specifically use case do you guys see that emerges for Platform9 when people call you up and you go talk to customers and prospects? What's the one thing or use case or cases that you guys see that you guys solve the best? >> So I think one of the, one of the, I guess new use cases that are coming up now, everyone's talking about economic pressures. I think the, the tap blows open, just get it done. CIO is saying let's modernize, let's use the cloud. Now all of a sudden they're recognizing, well wait, we're spending a lot of money now. We've opened that tap all the way, what do we do? So now they're looking at ways to control that spend. So we're seeing that as a big emerging trend. What we're also sort of seeing is people looking at their data centers and saying, well, I've got this huge legacy environment that's running a hypervisor. It's running VMs. Can we still actually do what we need to do? Can we modernize? Can we start this Cloud Native journey without leaving our data centers, our co-locations? Or if I do want to reduce costs, is that that thing that says maybe I'm repatriating or doing a reverse migration? Do I have to go back to my data center or are there other alternatives? And we're seeing that trend a lot. And our roadmap and what we have in the product today was specifically built to handle those, those occurrences. So we brought in KubeVirt in terms of virtualization. We have a long legacy doing OpenStack and private clouds. And we've worked with a lot of those users and customers that we have and asked the questions, what's important? And today, when we look at the world of Cloud Native, you can run virtualization within Kubernetes. So you can, instead of running two separate platforms, you can have one. So all of a sudden, if you're looking to modernize, you can start on that new infrastructure stack that can run anywhere, Kubernetes, and you can start bringing VMs over there as you are containerizing at the same time. So now you can keep your application operations in one environment. And this also helps if you're trying to reduce costs. If you really are saying, we put that Dev environment in AWS, we've got a huge amount of velocity out of it now, can we do that elsewhere? Is there a co-location we can go to? Is there a provider that we can go to where we can run that infrastructure or run the Kubernetes, but not have to run the infrastructure? >> It's going to be interesting too, when you see the Edge come online, you start, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, KubeCon events we're going to be at, the conversation is not just about public cloud. And you guys obviously solve a lot of do-it-yourself implementation hassles that emerge when people try to kind of stand up their own environment. And we hear from developers consistency between code, managing new updates, making sure everything is all solid so they can go fast. That's the goal. And that, and then people can get standardized on that. But as you get public cloud and do it yourself, kind of brings up like, okay, there's some gaps there as the architecture changes to be more distributed computing, Edge, on-premises cloud, it's cloud operations. So that's cool for DevOps and Cloud Native. How do you guys differentiate from say, some the public cloud opportunities and the folks who are doing it themselves? How do you guys fit in that world and what's the pitch or what's the story? >> The fit that we look at is that third alternative. Let's get your team focused on what's high value to your business and let us deliver that public cloud experience on your infrastructure or in the public cloud, which gives you that ability to still be flexible if you want to make choices to run consistently for your developers in two different locations. So as I touched on earlier, instead of saying go figure out Kubernetes, how do you upgrade a hundred worker nodes in place upgrade. We've solved that problem. That's what we do every single day of the week. Don't go and try to figure out how to upgrade a cluster and then upgrade all of the, what I call Kubernetes friends, your core DNSs, your metrics server, your Kubernetes dashboard. These are all things that we package, we test, we version. So when you click upgrade, we've already handled that entire process. So it's saying don't have your team focused on that lower level piece of work. Get them focused on what is important, which is your business services. >> Yeah, the infrastructure and getting that stood up. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting, if you look at the market right now, you mentioned cost savings and recovery, obviously kind of a recession. I mean, people are tightening their belts for sure. I don't think the digital transformation and Cloud Native spend is going to plummet. It's going to probably be on hold and be squeezed a little bit. But to your point, people are refactoring looking at how to get the best out of what they got. It's not just open the tap of spend the cash like it used to be. Yeah, a couple months, even a couple years ago. So okay, I get that. But then you look at the what's coming, AI. You're seeing all the new data infrastructure that's coming. The containers, Kubernetes stuff, got to get stood up pretty quickly and it's got to be reliable. So to your point, the teams need to get done with this and move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> 'Cause there's more coming. I mean, there's a lot coming for the apps that are building in Data Native, AI-Native, Cloud Native. So it seems that this Kubernetes thing needs to get solved. Is that kind of what you guys are focused on right now? >> So, I mean to use a customer, we have a customer that's in AI/ML and they run their platform at customer sites and that's hardware bound. You can't run AI machine learning on anything anywhere. Well, with Platform9 they can. So we're enabling them to deliver services into their customers that's running their AI/ML platform in their customer's data centers anywhere in the world on hardware that is purpose-built for running that workload. They're not Kubernetes experts. That's what we are. We're bringing them that ability to focus on what's important and just delivering their business services whilst they're enabling our team. And our 24 by seven proactive management are always on assurance to keep that up and running for them. So when something goes bump at the night at 2:00am, our guys get woken up. They're the ones that are reaching out to the customer saying, your environments have a problem, we're taking these actions to fix it. Obviously sometimes, especially if it is running on Bare Metal, there's things you can't do remotely. So you might need someone to go and do that. But even when that happens, you're not by yourself. You're not sitting there like I did when I worked for a bank in one of my first jobs, three o'clock in the morning saying, wow, our end of day processing is stuck. Who else am I waking up? Right? >> Exactly, yeah. Got to get that cash going. But this is a great use case. I want to get to the customer. What do some of the successful customers say to you for the folks watching that aren't yet a customer of Platform9, what are some of the accolades and comments or anecdotes that you guys hear from customers that you have? >> It just works, which I think is probably one of the best ones you can get. Customers coming back and being able to show to their business that they've delivered growth, like business growth and productivity growth and keeping their organization size the same. So we started on our containerization journey. We went to Kubernetes. We've deployed all these new workloads and our operations team is still six people. We're doing way more with growth less, and I think that's also talking to the strength that we're bringing, 'cause we're, we're augmenting that team. They're spending less time on the really low level stuff and automating a lot of the growth activity that's involved. So when it comes to being able to grow their business, they can just focus on that, not- >> Well you guys do the heavy lifting, keep on top of the Kubernetes, make sure that all the versions are all done. Everything's stable and consistent so they can go on and do the build out and provide their services. That seems to be what you guys are best at. >> Correct, correct. >> And so what's on the roadmap? You have the product, direct product management, you get the keys to the kingdom. What is, what is the focus? What's your focus right now? Obviously Kubernetes is growing up, Containers. We've been hearing a lot at the last KubeCon about the security containers is getting better. You've seen verification, a lot more standards around some things. What are you focused on right now for at a product over there? >> Edge is a really big focus for us. And I think in Edge you can look at it in two ways. The mantra that I drive is Edge must be remote. If you can't do something remotely at the Edge, you are using a human being, that's not Edge. Our Edge management capabilities and being in the market for over two years are a hundred percent remote. You want to stand up a store, you just ship the server in there, it gets racked, the rest of it's remote. Imagine a store manager in, I don't know, KFC, just plugging in the server, putting in the ethernet cable, pressing the power button. The rest of all that provisioning for that Cloud Native stack, Kubernetes, KubeVirt for virtualization is done remotely. So we're continuing to focus on that. The next piece that is related to that is allowing people to run Platform9 SaaS in their data centers. So we do ag app today and we've had a really strong focus on telecommunications and the containerized network functions that come along with that. So this next piece is saying, we're bringing what we run as SaaS into your data center, so then you can run it. 'Cause there are many people out there that are saying, we want these capabilities and we want everything that the Platform9 control plane brings and simplifies. But unfortunately, regulatory compliance reasons means that we can't leverage SaaS. So they might be using a cloud, but they're saying that's still our infrastructure. We're still closed that network down, or they're still on-prem. So they're two big priorities for us this year. And that on-premise experiences is paramount, even to the point that we will be delivering a way that when you run an on-premise, you can still say, wait a second, well I can send outbound alerts to Platform9. So their support team can still be proactively helping me as much as they could, even though I'm running Platform9s control plane. So it's sort of giving that blend of two experiences. They're big, they're big priorities. And the third pillar is all around virtualization. It's saying if you have economic pressures, then I think it's important to look at what you're spending today and realistically say, can that be reduced? And I think hypervisors and virtualization is something that should be looked at, because if you can actually reduce that spend, you can bring in some modernization at the same time. Let's take some of those nos that exist that are two years into their five year hardware life cycle. Let's turn that into a Cloud Native environment, which is enabling your modernization in place. It's giving your engineers and application developers the new toys, the new experiences, and then you can start running some of those virtualized workloads with KubeVirt, there. So you're reducing cost and you're modernizing at the same time with your existing infrastructure. >> You know Chris, the topic of this content series that we're doing with you guys is finding the right path, trusting the right path to Cloud Native. What does that mean? I mean, if you had to kind of summarize that phrase, trusting the right path to Cloud Native, what does that mean? It mean in terms of architecture, is it deployment? Is it operations? What's the underlying main theme of that quote? What's the, what's? How would you talk to a customer and say, what does that mean if someone said, "Hey, what does that right path mean?" >> I think the right path means focusing on what you should be focusing on. I know I've said it a hundred times, but if your entire operations team is trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes and getting three months into a journey and discovering, ah, I need Metrics Server to make something function. I want to use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler or Vertical Pod Autoscaler and I need this other thing, now I need to manage that. That's not the right path. That's literally learning what other people have been learning for the last five, seven years that have been focused on Kubernetes solely. So the why- >> There's been a lot of grind. People have been grinding it out. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. They've been standing up the, when Kubernetes started, it was all the promise. >> Chris: Yep. >> And essentially manually kind of getting in in the weeds and configuring it. Now it's matured up. They want stability. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Not everyone can get down and dirty with Kubernetes. It's not something that people want to generally do unless you're totally into it, right? Like I mean, I mean ops teams, I mean, yeah. You know what I mean? It's not like it's heavy lifting. Yeah, it's important. Just got to get it going. >> Yeah, I mean if you're deploying with Platform9, your Ops teams can tinker to their hearts content. We're completely compliant upstream Kubernetes. You can go and change an API server flag, let's go and mess with the scheduler, because we want to. You can still do that, but don't, don't have your team investing in all this time to figure it out. It's been figured out. >> John: Got it. >> Get them focused on enabling velocity for your business. >> So it's not build, but run. >> Chris: Correct? >> Or run Kubernetes, not necessarily figure out how to kind of get it all, consume it out. >> You know we've talked to a lot of customers out there that are saying, "I want to be able to deliver a service to my users." Our response is, "Cool, let us run it. You consume it, therefore deliver it." And we're solving that in one hit versus figuring out how to first run it, then operate it, then turn that into a consumable service. >> So the alternative Platform9 is what? They got to do it themselves or use the Cloud or what's the, what's the alternative for the customer for not using Platform9? Hiring more people to kind of work on it? What's the? >> People, building that kind of PaaS experience? Something that I've been very passionate about for the past year is looking at that world of sort of GitOps and what that means. And if you go out there and you sort of start asking the question what's happening? Just generally with Kubernetes as well and GitOps in that scope, then you'll hear some people saying, well, I'm making it PaaS, because Kubernetes is too complicated for my developers and we need to give them something. There's some great material out there from the likes of Intuit and Adobe where for two big contributors to Argo and the Argo projects, they almost have, well they do have, different experiences. One is saying, we went down the PaaS route and it failed. The other one is saying, well we've built a really stable PaaS and it's working. What are they trying to do? They're trying to deliver an outcome to make it easy to use and consume Kubernetes. So you could go out there and say, hey, I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster. Sounds like Argo CD is a great way to expose that to my developers so they can use Kubernetes without having to use Kubernetes and start automating things. That is an approach, but you're going to be going completely open source and you're going to have to bring in all the individual components, or you could just lay that, lay it down, and consume it as a service and not have to- >> And mentioned to it. They were the ones who kind of brought that into the open. >> They did. Inuit is the primary contributor to the Argo set of products. >> How has that been received in the market? I mean, they had the event at the Computer History Museum last fall. What's the momentum there? What's the big takeaway from that project? >> Growth. To me, growth. I mean go and track the stars on that one. It's just, it's growth. It's unlocking machine learning. Argo workflows can do more than just make things happen. Argo CD I think the approach they're taking is, hey let's make this simple to use, which I think can be lost. And I think credit where credit's due, they're really pushing to bring in a lot of capabilities to make it easier to work with applications and microservices on Kubernetes. It's not just that, hey, here's a GitOps tool. It can take something from a Git repo and deploy it and maybe prioritize it and help you scale your operations from that perspective. It's taking a step back and saying, well how did we get to production in the first place? And what can be done down there to help as well? I think it's growth expansion of features. They had a huge release just come out in, I think it was 2.6, that brought in things that as a product manager that I don't often look at like really deep technical things and say wow, that's powerful. But they have, they've got some great features in that release that really do solve real problems. >> And as the product, as the product person, who's the target buyer for you? Who's the customer? Who's making that? And you got decision maker, influencer, and recommender. Take us through the customer persona for you guys. >> So that Platform Ops, DevOps space, right, the people that need to be delivering Containers as a service out to their organization. But then it's also important to say, well who else are our primary users? And that's developers, engineers, right? They shouldn't have to say, oh well I have access to a Kubernetes cluster. Do I have to use kubectl or do I need to go find some other tool? No, they can just log to Platform9. It's integrated with your enterprise id. >> They're the end customer at the end of the day, they're the user. >> Yeah, yeah. They can log in. And they can see the clusters you've given them access to as a Platform Ops Administrator. >> So job well done for you guys. And your mind is the developers are moving 'em fast, coding and happy. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> And and from a customer standpoint, you reduce the maintenance cost, because you keep the Ops smoother, so you got efficiency and maintenance costs kind of reduced or is that kind of the benefits? >> Yeah, yep, yeah. And at two o'clock in the morning when things go inevitably wrong, they're not there by themselves, and we're proactively working with them. >> And that's the uptime issue. >> That is the uptime issue. And Cloud doesn't solve that, right? Everyone experienced that Clouds can go down, entire regions can go offline. That's happened to all Cloud providers. And what do you do then? Kubernetes isn't your recovery plan. It's part of it, right, but it's that piece. >> You know Chris, to wrap up this interview, I will say that "theCUBE" is 12 years old now. We've been to OpenStack early days. We had you guys on when we were covering OpenStack and now Cloud has just been booming. You got AI around the corner, AI Ops, now you got all this new data infrastructure, it's just amazing Cloud growth, Cloud Native, Security Native, Cloud Native, Data Native, AI Native. It's going to be all, this is the new app environment, but there's also existing infrastructure. So going back to OpenStack, rolling our own cloud, building your own cloud, building infrastructure cloud, in a cloud way, is what the pioneers have done. I mean this is what we're at. Now we're at this scale next level, abstracted away and make it operational. It seems to be the key focus. We look at CNCF at KubeCon and what they're doing with the cloud SecurityCon, it's all about operations. >> Chris: Yep, right. >> Ops and you know, that's going to sound counterintuitive 'cause it's a developer open source environment, but you're starting to see that Ops focus in a good way. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Infrastructure as code way. >> Chris: Yep. >> What's your reaction to that? How would you summarize where we are in the industry relative to, am I getting, am I getting it right there? Is that the right view? What am I missing? What's the current state of the next level, NextGen infrastructure? >> It's a good question. When I think back to sort of late 2019, I sort of had this aha moment as I saw what really truly is delivering infrastructure as code happening at Platform9. There's an open source project Ironic, which is now also available within Kubernetes that is Metal Kubed that automates Bare Metal as code, which means you can go from an empty server, lay down your operating system, lay down Kubernetes, and you've just done everything delivered to your customer as code with a Cloud Native platform. That to me was sort of the biggest realization that I had as I was moving into this industry was, wait, it's there. This can be done. And the evolution of tooling and operations is getting to the point where that can be achieved and it's focused on by a number of different open source projects. Not just Ironic and and Metal Kubed, but that's a huge win. That is truly getting your infrastructure. >> John: That's an inflection point, really. >> Yeah. >> If you think about it, 'cause that's one of the problems. We had with the Bare Metal piece was the automation and also making it Cloud Ops, cloud operations. >> Right, yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think Ironic did really well was saying let's just treat that piece of Bare Metal like a Cloud VM or an instance. If you got a problem with it, just give the person using it or whatever's using it, a new one and reimage it. Just tell it to reimage itself and it'll just (snaps fingers) go. You can do self-service with it. In Platform9, if you log in to our SaaS Ironic, you can go and say, I want that physical server to myself, because I've got a giant workload, or let's turn it into a Kubernetes cluster. That whole thing is automated. To me that's infrastructure as code. I think one of the other important things that's happening at the same time is we're seeing GitOps, we're seeing things like Terraform. I think it's important for organizations to look at what they have and ask, am I using tools that are fit for tomorrow or am I using tools that are yesterday's tools to solve tomorrow's problems? And when especially it comes to modernizing infrastructure as code, I think that's a big piece to look at. >> Do you see Terraform as old or new? >> I see Terraform as old. It's a fantastic tool, capable of many great things and it can work with basically every single provider out there on the planet. It is able to do things. Is it best fit to run in a GitOps methodology? I don't think it is quite at that point. In fact, if you went and looked at Flux, Flux has ways that make Terraform GitOps compliant, which is absolutely fantastic. It's using two tools, the best of breeds, which is solving that tomorrow problem with tomorrow solutions. >> Is the new solutions old versus new. I like this old way, new way. I mean, Terraform is not that old and it's been around for about eight years or so, whatever. But HashiCorp is doing a great job with that. I mean, so okay with Terraform, what's the new address? Is it more complex environments? Because Terraform made sense when you had basic DevOps, but now it sounds like there's a whole another level of complexity. >> I got to say. >> New tools. >> That kind of amalgamation of that application into infrastructure. Now my app team is paying way more attention to that manifest file, which is what GitOps is trying to solve. Let's templatize things. Let's version control our manifest, be it helm, customize, or just a straight up Kubernetes manifest file, plain and boring. Let's get that version controlled. Let's make sure that we know what is there, why it was changed. Let's get some auditability and things like that. And then let's get that deployment all automated. So that's predicated on the cluster existing. Well why can't we do the same thing with the cluster, the inception problem. So even if you're in public cloud, the question is like, well what's calling that API to call that thing to happen? Where is that file living? How well can I manage that in a large team? Oh my God, something just changed. Who changed it? Where is that file? And I think that's one of big, the big pieces to be sold. >> Yeah, and you talk about Edge too and on-premises. I think one of the things I'm observing and certainly when DevOps was rocking and rolling and infrastructures code was like the real push, it was pretty much the public cloud, right? >> Chris: Yep. >> And you did Cloud Native and you had stuff on-premises. Yeah you did some lifting and shifting in the cloud, but the cool stuff was going in the public cloud and you ran DevOps. Okay, now you got on-premise cloud operation and Edge. Is that the new DevOps? I mean 'cause what you're kind of getting at with old new, old new Terraform example is an interesting point, because you're pointing out potentially that that was good DevOps back in the day or it still is. >> Chris: It is, I was going to say. >> But depending on how you define what DevOps is. So if you say, I got the new DevOps with public on-premise and Edge, that's just not all public cloud, that's essentially distributed Cloud Native. >> Correct. Is that the new DevOps in your mind or is that? How would you, or is that oversimplifying it? >> Or is that that term where everyone's saying Platform Ops, right? Has it shifted? >> Well you bring up a good point about Terraform. I mean Terraform is well proven. People love it. It's got great use cases and now there seems to be new things happening. We call things like super cloud emerging, which is multicloud and abstraction layers. So you're starting to see stuff being abstracted away for the benefits of moving to the next level, so teams don't get stuck doing the same old thing. They can move on. Like what you guys are doing with Platform9 is providing a service so that teams don't have to do it. >> Correct, yeah. >> That makes a lot of sense, So you just, now it's running and then they move on to the next thing. >> Chris: Yeah, right. >> So what is that next thing? >> I think Edge is a big part of that next thing. The propensity for someone to put up with a delay, I think it's gone. For some reason, we've all become fairly short-tempered, Short fused. You know, I click the button, it should happen now, type people. And for better or worse, hopefully it gets better and we all become a bit more patient. But how do I get more effective and efficient at delivering that to that really demanding- >> I think you bring up a great point. I mean, it's not just people are getting short-tempered. I think it's more of applications are being deployed faster, security is more exposed if they don't see things quicker. You got data now infrastructure scaling up massively. So, there's a double-edged swords to scale. >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. I mean, maintenance, downtime, uptime, security. So yeah, I think there's a tension around, and one hand enthusiasm around pushing a lot of code and new apps. But is the confidence truly there? It's interesting one little, (snaps finger) supply chain software, look at Container Security for instance. >> Yeah, yeah. It's big. I mean it was codified. >> Do you agree that people, that's kind of an issue right now. >> Yeah, and it was, I mean even the supply chain has been codified by the US federal government saying there's things we need to improve. We don't want to see software being a point of vulnerability, and software includes that whole process of getting it to a running point. >> It's funny you mentioned remote and one of the thing things that you're passionate about, certainly Edge has to be remote. You don't want to roll a truck or labor at the Edge. But I was doing a conversation with, at Rebars last year about space. It's hard to do brake fix on space. It's hard to do a, to roll a someone to configure satellite, right? Right? >> Chris: Yeah. >> So Kubernetes is in space. We're seeing a lot of Cloud Native stuff in apps, in space, so just an example. This highlights the fact that it's got to be automated. Is there a machine learning AI angle with all this ChatGPT talk going on? You see all the AI going the next level. Some pretty cool stuff and it's only, I know it's the beginning, but I've heard people using some of the new machine learning, large language models, large foundational models in areas I've never heard of. Machine learning and data centers, machine learning and configuration management, a lot of different ways. How do you see as the product person, you incorporating the AI piece into the products for Platform9? >> I think that's a lot about looking at the telemetry and the information that we get back and to use one of those like old idle terms, that continuous improvement loop to feed it back in. And I think that's really where machine learning to start with comes into effect. As we run across all these customers, our system that helps at two o'clock in the morning has that telemetry, it's got that data. We can see what's changing and what's happening. So it's writing the right algorithms, creating the right machine learning to- >> So training will work for you guys. You have enough data and the telemetry to do get that training data. >> Yeah, obviously there's a lot of investment required to get there, but that is something that ultimately that could be achieved with what we see in operating people's environments. >> Great. Chris, great to have you here in the studio. Going wide ranging conversation on Kubernetes and Platform9. I guess my final question would be how do you look at the next five years out there? Because you got to run the product management, you got to have that 20 mile steer, you got to look at the customers, you got to look at what's going on in the engineering and you got to kind of have that arc. This is the right path kind of view. What's the five year arc look like for you guys? How do you see this playing out? 'Cause KubeCon is coming up and we're you seeing Kubernetes kind of break away with security? They had, they didn't call it KubeCon Security, they call it CloudNativeSecurityCon, they just had in Seattle inaugural events seemed to go well. So security is kind of breaking out and you got Kubernetes. It's getting bigger. Certainly not going away, but what's your five year arc of of how Platform9 and Kubernetes and Ops evolve? >> It's to stay on that theme, it's focusing on what is most important to our users and getting them to a point where they can just consume it, so they're not having to operate it. So it's finding those big items and bringing that into our platform. It's something that's consumable, that's just taken care of, that's tested with each release. So it's simplifying operations more and more. We've always said freedom in cloud computing. Well we started on, we started on OpenStack and made that simple. Stable, easy, you just have it, it works. We're doing that with Kubernetes. We're expanding out that user, right, we're saying bring your developers in, they can download their Kube conflict. They can see those Containers that are running there. They can access the events, the log files. They can log in and build a VM using KubeVirt. They're self servicing. So it's alleviating pressures off of the Ops team, removing the help desk systems that people still seem to rely on. So it's like what comes into that field that is the next biggest issue? Is it things like CI/CD? Is it simplifying GitOps? Is it bringing in security capabilities to talk to that? Or is that a piece that is a best of breed? Is there a reason that it's been spun out to its own conference? Is this something that deserves a focus that should be a specialized capability instead of tooling and vendors that we work with, that we partner with, that could be brought in as a service. I think it's looking at those trends and making sure that what we bring in has the biggest impact to our users. >> That's awesome. Thanks for coming in. I'll give you the last word. Put a plug in for Platform9 for the people who are watching. What should they know about Platform9 that they might not know about it or what should? When should they call you guys and when should they engage? Take a take a minute to give the plug. >> The plug. I think it's, if your operations team is focused on building Kubernetes, stop. That shouldn't be the cloud. That shouldn't be in the Edge, that shouldn't be at the data center. They should be consuming it. If your engineering teams are all trying different ways and doing different things to use and consume Cloud Native services and Kubernetes, they shouldn't be. You want consistency. That's how you get economies of scale. Provide them with a simple platform that's integrated with all of your enterprise identity where they can just start consuming instead of having to solve these problems themselves. It's those, it's those two personas, right? Where the problems manifest. What are my operations teams doing, and are they delivering to my company or are they building infrastructure again? And are my engineers sprinting or crawling? 'Cause if they're not sprinting, you should be asked the question, do I have the right Cloud Native tooling in my environment and how can I get them back? >> I think it's developer productivity, uptime, security are the tell signs. You get that done. That's the goal of what you guys are doing, your mission. >> Chris: Yep. >> Great to have you on, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Chris: Thanks very much. 0 Okay, this is "theCUBE" here, finding the right path to Cloud Native. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage here at AWS reInvent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, wrapping up our day one coverage here in the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and with me to talk about Accenture, couple of guys who are no strangers at all to the Cube. In fact, I think we got to give you like alumni passes or something. (Chris and Merim laugh) We got to come up with something like that. Um, Merim Becirovic is with us. Uh, Merim's a global IT at Accenture. And Chris Wegmann, who's already been on once today, as a matter of fact. >> Yeah (indistinct) >> So we're going to start charging you rent, Chris. (Chris and Merim laugh) Uh, global technology and practice lead with the AWS business group at Accenture. Good, glad to have you both back and, um, you're welcome to the Cube any time, by the way. >> So don't be scared. >> Thanks, great to be back. Let's talk about >> Sure. >> What, what you folks have been up to. So, um, you are, as we were talking earlier, you are where a lot of your clients would like to be. You, you've begun this transformation. You have fully migrated to the cloud, you've learned, right? >> Yes. You've hit all the bumps along the way. So talk about your journey. >> Yeah. >> And then how you think that experience could be translated to what your clients are going through. >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll hit it from the lessons learned and working together with our business group partners. We, so Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. We have finished that journey, and as part of that journey, we have migrated all of the services it takes to run Accenture to the public cloud. So now that's done. That was complete. But now we are this, now it is this cloud continuum living in the cloud. And the, now, the thing we talk about, and I'd love to have Chris, you know, shine a little bit more, is we have built our digital core in a cloud, now. We're no longer dependent on data centers. And that has given us tremendous flexibility around how to enable the business as it has grown significantly since we started this journey a few years back. >> Yeah, you know, Merim, like you talk about, right? We talk about our client, we've talked to our clients about building this digital core, right? And, and we've been through that as Accenture, as a global IT organization, you know. Supporting well over 720,000 people. >> Yeah. >> Right? That growth over the last year has been tremendous. Right? So, without the strong digital core built on cloud, right? We couldn't do that, right? We couldn't add that number of people, right? We couldn't make the, the, the changes were needed during, uh, Covid to bring people home, working from home. You know, whether it being uh, the way we changed our business model or things like that, um, you know that was all enabled by cloud. It couldn't be done without that. And, you know, also the variable in our business, right? Is very tied now to our cloud consumption, right? So, you know, it goes up, it goes down, right? We've, you know, Merim and his team have completely built their, their their core with those, with those concepts uh, in mind. >> Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, you know, 700, 800,000 employees and how many countries did you say? >> 130 different countries, at least. >> 130 different countries. So, I mean, no small task, obviously, uh, to get everything done. When did you start? >> So our cloud journey, effectively, we started in 2015. And we were done, kind of right before Covid around 2019. We took a pause for a couple of different things but we could have probably done that faster. And if we were, if I was to do it again now, today we could probably do it in two to three years, flat. With everything that we've learned so far. >> So what's the application, then, to your clients' experiences that, I mean, been there, done that, right? >> You can, exactly right. I mean, you know, we always say that we want to be our best credential, right? And Merim and his team are our best credential in this space. Um, so, you know, a lot of our customers, you know, struggle making that commitment. A lot of 'em are past that struggle, now. They're committed, they're going. Uh, but I talk to a lot of my customers about, you know, do I, do I migrate? Do I modernize? You know, how do I do it? And, and it was interesting with Accenture, right? It, it started out very much as a migration program. >> Yeah. >> Right, so, we made the decision, Merim and his team made the decision to do a migration and now a modernization, right? And, and that's proven very effective. Uh, it, it's, it's, it's proven, you know, uh, we got that core in place, right? We were able to build off of that versus, you know, spending- it would've taken a lot more time just to start with a modernization approach. >> Yeah. Where, where do you draw the line between the two, between migration and modernization, then? Because just by migrating alone, you are modernizing, you know, some of your operations, so you're getting up to speed. But, but how do you draw that line and then how do you get people to jump over it? >> So I, I'll hit it from how our lessons learned. So, when we first started and we did the migrations it was literally lift and shift. And it was a lot of argument about lift and shift isn't worth it. But we found out it was, because it wasn't just about moving the work loads and keeping it like a data center. It was moving the work loads and then optimizing because everything in the cloud was significantly faster. So then I didn't have to consume all the services the same way I did in the data center. I can actually consume them smaller. But also as time went by, what we learned is, hey, now these services are working here. Which ones are actually costing us more money to run? And not that they were costing more than the data center, but it's relative to the cloud which ones cost more in the cloud? Then we looked at that and said, okay how do we want to modernize those? And then we modernized as container capabilities started the evolving, got much more mature. We shifted a lot of workloads to containers. But otherwise, the other principle we push very hard is big consumption of Lambda and uh, serverless capabilities on Amazon. So we have refactored multiple applications to give us that capability to say we no longer need the IAS capabilities, those servers, those VM's, and we run on, on serverless capability. And what's great about that is, now I don't have a server to patch, to scan, to remediate, to upgrade. I've moved away from that capability. And the teams can focus more on building the business capabilities the business wants. Um, like we did to our pricing team. I don't know if you knew this one, Chris, but all the pricing capability has been redone to be cloud native on, on AWS. >> And how, how do you deal with the folks that, that still kind of have a foot in the on-prem world that, um, that they're just not ready to give it up? You know, they, they like the control, they like the self-management. >> Yeah. >> They, they want to be in charge. >> Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of our customers, it's, there's a reason why they need on-prem still. And there is on-prem, let's be clear. I mean, it, it is a hybrid cloud world for most of our, our customers, right? Whether they got manufacturing, whether they've got, you know, datas that are, you know, SCADA systems or, or operational IT systems that have to be close to their, their execution or to their, to their factories and things like that. So that's going to happen. I think everyone, and I shouldn't say everyone, but you know, most of our customers know they need to get there, right? And are somewhere on their journey, right? Very few have not started at all. Uh, but it's about acceleration, right? And I, I do think, um, we're going to see more and more acceleration. We saw it with Covid, right? >> Mm-hm. >> And then, you know, obviously I think we're going to see it again, right? With you know, kind of what's going on with the economy and stuff like that. It, it's, you know, it's a great way to push that change through. >> Right. >> And I, I'm really excited, to be honest what I'm really excited about, if I look at what Merim and his team's doing, is they're just leveraging that digital core and truly taking the investments that the hyper scaler's are making, the AWS's are making, and leveraging 'em. So we're not making that investment, right? We're a capital white company, right? So we don't like making good capital investments, right? And we're taking advantage of the capital investments. And we couldn't do that of the, of the hyper scales. We couldn't do that without being there. Right? >> Right. >> We just couldn't do it. >> And maybe, John, if I can build on that. >> Sure. >> Like, one of, one of the things for me when I think about the cloud is, I'm not alone. You know, because when you're in a data center when you're running a data center, you're kind of on an island. And on that island, if you've got security issues, if you got stuff you're dealing with with attackers, you know, you're, you're kind of on an island and you're alone. Whereas in this world, I am where all the investment is, where all the security capabilities are being built, and I have partners that are there with us that help us when these situations come up. So for me, I'm very uh, grateful that we pushed very hard in the beginning to get here. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For us. >> So like, do you- do you want to live outside the fort? >> Yeah. >> No >> No. (laughs) >> You're exactly right. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to live outside the fort. >> Right. >> There are a lot of bad guys out there right now. >> Yeah. >> All right, so, the journey is over. >> Right. You can unpack your bags and get comfortable, right? (Merim laughs) >> No. >> Hardly. >> No. >> So, so what is the, what has this done in terms of setting you up for your future plans? And, and >> So I'll talk about a couple different things and maybe you can build on it, Chris, from what you're seeing, like for us, we, we got very good at, I hate the concept of just FinOps but it's the way of being in the cloud. It's different than running a data center and uh, the way we think about building services, consuming services, allocating services, provisioning services. There's just so much more flexibility there that we can completely fine tune the service that we want to provide. That helps us from when we think about 360 degree value, as we talk to our clients, for ourselves to say it also helps just simply on the sustainability agenda, right, because now, as Amazon builds their capabilities to be more sustainable, those SKUs are available to us, we can naturally consume those SKUs much more effectively. Um, and then uh, the next thing to me, what I'm, what I'm especially excited about is all the stuff we're doing around network. So, you know, pre-Covid, 95% of our traffic was just straight to the internet because we had already finished the journey. So now what do you need a wide area network for anymore? >> Right. >> If you're not routing traffic between data centers what do you need it for? So, we have been working with, with AWS especially, like building these cloud land type capabilities and consuming it. So think of consuming, uh, network same way as you do the cloud. So I'm excited about that one. >> Yeah. That, that, I'm super excited about that, right? Because you know, network's at the core of everything you do, right? And there's always a lot of concern, hey, when I go to the cloud, my network costs are going to go up, right? Um, but I think we've proven, right? >> Yes. >> Being able, that those costs can come down, right? And we can have a better experience, uh, deal with the ebbs and flows of our business whether it's people working from home, people working in the office, you know, or at the client sites. We, we've, you know, we've got that cloud-based backbone that we support. You know, I, I mean Merim, I agree a hundred percent. I think you and your team have done a great job of cost management, cloud cost management, optimization, right? You didn't stop, right? >> No. >> You didn't lo- you didn't just live after the migration on VMs. Right? You know, you went serverless, you went, you know, containerization. >> Yep. >> Uh, and that's kept our cloud bill going down. >> Yes. >> Right. Versus going up, right? >> Yes. >> And I hear from a lot of customers concerned about cloud costs and that type of stuff, but you've proven right, >> Yes. >> That you can keep it flat, if not going down because you're using those last minutes. Sustainability is the other thing that I truly am, I, I love, right? Is, you know, we're all trying to become a more sustainable, sustainable organization. We're trying to help our clients become more sustainable organizations. And you know, you know, your ability to take on Gravitant processors, right? Which use less power. >> Yes. >> Right? Overnight, right? >> Yes. >> Or, hey, I'm using a, you know a, uh, serverless lambda, whatever, right? And I'm not running that server. >> Right. >> You know, so, you're able to show that sustainability gains, um, you know, very quickly. Which you could not do, right? You know, in just doing cloud basic migrations. >> Well, I tell you what I think is impressive, is that you put your money where your mouth is, right? >> Yep. (laughs) >> Is that, that it's, and, and if I'm going to be a client, not to, you know, give you guys a pat on the back, you don't need it. You're doing great without me. But I'd say you've been there, you've done that. And, and so I can learn from you. You understand my pain. >> Yes. >> You understand my reservations, my challenges and uh, you could be my, my headlights here. (Merim laughs) >> So, I think great approach. Kudos to you and certainly wish you both success and to your fourth and fifth appearances on the Cube. (Merim and Chris laugh) Um, we have slots tomorrow if you're arou- available. So, maybe we'll fill it up >> There you go. >> and bring it back again. >> Awesome. >> Guys, thanks for being here. >> Sure. >> It was very nice. >> Appreciate the time. >> All right. >> That's great. >> I've been talking, uh, about Accenture. This is the, of course, executive summit being sponsored by Accenture here at AWS reInvent 22. I'm John Walls. You're watching the Cube, the leader in tech coverage.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, friends. Welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 in Sin City. We are so excited to be here with tens of thousands of people. This is our third day of coverage, really the second full day of the show, but we started Monday night. You're going to get wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. You probably know that because you've been watching. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Paul Gill. Paul, this is great. We have had such great conversations. We've been talking a lot about data. Every company is a data company, has to be a data company. We've been talking about developers, the developer experience, and how that's so influential in business decisions for businesses in every industry. >> And it's a key element of what's going on here on the floor at re:Invent is developers, the theme of developers just permeates the show. Lots and lots of boots here devoted to DevOps and Agile approaches. And certainly that is one of the things that the Cloud enables is your team to rethink the way they develop software, and that's what we're going to talk about next. >> That is what we're going to talk about next. We have two guests from Split. split.io is the URL if you want to check it out. Chris Demars joins us Developer advocate. Chris, great to have you and PaaS, VP of Engineering guys thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us Pierre, we'll start with you. For the audience that might not know Split what does the company do? What's the value in it for customers? What are you all about? >> Sure. So in very simple terms, for those who are familiar, we do feature flags, feature management and experimentation. And essentially that two essential feature of the Agile transformation as you were mentioning and elements that really helps getting as much art we can from the team in term of productivity and in term of impact. And we basically help with those elements. And so that's a very short... >> 'Excellent, very nice. Chris, you were saying before we went live you do a lot of speaking at conferences, you're often in front of large audiences. As the developer advocate, what are some of the key requirements you're hearing from the developer community that organizations need to be encompassing? >> I think community is key. Like community is at the forefront of developer advocacy and developer relations. Like you want to go where the developers are and developers want to hear those stories in those personalized pieces of the puzzle. And when you're able to talk about modern Web and software technology and loop in product with that and still keep talking about those things and bring that to them, like that is on top of the list when it comes to developer advocacy and being embedded within the developer community. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Tell us about feature flags, because I would assume that for our viewers who are not developers, who are not familiar with Agile technologies, the Agile approaches that might be, may be a new term, what are feature flags? How do you use them? >> Sure, I can start with that. So feature flag is a tool that you embed in your code that allows you to control the activation of your code essentially. And that's allows you to really validate things in a much better and solve way and also attach measurement to it. So, when you're writing your new feature, you just put essentially an if statement around it, if my feature flag is on, then I actually do all those things with soft, then I don't do any of those things and then within our platform, then you can control the activation. Do you want to turn it on for yourself just to try it out? Do you want your QA team to start validating it? Do you want 5% of your users 10%? And start seeing how they interacting with the product. That's what feature flag is. >> It's an amazing piece of any part of the stack, right? 'Cause I'm a Web accessibility and an UI specialist and being able to control the UI with a feature flag and being able to turn on and off those features based on percentage, locale, all of those things. It's very, very powerful. >> What are some of the scenarios which you would use feature flags? You have been testing? >> Yeah, yeah. We actually, you can imagine we use it for pretty much everything. So, as Chris was saying, in the front-end, everything you want to change, you basically can validate and attach measurements. So you can do AB testing, so you can see the impact, you can see if there is a change in performance. We use it also for a lot of backend services and changes and a lot of even infrastructure changes where we can control the traffic and where it goes. So we can validate that things are operating the way that they should before we fully done the market I think. >> 'It can be as small as, you know having a checkout button here and then writing an AB test and running an experiment and moving that checkout button somewhere else because then you can get conversion rates and see which one performed better to a certain amount of people and whatever performed better, that's the feature you would go with. >> Chris, talk about the value of the impact in feature flags for the developer from a developer experience perspective, a productivity perspective. >> So I think that having that feature and being able to write that UI, let's say that you have a checkout button, right? And there's specific content there's verbiage on that checkout button. And then let's say that another team within the organization wants to change that because the conversion is different. You can make those changes, still have it in production and then have it tested. So you don't have to cut specific branches or like test URLs to give to QA, you can do all of that behind that flag. And then once everything is good to go, push it out there and then based on those metrics and that data, see which one performs better and then that's the one that you would go with. >> One of the things with feature flag and it goes to like our main theme of 'What a Release, What a Relief' is that it gives autonomy to the teams and to the developers, enable them to move independently from others. So the deployment can go but their code is not activated until they decide to. And so, they are not impeding anybody else. It makes releases a lot safer, a lot simpler and it gives a lot more speed to everybody because when you do releases with five teams, 10 teams, pushing the code at the same time, you have such a high-risk of breaking something that it's you know... So it's a huge effort and it requires a lot of attention from a lot of people. If anything happens, all those teams needs to investigate. When you decouple all those things, the deployments are essentially not doing anything per se until every individual team activate those things independently. So if anything goes wrong, only them are affected and they don't have to depend on anybody else to get their thing out. So it really helps them making their life a lot safer and gives them a lot more speed because they have autonomy. >> So, why come to re:Invent? What do you get with this audience that you don't get elsewhere? >> Why to re:Invent? I think like re:Invent in the Cloud and AWS is a lot about getting speed to companies to build better product and faster. And essentially like the tool we provide and the technology and the platform we provide is really at the heart of that in itself. And so that's why we feel we have really great conversation with all the people on the floor. >> 'the people who have the right mindset for adopting... >> For me, it's very much community and networking, I love developer community and just community in general is my lifeblood. That's why I travel so much and I talk about these things and I'm with people and if it's not about the products, the story and the story is what gets people. That's why I love being here and being with my team and it's amazing. >> And what is that story? If you had an elevator pitch to give, what would you tell me? >> Hoo, if you were in a late release or deploy at night. I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, it doesn't matter what you're doing. We don't want be up until two, three in the morning doing those things, right? Our product helps alleviate those stresses. And you talking about accessibility, what I do, you know, a big piece of that are hidden impairments like anxiety will stress and anxiety go hand in hand and you want to alleviate that all across the board for everybody involved. >> As you see organizations shift Agile technologies and to parallel development and continuous release cycles, what are some of the biggest barriers they encounter in changing that mindset? >> Ooh, what do you think? >> It depends on where they are in the organization. The Agile transformation is a journey and it's also a change of mindset, it's a change of process. So depending on where they are then they might have some areas where they need a little bit more effort in those directions. What we see is that feature flag just the control of the layout. It's usually something that's fairly easily adopted. Thinking about measurement and attaching measurement to it is often something that requires a little bit more thinking. Like engineers are not really used to thinking about AB testing. It feels like more of a product management thing but AB testing is important also for performance informations like errors and all those things. There is a lot of risk management to be done. We do that through monitoring with APMs, but with feature flag and with Split, you can do that at a feature level and it really gives a great insight. And that's usually something that takes a little bit more digestion from the developers to really get their mind around it and get to it. But there's a lot of value to it. >> I'm looking at the split I/O website and I like the tagline shorten time from code to customer. As customers in any industry, as consumers, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want anytime 24 by 7 and it's going to be a relevant experience. So it sounds to me like from a speed perspective, there's a lot of business impact that Split can help organizations make from getting releases faster, getting cut faster time-to-market, delivering what customers expect because we all expect real-time these days. Nobody wants to wait. >> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that has to do with the going back to the decoupling of things that, you know... Not having to go through so many teams to have it tested and getting away from all the meetings about meetings to review the metrics, right? We all love meetings about meetings. >> No. (laughs loudly) >> Right, exactly, exactly. So being able to take that away and being able to push all of that stuff into production, getting it tested while it's in production and then being able to turn those features on, it's already there without having to do another deployment. And I think, like that's really powerful to me at least. >> Does your solution have value at the security level as well? >> Yes. So that's one of the particularity on the way we do things is like the way you control the feature flag, you have kind of two ways of doing it. Either the piece of code, the SDKs that we provide, the library we provide, you that you put in your code could come back to our platform and check. The way we do it is we send the rules back to the SDK so the whole evaluation is local. The evaluation is extremely fast and it's very secure because it's all happening within your environment. You never have to share any information, no PI whatsoever, contrary it to some of the other tools that you might find on the market. >> So the theme of the booth is 'What a Release, What a Relief'. What are some of the things that you're hearing as you're engaging folks on the show floor this week? >> Oh, what is Aura Photography and can I take a picture of. (everyone laughs loudly) I think just a lot of the stresses of... They're like the release cycle and you know, having to go through so many teams. I feel like that's a common theme that I've heard of. >> Yeah, we see a number of teams organization that still have like really big deployments with like a lot of teams basically coming together, pushing the code together, and there's a lot of pain in it. It's like, it's a huge effort by huge teams. You get 10, 20 people that have to have watch over it at always weird hours, and I think there is a lot of pain to that and that resonate a lot with people. And when we talk about monitoring at the future level, that also helps a lot. Like I was part of organizations before where we had a dedicated staff engineer to just monitor and fix performance on a daily basis because it's such a huge problem and it affects so much the performance of the company. And so essentially, you have this person that tries to look at is a performance being degraded today with the deployment of yesterday and what went out yesterday and you have so many things that went out. It's so hard to control. With what we provide, we tell you exactly which feature flag is responsible for the degradation. And so, you don't need that person to focus on that anymore. And you can focus on delivering value a lot better. >> I think it also might take away the need for extensive release notebooks and playbooks, right? 'Cause when you do bring all those teams together, it's certain people that are in that meeting and there's a PDF saying, all right, we check this off the list, we check this off the list. I think that might alleviate some of that overhead as well. >> Streamlining processes, process efficiencies, workforce productivity improvements, big impact. >> And that gets code quicker to the user. >> You talk about decoupling deploy from release. What do you mean by that? What's the value? >> So the deployment in my definition is essentially getting the code out to production. The release is activating the code in production. And often people do both of those things at the same time, right? But there's a huge risk when you do that because if anything goes wrong, now you need to revert everything which is not a short operation often and takes a lot of effort. And so now, if you can basically push your code to production but separate the activation of it, the release of it, then it goes a lot faster. It's a lot. You have a lot of autonomy and decoupling and if anything goes wrong, it's the click of a button and it's off. So like there's a lot of safety that comes with it and we know that any outages as a high cost for all the companies. So it's like, if you can reduce the outage to like five seconds... >> Right. >> It's a lot better than basically several hours. >> Can you talk about the value out of Split versus DIY and where are most of your customers in this process? Do they have a bunch of tools, a bunch of processes, a bunch of teams, and you're really helping them consolidate streamline? >> The one thing I hear a lot is we rolled our own AB testing and feature flagging system, but some of the issues I've seen and I've heard are that they don't have all those metrics or they have to work with a specific data team to get those metrics. And then you go back to having those meetings about meetings... >> Lisa: Dependencies. >> Right, you have a data team that's putting together a report that is then presented to you and then that's got to be presented to a stakeholder and then that stakeholder makes a decision whether to turn on feature A or feature B, right? Our product from my understanding is we have those metrics already built in and you can have that at your disposal. >> Yeah, the other thing I would add to that is like we see a number of people, they start on the feature flag journey just because they have a high risk thing that they need to put out. So they do the minimal thing to basically control it somehow, but it works only in one part of the stacks. They can't basically leverage it anywhere else and it's very limited in capability so that it just serve the purpose that was needed at that time. They don't have a dedicated team to manage it. So it just there, but it's very constrained and it's not supported effectively. The other thing is like for those companies is like they have a question to ask themselves. It's like do they want to invest resources in managing that kind of tool or is it not so core to their business that they want essentially to have vendor deal with it at a much lower price and they would have to invest resources for them to support it, and... >> Sounds like feature flags are kind of a team building. Have you have a team building dimension to them? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It takes a team for sure. >> Yeah, and then once you add like AB testing and the feature flag, it's the collaboration between product management and engineering. It can go even further. Like two executives like to basically, you know, view the impact, understand the impact. So it goes from the control to the risk management to the product and to the impact and measuring the flow of delivery and the communication around it. >> Here we are at re:Invent, so many thousands of people as I mentioned, we're on the second full-day of the event. What have you heard from AWS that really excites you about being in their ecosystem? Any news in particular that jumps out at you that really speaks to improving that developer experience as if we've heard a lot of focus on the developer? >> Chris: Yeah, I haven't heard much, have you? >> So, I arrived yesterday, I haven't followed yet all the announcement, I'm just like, >> there's so many- >> on the news, yeah, yeah. >> So I'm on the booth at the same time. >> I stopped counting at 15 during the Keynote this morning. >> Many of them just can't keep up, there's so much happening at one time's so much. >> This event is a can of content, can of news re:Invent. It is hard. But yesterday they were spent so much time talking about data and how... And I always think every company today has to be a data company, have to be a software company, we were just talking with Capital One and they think of themselves as a technology company that does banking. And sometimes, I'll talk with retailers that think of themselves as technology companies that do retail and they love that but that's what companies like Split have to enable these days. It's companies to become technology companies, deliver code faster to customer because the customer's demanding it. We're not going to want less stuff slower. >> Yeah, I mean it's so essential I think for me like I joined Split because of that premises. Like every company now is a software company and every company has really to compete in innovation. You know all those banks, Capital One like we see it a lot in the financial industry where our message resonates extremely strongly is really in a high-competitive environment and they have to be innovative and innovation comes when people have speed and autonomy. And if you basically provide that to teams and the tools to basically get some signals and some quick feedback loop, that's how you get innovation. Like you can't decide what to build but you can basically provide the tools to enable them to think about. >> Right, you can experiment more flexibly right, faster. >> And developers have to be empowered, right? >> Yes. >> I think that's the probably one of the number one messages I've heard at all the shows we've done this year. How influential the developer is in the direction of the business. >> Autonomy and empowerment are two main factors 'cause I'm a front end developer at heart and I want to work on cool stuff and we're doing cool stuff. Like we are doing cool stuff. We can't talk about all of it, right? But I think we're doing a lot of cool things at Split and I'm really stoked to be a part of the team and grow developer relations, grow developer advocacy and be along for the journey. >> Yeah, I love that. Last question for both of you, same question. If you had a bumper sticker and you were going to put it on a fancy shiny new car, car of your choice about Split, what would it say? Pierre I'll start with you then Chris. >> Bumper sticker. >> On the spot question. >> On the question, (everyone laughs happily) I mean the easy answer is probably written on my t-shirt. Like, you know, 'What a Release, What a Relief'. I think that the first step for teams is like, you can have a message that's very like even further, you know, the Agile transformation is a journey and I basically tell people, you need to first crawl, walk and run and I think the 'What a Release, What a Relief' is a good step to like getting to the working. And I think like that would be the first bumper sticker before I get to the further one about AP testing and innovative. >> Love it. Chris, what would your bumper sticker say? >> It would say Split software, feature flags for the masses. Hard stop. >> Mic drop. >> Done. >> Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining Paul and me on the program. It's been outstanding introducing Split to our audience, what you do, how you're impacting the developer experience and ultimately, the business and the end customer on the backend who just wants things to work. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and Paul Gillin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, which you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, we're at Reinvent 22, AWS's big show going on here at the Venetian. Several thousand, tens of thousands of folks packing that exhibit four and going to sessions and also learning a lot about what's going on in the cloud space. And today we're going to talk about speed, velocity, to be specific. And with me to do that is Chris Wegmann who's the global technology and business lead for the Accenture AWS business group. And Chris is with Accenture. And then Erik Farr immediately on my right, is the global technology leader again for the AWS business group, but at AWS. So very similar titles guys, you're making it tough on the host. But glad to have you with us here. Really appreciate the time. So let's talk about velocity, you know, what's that all about? And Erik, I'll let you jump in on that. And then Chris, you go from there. How about that? >> Yeah, so with velocity, it's really about innovation. It's really about trying to speed the way that we help our customers, not just innovate through the AWS services, but with Accenture. With their ability to come in and really just kind of bring their expertise in industries and in the technology underpinnings and kind of all of the aspects of what we do together as a partnership. >> Okay. Chris? >> Yeah, so when we came up with a concept around velocity, we worked backwards from the customers the traditional Amazon way, right? So, we looked across a lot of the programs we were doing with our customers as well as we were doing internally when we were building assets to take to the market on AWS. And we found we were spending way too much time, anywhere from six to eight months just getting all the foundation in place, all the integration in place, getting the services to the point where we could actually build on top of it or our customers could build on top of it. And we got challenged. We said, there's got to be a better way, right? And so we took a different look at it. We said, can we go build an application? Can we go build code versus accelerators or our blueprints or that type of stuff that really would allow us to walk into a customer or walk into one of our internal organizations that had a an idea around an application or solution to be built on AWS to take to our customers as a service. And said can we go through just a very simple set of checklist, predefined architectures, predefined solutions and that stuff, and can we just crank it out, right? Can we, and that's what we've built. We built this tool and platform based on that concept. So it's designed and it is helping us internally as well as our customers just go that much faster and get to that innovation that Erik talked about. >> So how did it happen between the two of you? >> Yeah. >> It's not easy, right? I mean, as good as your culture is there's still going to be some bumps along the way right? And so how did that evolve? What was that process like? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So I've been working with Accenture for over five years, working with Chris and other people at Accenture. And over those years we've spent countless discussions with our customers all around the world. And just like Chris said, we see all of the different scenarios that our customers are having to deal with. We see the pain points, we try to figure out how do we get better next time? How do we do this in such a way that allows them, those customers to really kind of innovate using AWS, which is what we're all trying to get to. And during that process we started to realize there's a few key themes that we're seeing, right? Not just the foundations, right, what you build off of at the base level, but the data aspects. Like how is a customer going and developing their data lake, so their data meshes, right? How is this happening? And what we've realized is that we are kind of doing that on a custom basis often and we realize we could actually speed that much faster, faster to value, faster to customer appreciation and additional usage and development of their solutions on AWS. >> So I look at it is, from the beginning we started the business group and the reason why we have very similar names is 'cause we represent each side of the organizations that are here. And when we started the business group seven years ago, the whole idea was better together, right? We should be able to come together and help our clients move that much faster, right? And that's what really was at the foundation of this, right? And how we built this, right? We came together, we both saw the problems, right? Obviously AWS has an immense set of services, has an immense set of capabilities. We had a lot of experience of implementing these. Came together, worked together to build this platform. And it's been a great journey, right? I mean, it's great to see the experiences from both sides come together. Some of the common problems, we each had different ways of addressing them and we had to go and debate, which was the best way. And we really are leveraging our joint customers here as well is to get inputs from them since we were working backwards for them. We've now taken this and pulled them into it and really gotten inputs from them on really what they're looking for above and beyond the services they have today. This is designed not just to be something we go use at the beginning of a journey, right? A cloud journey, it's to help customers continue through their journey as well. >> So, and I might have missed this, so I apologize if I did. But we always talk about speed, right? Everybody's about faster, quicker, more efficient and that. So what makes velocity a unique animal in that respect? What exactly is it delivering then for a customer that isn't just kind of baked into the services you'd be proposing to them anyhow? >> Yeah. So first off velocity is designed with automation at the core, right? So instead of having people going in and making changes or anything like that, it's all completely code backed and automated, right? So that alone allows for immense ability for us to go in and actually accelerate that journey for the customer. But in addition to that, because velocity was all developed to work together with this code, it actually allows these pieces and these components to be deployed together, to work together and to ultimately support that customer use case without actually having to go and recreate that every time. >> Okay. And can you gimme an idea, Chris, about somebody or at least how this has been put into practice then yeah? >> So I'll give you a couple examples. One, internally, right? So as part of our relationship, we're investing in these joint industry solutions, right? So industries, we're working with our different industry clients to solve industry specific problems, right? They're not thinking about, okay, let me go lay down a cloud foundation and go do that. They said, I've got a problem I want you to fix. Insurance is a great example, the underwriting processes and insurance, right? So our insurance teams really looked and said, okay, this is what we're going to go build. This is what we need to modernize that process. So instead of going back and going and building all the components they needed, building a data lake, right? Figuring out how data lake's going to work together, build the automation to create all the different EC2 instances and all the different services, security, all that stuff. You know, we were able to very quickly take velocity, go through a very short process with them, understand what they needed and use that code to create that entire environment. And it's not tied to that once it's created, right? So at that point you can still take the updates that we're giving on new services and things like that, but it's their environment, they're able to build on top of it. And it allowed them to rapidly create this insurance platform, right, that they're now taking out into clients. We're taking that same platform we use there and embedding it in every offering, every service that we give to our customers. So whether we're going out and build a cloud foundation, right? Whether we're rebuilding a cloud foundation because hey, it didn't stay up or keep up with the new services that came out from AWS, or we're going and building a data lake, right? Our customers want to take, they don't want to have to do all that heavy lifting in a lot of cases. They don't want it to go make a lot of those hard decisions, right? They want it kind of rebuilt. And what I love about velocity from the beginning, Erik talked about blocks, building blocks, right? And we also heard from our customers is, "I don't want to buy just one thing, right? And I have one size fits all. Hey, I'm really want something around data. Can you gimme that block? I really need something around compliance. Can you gimme that block?" Good example in Accenture, the compliance portion is an area that our internal organization really wanted. So we were able to give them that block. So we're hopeful that this just gives our clients that much more flexibility and move that much faster. >> So, go ahead EriK. >> Yeah, I was going to say I think to to the point too, the other aspect that we get with velocity is the idea and that the vision is that it's designed to be evergreen. And what that means is as AWS, as we release new services to the market, like we're doing this week right? We as the joint development group of velocity are taking those new services, those new features and updating them so that those functionalities are available to our customers that are already using velocity or that are going to use velocity into the future so that they're all taking advantage of it without having to go and do it into their own environments. >> That's what I was asking you about, about if there's a 2.0 down the road or I mean, how do you meet those growing needs and new capabilities that maybe don't exist now but they will a year from now, six months from now? Yeah so, what's on the drawing board right now? >> Yeah, so yeah, just I'll start. The one area that we're really looking at heavily, so the the velocity fabric is really just the underpinning technology that we've already been talking about. We've also got a set of activators, which is really the fact that we're kind of joint deploying this to our customers. But to answer your question, we have a concept of accelerators. So these accelerators are there to be developed over time and they're going to allow us to take those customer use cases that are typically kind of at a microservice level, right? Something smaller than an entire solution or an entire application. And use those to accelerate either the development of solutions into our customer environment or to accelerate our ability to create solutions to then take it out to our customers. So that's on the roadmap for '23 and beyond. >> So I'll build on what Erik was talking a little bit. A 2.0 is actually today, right? Multiple new services came out today, obviously through the site partnership, we had some insights on what's coming, right? And we could start building to those and start knowing customers are going to want to use those. And the idea of velocity is they don't have to go and figure that out themselves, right? So we'll be able to hand that off fairly shortly after those services are released to general availability. And the customers of Velocity will be able to start using 'em, right? And they don't have to go figure out how to integrate 'em and so on. So that's what's in the future. We'll continue to do that, right? We're committed to this. These industry solutions are going to grow, right? I mean that was one of the big reasons we built this. We knew we were going to be building a lot of these industry solutions. We already got several of 'em that are out in the market and we need this platform to do that. So you'll see a lot of velocity powered industry solutions coming out of Accenture. >> Who came up with the name? >> It's a great question. We wanted something around speed, right? 'Cause that's what it, further, faster. >> BLO did it, right? >> Exactly right. Everyone loves speed, right? And that's what we're talking about. So we really looked at lots of names, obviously, and Velocity is one of those ones that just stuck. It felt really right. It felt like it captured what we were trying to do in the market. You know, Accenture, we don't name a lot of things one off, right? They're really focused on what they do. And this was an exception to that because we thought, and we think that it's really going to drive the speed of our customers. And that was a challenge. And we're starting to see that. We're starting to see the improvement and speed that we can get our customers into the cloud. It's awesome. >> Yeah, it caught my attention right away. >> Yeah. >> So success on nicely done there. >> But I also think that velocity is not just about speed, it's speed in the right direction, right? >> Oh, sure. It's meant to design it in the way that our customers are leading and that we can then go along that journey with them. >> Right, yeah. The last thing you want is to go really fast in the wrong way. >> That's exactly right. That's exactly right. >> That's bad recipe. And you've had very few of those. You've had a lot of good recipes. Thanks for the time fellas, we appreciate. >> No, thanks for having us. >> All about Velocity and that offering going out to the marketplace in a, I guess a modernized version. Could you call it modernized now? By the way, it's only been around for couple years. It's all modernized. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and also theCUBE, which is the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada, this week at AWS Reinvent. I am joined by analyst and 10 year reinvent veteran John Furrier. John, pleasure to join you today. >> Great to see you, great event. This is 10 years. We've got great guests coming on the Q3 days of after this wall to wall, we'll lose our voice every year, Thursday >> Host: I can feel the energy. Can you feel the volume already? >> Yes. Everyone's getting bigger, stronger, in the marketplace seeing a lot more activity new players coming into the cloud. Ones that have been around for 10 years or growing up and turning into platforms and just the growth of software in the industry is phenomenal. Our next guest is going to be great to chat about. >> I know it's funny you mentioned marketplace. We're going to be talking marketplace, in our next segment. We're bringing back a Cube alumni Chris Casey welcome back to the show. How, how you Feeling today? >> Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean this week is the most exciting week of the year for us at AWS and you know, it's just a fantastic energy. You mentioned it before, to be here in Las Vegas at Reinvent and thank you very much for having me back. It's great to talk to John last year and lovely to meet you and talk to you this year. >> It is, it is our pleasure. It is definitely the biggest event of the year. It's wild that Amazon would do this on the biggest online shopping day of the year as well. It goes to show about the boldness and the bravery of the team, which is very impressive. So you cover a few different things at AWS So you cover a few different things at AWS you're talking about and across industries as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about why the software alliances and the data exchange are so important to the partner organization at AWS? >> Yeah, it really comes back to the importance to, to the AWS customer. As we've been working with customers over the, you know the past few years especially, and they've been embarking on their enterprise transformation and their digital transformation moving workloads to to the cloud, they've really been asking us for more and more support from the AWS ecosystem, and that includes native AWS services as well as partners to really help them start to solve some of the industry specific use cases and challenges that they're facing and really incorporate those as part of the enterprise transformation journey that they're embarking on with AWS. What, how that translates back to the AWS marketplace and the partner organization is customers have told us they're really looking for us to have the breadth and depth of the ecosystem of partners available to them that have the intellectual property that solves very niche use cases and workloads that they're looking to migrate to the cloud. A lot of the time that furnishes itself as an independent software vendor and they have software that the customer is trying to use to solve, you know an insurance workflow or an analytics workflow for your utility company as well as third party data that they need to feed into that software. And so my team's responsibility is helping work backwards from the customer need there and making sure that we have the partners available to them. Ideally in the AWS marketplace so they can go and procure those products and make them part of solutions that they're trying to build or migrate to AWS. >> A lot of success in marketplace over the past couple years especially during the pandemic people were buying and procuring through the marketplace. You guys have changed some of the operational things, data exchange enterprise sellers or your sales reps can sell in there. The partners have been glowingly saying great things about how it's just raining money for them if they do it right. And some are like, well, I don't get the marketplace. So there's a, there's kind of a new game in town and the marketplace with some of the successes. What, what is this new momentum that's happening? Is it just people are getting more comfortable they're doing it right? How does the marketplace work effectively? >> Yeah, I mean, marketplace has been around for for 10 years as well as the AWS partner organization. >> Host: It's like our coverage. >> Yes, just like. >> Host: What a nice coincidence. Decades all around happy anniversary everyone. >> Yeah, everyone's selling, celebrating the 10 year birthday, but I think to your point, John, you know, we we've continued iterate on features and functionality that have made the partner experience a much more welcoming digital experience for them to go to market with AWS. So that certainly helped and we've seen more and more customers start to adopt marketplace especially for, for some of their larger applications that they're trying to transform on the cloud. And that extends into industry verticals as well as horizontal sort of business applications whether they be ERP systems like Infor the customers are trying to procure through the marketplace. And I think even for our partners, it's customer driven. You know, we, we've, we've heard from our customers that the, the streamlining the payments and procurement process is a really key benefit for them procuring by the marketplace and also the extra governance and control and visibility they get on their third party licensing contracts is a really material benefit for them which is helping our partners lean in to marketplace as a as a digital channel for them to go to market with us. >> And also you guys have this program it's what's it called enterprise buying or something where clients can just take their spend and move it over into other products like MongoDB more Mongo gimme some more Splunk, gimme some more influence. I mean all these things are possible now, right. For some of the partners. Isn't that, that's like that's like found money for the, for the partners. >> Yeah, going back to what I said before about the AWS ecosystem, we're really looking to help customers holistically with regard to that, and certainly when customers are looking to make commitments to AWS and and move a a large swath of workloads to AWS we want to make sure they can benefit from that commitment not only from native AWS services but also third party data and software applications that they might be procuring through the marketplace. So certainly for the procurement teams not only is there technical benefits for them on the marketplace and you know foresters total economic impact study really helped quantify that for us more recently. You know, 66% of time saving for procurement professionals. >> Host: Wow. >> Which is when you calculate that in hours in person weeks or a year, that's a lot of time on undifferentiated heavy lifting that they can now be doing on value added activities. >> Host: That's a massive shift for >> Yeah, massive shift. So that in addition, you know, to, you know, some of the more contractual and commercial benefits is really helping customers look holistically at how AWS is helping them transform with third party applications and data. >> I want to stick on customers for a second 'cause in my show notes are some pretty well known customers and you mentioned in for a moment ago can you tell us a little bit about what's going on with Ferrari? >> Chris: Sure. So in four is one of our horizontal business application partners and sellers in the AWS marketplace and they sell ERP systems so helping enterprises with resource planning and Ferrari is obviously a very well known brand and you know, the oldest and most successful >> May have heard of them. >> Chris: Yes. Right. The most successful formula one racing team and Ferrari, you know a really meaningful customer for AWS from multiple angles whether they're using AWS to enhance their car design, as well as their fan engagement, as well as their actual end car consumer experience. But as it specifically relates to marketplace as part of Ferrari's technical transformation they were looking to upgrade their ERP system. And so they went through a whole swath of vendors that they wanted to assess and they actually chose Infor as their ERP system. And one of the reasons was >> Nice. >> Chris: because Infor actually have an automotive specific instance of their SaaS application. So when we're talking about really solving for some of those niche challenges for customers who operate in an industry, that was one of the key benefits. And then as an added bonus for Ferrari being able to procure that software through the AWS marketplace gave them all the procurement benefits that we just talked about. So it's super exciting that we're able to play a, you know a part in accelerating that digital transformation with Ferrari and also help Infor in terms of getting a really meaningful customer using their software services on AWS. >> Yeah. Putting a new meaning to turn key your push start. (laughing) >> You mentioned horizontal services earlier. What is it all about there? What's new there? We're hearing, I'm expecting to see that in the keynote tomorrow. Horizontal and vertical solutions and let's get the CEOs. What, what's the focus there? What's this horizontal focus for you? >> Yeah, I, I think the, the big thing is is really helping line of business users. So people in operations or marketing functions, that our customers, see the the partners and the solutions that they use on a daily basis today and how they can actually help accelerate their overall enterprise transformation. With those partners, now on AWS. Historically, you know, those line of business users might not have cared where an application historically ran whether it was on-prem or on AWS but now just the depth of those transformation journeys their enterprises are on that's really the next frontier of applications and use cases that many of our customers are saying they want to move to AWS. >> John: And what are some of those horizontal examples that you see emerging? >> So Salesforce is, is probably one, one of the best ones to call out there. And really the two meaningful things Salesforce have done there is a deep integration with our ML and AI services like SageMaker so people can actually perform some of those activities without leaving the Salesforce application. And then AWS and Salesforce have worked on a unified developer experience, which really helps remove friction in terms of data flows for anyone that's trying to build on both of those services. So the partnership with horizontal business applications like Salesforce is much deeper than just to go to market. It's also on the build side to help make it much more seamless for customers as they're trying to migrate to Salesforce on AWS as an example there. >> It's like having too many tabs open at once, everybody wants it all in one place all at one time. >> Chris: Yeah. >> And it makes sense that you're doing so much in, in the partner marketplace. Let's talk a little bit more about the data exchange. How, how is this intertwined with your vertical and horizontal efforts that the team's striving as well as with another big name example that folks know probably only because of the last few, few years, excuse me, with Moderna? Can you tell us a little more about that? >> Sure. I think when we're, when we're talking to customers about their needs when they're operating in a specific industry, but it probably goes for all customers and enterprise customers especially when they're thinking about software. Almost always that software also needs data to actually be analyzed or processed through it for really the end business outcome to be achieved. And so we're really making a conscious effort to really help our partners integrate with solutions that the AWS field teams and business development teams are talking to customers about and help tie those solutions to customer use cases, rather than it being an engagement with a specific customer on a product by product basis. And certainly software and and data going together is a really nice combination that many customers are looking for us to solve for and for looking for us to create pairings based on other customer needs or use cases that we've historically solved for in the past. >> I mean, with over a million customers, it's hard to imagine anyone could have more use cases to pull from when we're talking about these different instances >> Right. The challenge actually is identifying which are the key ones for each of the industries and which are the ones that are going to help move the needle the most for customers in there, it's, it's not an absence of selection in that case. >> Host: Right. (laughter) I can imagine. I can imagine that's actually the challenge. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But it's really important. And then more specifically on the data exchange, you know I think it goes back to one of the leadership principles that we launched last year. The two new leadership principles, success and scale bring broad responsibility. You know, we take that very seriously at AWS and we think about that in our actions with our native services, but also in terms of, you know, the availability of partner solutions and then ultimately the end customer outcomes that we can help achieve. And I think Moderna's a great example of that. Moderna have been using the mRNA technology and they're using it to develop a a new vaccine for the RSV virus. And they're actually using the data exchange to procure and then analyze real world evidence data. And what that, what that helps them do is identify and and analyze in almost real time using data on Redshift who are the best vaccine candidates for the trials based on geography and demographics. So it's really helping them save costs, but not only cost really help optimize and be much more efficient in terms of how they're going about their trials from time to market.. >> Host: Time to market. >> vaccine perspective. Yeah. And more importantly, getting the analysis and the results back from those trials as fast as they possibly can. >> Yeah. >> And data exchange, great with the trend that we're going to hear and the keynote tomorrow. More data exchanging more data being more fluid addressable shows those advantages. That's a great example. Great call out there. Chris, I got to get your thoughts on the ecosystem. You know, Ruba Borno is the new head of partners, APN, Amazon Partner Network and marketplace comes together. How you guys serve your partners is also growing and evolving. What's the biggest thing going on in the ecosystem that you see from your perspective? You can put your Amazon hat on or take your your Amazon hat off a personal hat on what's going on. There's a real growth, I mean seeing people getting bigger and stronger as partners. There's more learning, there's more platforms developing. It's, it's kind of the next gen wave coming. What's going on there? What's the, what's the keynote going to be like, what's the what's this reinvent going to be for partners? Give us a share your, share your thoughts. >> Yeah, certainly. I, I think, you know, we are really trying to make sure that we're simplifying the partner experience as much as we possibly can to really help our partners become you know, more profitable or the most profitable they can be with AWS. And so, you know, certainly in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday you're going to hear a little bit about what we've done there from a programs perspective, what we're doing there from feature and capability perspectives to help, you know really push the digital custom, the digital partner experience, sorry, I should say as much as possible. And really looking holistically at that partner experience and listening to our partners as much as we possibly can to adapt partner pathways to ultimately simplify how they're going to market with AWS. Not only on the co-sell side of things and how we interact with our field teams and actually interact with the end customer, but also on how we, we build and help coil with them on AWS to make their solutions whether that be software, whether that be machine learning models, whether that be data sets most optimized to operate in the AWS ecosystem. So you're going to hear a lot of that in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday. There's certainly some really fantastic partner stories and partner launches that'll be featured. Also some customer outcomes that have been realized as a result of partners. So make sure you don't miss it >> John: More action than ever before, right now. >> It's jam-packed, certainly and throughout the week you're going to see multiple launches and releases related to what we're doing with partners on marketplace, but also more generally to help achieve those customer outcomes. >> Well said Brian. So your heart take, what is the future of partnerships the future of the cloud, if you want throw it in, what what are you going to be saying to us? Hopefully the next time you get to sit down with John and I here on theCUBE at reinvent next year. >> Chris: Yeah, I think Adam, Adam was quoted today, as you know, saying that the, the partner ecosystem is going to be around and a foundation for decades. I think is a hundred percent right for me in terms of the industry verticals, the partner ecosystem we have and the availability of these niche solutions that really are solving very specific but mission critical use cases for our customers in each of the industries is super important and it's going to be a a foundation for AWS's growth strategy across all the industry segments for many years to come. So we're super excited about the opportunity ahead of us and we're ready to get after it. >> John: If you, if you could do an Instagram reel right now, what would you say is the most important >> The Insta challenge by go >> The Insta challenge, real >> Host: Chris's Insta challenge >> Insta challenge here, what would be the the real you'd say to the audience about why this year's reinvent is so important? >> I think this year's reinvent is going to give you a clear sense of the breadth and depth of partners that are available to you across the AWS ecosystem. And there's really no industry or use case that we can't solve with partners that we have available within the partner organization. >> Anything is possible. What a note to close on. Chris Casey, thank you so much for joining us for the second time here on theCUBE. John >> He nailed Instagram challenge. >> Yeah, he did. Did he pass the John test? >> I'd say, I'd say so. >> I'd say so. And and and he certainly teased us all with the content to come this week. I want to see all the keynotes here about some of those partners. You tease them in the gaming space with us earlier. It's going to be a very exciting week. Thank you John, for your commentary. Thank you Chris, one more time. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thank you all for tuning in here at theCUBE where we are the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier with Cube Team live from Las Vegas, Nevada. AWS Reinvent will be here all week and we hope you stay tuned.

>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube and Horizon three.ai special presentation. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We with Chris Hill, Sector head for strategic accounts and federal@horizonthree.ai. Great innovative company. Chris, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >>Yeah, like I said, you know, great to meet you John. Long time listener. First time call. So excited to be here with >>You guys. Yeah, we were talking before camera. You had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com. Yep. And boy man, you know, talk about being in the right place at the right time. Now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant and continuing to have that data driving security and that interplay. And your ceo, former CTO of Splunk as well at Horizons Neha, who's been on before. Really innovative product you guys have, but you know, Yeah, don't wait for a brief to find out if you're locking the right data. This is the topic of this thread. Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement with you guys. Tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and the Horizon AI as you guys expand Node zero out internationally? >>Yeah, well so across, so you know, my role within Splunk was working with our most strategic accounts. And so I look back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with, with our small customers. You know, it was, it was still very siloed back then. Like I was selling to an IT team that was either using us for IT operations. We generally would always even say, yeah, although we do security, we weren't really designed for it. We're a log management tool. And you know, we, and I'm sure you remember back then John, we were like sort of stepping into the security space and in the public sector domain that I was in, you know, security was 70% of what we did. When I look back to sort of the transformation that I was, was witnessing in that digital transformation, you know when I, you look at like 2019 to today, you look at how the IT team and the security teams are, have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silo away, would not communicate one, you know, the security guys would be like, Oh this is my BA box it, you're not allowed in today. >>You can't get away with that. And I think that the value that we bring to, you know, and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do innovation across the board. But I think what we've we're seeing in the space that I was talking with Patrick Kauflin, the SVP of security markets about this, is that, you know, what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data. So Splunk itself, as you well know, it's an ingest engine, right? So the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it, but without data it doesn't do anything, right? So how do you drive and how do you bring more data in? And most importantly from a customer perspective, how do you bring the right data in? >>And so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a Horizon three is that, sure we do pen testing, but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool, we do it continuously. So this whole thought of being like, Oh, crud like my customers, Oh yeah, we got a pen test coming up, it's gonna be six weeks. The wait. Oh yeah. You know, and everyone's gonna sit on their hands, Call me back in two months, Chris, we'll talk to you then. Right? Not, not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot, we, we saw that with Uber this week. Right? You know, and that's a case where we could have helped. >>Well just real quick, explain the Uber thing cause it was a contractor. Just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the >>Dots. Yeah, no problem. So there it was, I think it was one of those, you know, games where they would try and test an environment. And what the pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like, I need to reset my password re to set my password. And eventually the customer service guy said, Okay, I'm resetting it. Once he had reset and bypassed the multifactor authentication, he then was able to get in and get access to the domain area that he was in or the, not the domain, but he was able to gain access to a partial part of the network. He then paralleled over to what would I assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains. And so within minutes they had access. And that's the sort of stuff that we do under, you know, a lot of these tools. >>Like not, and I'm not, you know, you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a CTA orchestra architecture, right? I'm gonna get like a Zscaler, I'm gonna have Okta, I'm gonna have a Splunk, I'm gonna do this sore system. I mean, I don't mean to name names, we're gonna have crowd strike or, or Sentinel one in there. It's just, it's a cacophony of things that don't work together. They weren't designed work together. And so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen test, that there will be 5,000 servers out there. Three are misconfigured. Those three misconfigurations will create the open door. Cause remember the hacker only needs to be right once, the defender needs to be right all the time. And that's the challenge. And so that's why I'm really passionate about what we're doing here at Horizon three. I see this my digital transformation, migration and security going on, which we're at the tip of the sp, it's why I joined say Hall coming on this journey and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk. I get into more details on some of the specifics of that. But you know, >>I mean, well you're nailing, I mean we've been doing a lot of things around super cloud and this next gen environment, we're calling it NextGen. You're really seeing DevOps, obviously Dev SecOps has, has already won the IT role has moved to the developer shift left as an indicator of that. It's one of the many examples, higher velocity code software supply chain. You hear these things. That means that it is now in the developer hands, it is replaced by the new ops, data ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking. To your point about access, there's no more perimeter. So >>That there is no perimeter. >>Huge. A hundred percent right, is really right on. I don't think it's one time, you know, to get in there. Once you're in, then you can hang out, move around, move laterally. Big problem. Okay, so we get that. Now, the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally, how do they figure out what to do? Okay, this is the next step. They already have Splunk, so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success. So how would you look at that and describe the challenges? What do they do? What is, what are the teams facing with their data and what's next? What do they, what do they, what action do they take? >>So let's do some vernacular that folks will know. So if I think about dev sec ops, right? We both know what that means, that I'm gonna build security into the app, but no one really talks about SEC DevOps, right? How am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing? And so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we could pen test the entire environment from soup to nuts, right? So I'm gonna test the end points through to it. So I'm gonna look for misconfigurations, I'm gonna, and I'm gonna look for credential exposed credentials. You know, I'm gonna look for anything I can in the environment. Again, I'm gonna do it at at light speed. And, and what we're, what we're doing for that SEC dev space is to, you know, did you detect that we were in your environment? >>So did we alert Splunk or the SIM that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around? Did they, more importantly, did they log us into their environment? And when did they detect that log to trigger that log? Did they alert on us? And then finally, most importantly, for every CSO out there is gonna be did they stop us? And so that's how we, we, we do this in, I think you, when speaking with Stay Hall, before, you know, we've come up with this boils U Loop, but we call it fine fix verify. So what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker, right? We act in a production environment. So we're not gonna be, we're a passive attacker, but we will go in un credentialed UN agents. But we have to assume, have an assumed breach model, which means we're gonna put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment. >>So we're gonna go out and do an asset survey. Now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well, you know, so can Splunk see all the assets, do the same assets marry up? We're gonna log all that data and think then put load that into the Splunk sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in enterprise, right? That's an immediate future ad that they've got. And then we've got the fix. So once we've completed our pen test, we are then gonna generate a report and we could talk about about these in a little bit later. But the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found, which would be your asset discovery aspect of that, a fixed report. And the fixed report I think is probably the most important one. It will go down and identify what we did, how we did it, and then how to fix that. >>And then from that, the pen tester or the organization should fix those. Then they go back and run another test. And then they validate through like a change detection environment to see, hey, did those fixes taste, play take place? And you know, SNA Hall, when he was the CTO of JS o, he shared with me a number of times about, he's like, Man, there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about. And it's, and it has to do with how we, you know, how they were prioritizing the CVEs and whatnot because they would take all CVS was critical or non-critical. And it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot. That >>Was a lot. That brings, that brings up the, the efficiency for Splunk specifically. The teams out there. By the way, the burnout thing is real. I mean, this whole, I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can, keeps, keeps growing. How did Node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient? Now that's the question I want to get at, because this seems like a very scalable way for Splunk customers and teams, service teams to be more efficient. So the question is, how does Node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient? >>So to, so today in our early interactions with building Splunk customers, what we've seen are five things, and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots, right? So kind of what I just talked about with you. Did we detect, did we log, did we alert? Did they stop node zero, right? And so I would, I put that at, you know, a a a more layman's third grade term. And if I was gonna beat a fifth grader at this game would be, we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk enterprise customer, a Splunk essentials customer, someone using Splunk soar, or even just an enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and, and just wants to know where am I exposed. So by creating and generating these reports and then having the API that actually generates the dashboard, they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in. >>And then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs, right? So how do we create visibility to logs that are, have critical impacts? And again, as I mentioned earlier, not all CVEs are high impact regard and also not all are low, right? So if you daisy chain a bunch of low CVEs together, boom, I've got a mission critical AP CVE that needs to be fixed now, such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it, that would be very bad. And then third would be verifying that you have all of the hosts. So one of the things that Splunk's not particularly great at, and they, they themselves, they don't do asset discovery. So do what assets do we see and what are they logging from that? And then for, from, for every event that they are able to identify the, one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low-code, no-code environment. >>So they could let, you know, float customers can use Splunk. So to actually triage events and prioritize that events or where they're being routed within it to optimize the SOX team time to market or time to triage any given event. Obviously reducing mtr. And then finally, I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is our ability to build glass tables. So behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build a lock Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table, which is very familiar to this Splunk community. We're going to have the ability, not too distant future to allow people to search, observe on those IOCs. And if people aren't familiar with an ioc, it's an incident of compromise. So that's a vector that we want to drill into. And of course who's better at drilling in into data and Splunk. >>Yeah, this is a critical, this is awesome synergy there. I mean I can see a Splunk customer going, Man, this just gives me so much more capability. Action actionability. And also real understanding, and I think this is what I wanna dig into, if you don't mind understanding that critical impact, okay. Is kind of where I see this coming. I got the data, data ingest now data's data. But the question is what not to log, You know, where are things misconfigured? These are critical questions. So can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, going back to those things that I just spoke about, a lot of those CVEs where you'll see low, low, low and then you daisy chain together and you're suddenly like, oh, this is high now. But then to your other impact of like if you're a, if you're a a Splunk customer, you know, and I had, I had several of them, I had one customer that, you know, terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like, all right, there's a lot of other data that you probably also wanna bring, but they could only afford, wanted to do certain data sets because that's, and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets. And so we provide that opportunity to say, Hey, these are the critical ones to bring in. But there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low CVE in this case really does mean low cve. >>Like an ILO server would be one that, that's the print server where the, your admin credentials are on, on like a, a printer. And so there will be credentials on that. That's something that a hacker might go in to look at. So although the CVE on it is low, if you daisy chain was something that's able to get into that, you might say, ah, that's high. And we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate. So put it on the scale and we prioritize though, versus a, a vulner review scanner's just gonna give you a bunch of CVEs and good luck. >>And translating that if I, if I can and tell me if I'm wrong, that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement. That's it. Challenge, right? Print server, great example, look stupid low end, who's gonna wanna deal with the print server? Oh, but it's connected into a critical system. There's a path. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >>Yeah, I used daisy chain. I think that's from the community they came from. But it's, it's just a lateral movement. It's exactly what they're doing. And those low level, low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in. Right? So that's what the beauty thing about the, the Uber example is that who would've thought, you know, I've got my multifactor authentication going in a human made a mistake. We can't, we can't not expect humans to make mistakes. Were fall, were fallible, right? Yeah. The reality is is once they were in the environment, they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain exposed credentials that would've stopped the breach. Yeah. And they did not, had not done that in their environment. And I'm not poking. Yeah, >>They put it's interesting trend though. I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well. So it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint, but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spear fished because they're not paying attention. Cause they don't have to. No one ever told them, Hey, be careful of what you collect. >>Yeah. For the community that I came from, John, that's exactly how they, they would meet you at a, an international event introduce themselves as a graduate student. These are national actor states. Would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such? And I was at Adobe at the time though I was working on this and start off, you get the pdf, they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches, and I don't know if you remember back in like 2002, 2008 time frame, there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it. And John, that's >>Or LinkedIn. Hey I wanna get a joke, we wanna hire you double the salary. Oh I'm gonna click on that for sure. You know? Yeah, >>Right. Exactly. Yeah. The one thing I would say to you is like when we look at like sort of, you know, cuz I think we did 10,000 pen test last year is it's probably over that now, you know, we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think then fine people coming into the environment. The funniest thing is that only one of them is a, a CVE related vulnerability. Like, you know, you guys know what they are, right? So it's it, but it's, it's like 2% of the attacks are occurring through the CVEs, but yet there's all that attention spent to that. Yeah. And very little attention spent to this pen testing side. Yeah. Which is sort of this continuous threat, you know, monitoring space and, and, and this vulnerability space where I think we play such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one. >>Yeah. I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers, which I love as a, you know, watching that movie, you know, professional hackers are testing, testing, always testing the environment. I love this. I gotta ask you, as we kind of wrap up here, Chris, if you don't mind the benefits to team professional services from this alliance, big news Splunk and you guys work well together. We see that clearly. What are, what other benefits do professional services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon three AI alliance? >>So if you're a, I think for, from our, our, from both of our partners as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner, right? Is that first off, the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at. So if you're an end user, you can buy for the enterprise by the enter of IP addresses you're using. But if you're a partner working with this, there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to MSPs and what that business model on our MSPs looks like. But the unique thing that we do here is this c plus license. And so the Consulting Plus license allows like a, somebody a small to midsize to some very large, you know, Fortune 100, you know, consulting firms uses by buying into a license called Consulting Plus where they can have unlimited access to as many ips as they want. >>But you can only run one test at a time. And as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and checking hashes and decrypting hashes, that can take a while. So, but for the right customer, it's, it's a perfect tool. And so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with our partners so that we underhand to sell, understand how not to just sell too or not tell just to sell through, but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner. I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bringing into market. >>Yeah. I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled partners and professional services. Absolutely. They've, you know, the services that layer on top of Splunk are multifold tons of great benefits. So you guys vector right into that ride, that wave with >>Friction. And, and the cool thing is that in, you know, in one of our reports, which could be totally customized with someone else's logo, we're going to generate, you know, so I, I used to work at another organization, it wasn't Splunk, but we, we did, you know, pen testing as a, as a for, for customers and my pen testers would come on site, they, they do the engagement and they would leave. And then another really, someone would be, oh shoot, we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back, you know, four weeks later. And so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like, wow. And in March maybe, and they'd like, No, no, no, I gotta breach now. And, and, and then when they do go in, they go through, do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pat you on the back and say, there's where your problems are, you need to fix it. And the reality is, is that what we're gonna generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're gonna go and find all the permutations that anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you fixed everything, you just go back and run another pen test. Yeah. It's, you know, for what people pay for one pen test, they could have a tool that does that. Every, every pat patch on Tuesday pen test on Wednesday, you know, triage throughout the week, >>Green, yellow, red. I wanted to see colors show me green, green is good, right? Not red. >>And once CIO doesn't want, who doesn't want that dashboard, right? It's, it's, it is exactly it. And we can help bring, I think that, you know, I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team cuz they get that, they understand that it's the green, yellow, red dashboard and, and how do we help them find more green so that the other guys are >>In Yeah. And get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data, Know what to look at. So many things to pay attention to, you know, the combination of both and then, then go to market strategy. Real brilliant. Congratulations Chris. Thanks for coming on and sharing this news with the detail around this Splunk in action around the alliance. Thanks for sharing, >>John. My pleasure. Thanks. Look forward to seeing you soon. >>All right, great. We'll follow up and do another segment on DevOps and IT and security teams as the new new ops, but, and Super cloud, a bunch of other stuff. So thanks for coming on. And our next segment, the CEO of Verizon, three AA, will break down all the new news for us here on the cube. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>>Hello. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in Seattle for the cubes coverage of AWS marketplace seller conference. Now part of really big move and news, Amazon partner network combines with AWS marketplace to form one organization, the Amazon partner organization, APO where the efficiencies, the next iteration, as they say in Amazon language, where they make things better, simpler, faster, and, and for customers is happening. We're here with Chris Cruz, who's the general manager, worldwide leader of ISV alliances and marketplace, which includes all the channel partners and the buyer and seller relationships all now under one partner organization, bringing together years of work. Yes. If you work with AWS and are a partner and, or sell with them, all kind of coming together, kind of in a new way for the next generation, Chris, congratulations on the new role and the reor. >>Thank you. Yeah, it's very exciting. We're we think it invent, simplifies the process on how we work with our partners and we're really optimistic so far. The feedback's been great. And I think it's just gonna get even better as we kind of work out the final details. >>This is huge news because one, we've been very close to the partner that we've been working with and we talking to, we cover them. We cover the news, the startups from startups, channel partners, big ISVs, big and small from the dorm room to the board room. You guys have great relationships. So check marketplace, the future of procurement, how software will be bought, implemented and deployed is also changed. So you've got the confluence of two worlds coming together, growth in the ecosystem. Yep. NextGen cloud on the horizon for AWS and the customers as digital transformation goes from lift and shift to refactoring businesses. Yep. This is really a seminal moment. Can you share what you talked about on the keynote stage here, around why this is happening now? Yeah. What's the guiding principle. What's the north star where, why what's what's the big news. >>Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of reasons on why we kind of, we pulled the two teams together, but you know, a lot of it kind gets centered around co-sell. And so if you take a look at marketplace where we started off, where it was really a machine image business, and it was a great self-service model and we were working with ISVs that wanted to have this new delivery mechanism on how to bring in at the time was Amazon machine images and you fast forward, we started adding more product types like SAS and containers. And the experience that we saw was that customers would use marketplace for kind of up to a certain limit on a self-service perspective. But then invariably, they wanted by a quantity discount, they wanted to get an enterprise discount and we couldn't do that through marketplace. And so they would exit us and go do a direct deal with a, an ISV. >>And, and so to remedy that we launched private offers, you know, four years ago. And private offers now allowed ISVs to do these larger deals, but do 'em all through marketplace. And so they could start off doing self-service business. And then as a customer graduated up to buying for a full department or an organization, they can now use private offers to execute that larger agreement. And it, we started to do more and more private offers, really kind of coincided with a lot of the initiatives that were going on within Amazon partner network at the time around co-sell. And, and so we started to launch programs like ISV accelerate that really kind of focused on our co-sell relationship with ISVs. And what we found was that marketplace private offers became this awesome way to automate how we co-sell with ISV. And so we kinda had these two organizations that were parallel. We said, you know what, this is gonna be better together. If we put together, it's gonna invent simplify and we can use marketplace private offers as part of that co-sell experience and really feed that automation layer for all of our ISVs as they interacted with native >>Discussions. Well, I gotta give you props, you and Mona work on stage. You guys did a great job and it reminds me of the humble nature of AWS and Amazon. I used to talk to Andy jazzy about this all the time. That reminds me of 2013 here right now, because you're in that mode where Amazon reinvent was in 2013. Yeah. Where you knew it was breaking out. Yeah. Everyone's it was kind of small, but we haven't made it yet. Yeah. But you guys are doing billions of vows in transactions. Yeah. But this event is really, I think the beginning of what we're seeing as the change over from securing and deploying applications in the cloud, because there's a lot of nuanced things I want to get your reaction on one. I heard making your part product as an ISV, more native to AWS's stack. That was one major call out. I heard the other one was, Hey, if you're a channel partner, you can play too. And by the way, there's more choice. There's a lot going on here. That's about to kind of explode in a good way for customers. Yeah. Buyers get more access to assemble their solutions. Yeah. And you got all kinds of like business logic, compensation, integration, and scale. Yeah. This is like unprecedented. >>Yeah. It's, it's exciting to see what's going on. I mean, I think we kind of saw the tipping point probably about two years ago, which, you know, prior to that, you know, we would be working with ISVs and customers and it was really much more of an evangelism role where we were just getting people to try it. Just, just list a product. We think this is gonna be a good idea. And if you're a buyer, it's like just try out a private offer, try out a self, you know, service subscription. And, and what's happened now is there's no longer a lot of that convincing that needs to happen. It's really become accepted. And so a lot of the conversations I have now with ISVs, it's not about, should I do marketplace it's how do I do it better? And how do I really leverage marketplace as part of my co-sell initiatives as, as part of my go to market strategy. >>And so you've, you've really kind of passed this tipping point where marketplaces are now becoming very accepted ways to buy third party software. And so that's really exciting. And, and we see that we, you know, we can really enhance that experience, you know, and what we saw on the machine image side is we had this awesome integrated experience where you would buy it. It was tied right into the EC two control plane. And you could go from buying to deploying in one single motion. SAS is a little bit different, you know, we can do all the buying in a very simple motion, but then deploying it. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that our customers have to do. And so we see all kinds of ways that we can simplify that. You know, recently we launched the ability to put third party solutions outta marketplace, into control tower, which is how we deploy all of our landing zones for AWS. And now it's like, instead of having to go wire that up as you're adding new AWS environments, why not just use that third party solution that you've already integrated to you and have it there as you're span those landing zones through >>Control towers, again, back to humble nature, you guys have dominated the infrastructure as a service layer. You kind of mentioned it. You didn't really kind of highlight it other than saying you're doing pretty good. Yeah. On the IAS or the technology partners as you call or infrastructure as you guys call it. Okay. I can see how the, the, the pan, the control panel is great for those customers. But outside that, when you get into like CRM, you mentioned E R P these business apps, these horizontal and verticals have data they're gonna have SageMaker, they're gonna have edge. They might have, you know, other services that are coming online from Amazon. How do I, as an ISV, get my stuff in there. Yeah. And how do I succeed? And what are you doing to make that better? Cause I know it's kind of new, but not new. Yeah, >>No, it's not. I mean, that's one of the things that we've really invested on is how do we make it really easy to list marketplace? And, you know, again, when we first start started, it was a big, huge spreadsheet that you had to fill out. It was very cumbersome and we've really automated all those aspects. So now we've exposed an API as an example. So you can go straight out of your own build process and you might have your own C I CD pipeline. And then you have a build step at the end. And now you can have that execute marketplace update from your build script, right across that API all the way over to AWS marketplace. So it's taking that effectively, a C CD pipeline from an ISV and extending it all the way to AWS and then eventually to a customer, because now it's just an automated supply chain for that software coming into their environment. And we see that being super powerful. There's nowhere manual steps >>Along. Yeah. I wanna dig into that because you made a comment and I want you to clarify it here in the cube. Some have said, even us on the cube. Oh, marketplace. Just the website's a catalog. Yeah. Feels old school. Yeah. Feels like 1995 database. I'm kind of just, you know, saying no offense sake. And now you're saying, you're now looking at this and, and implementing more of a API based. Why is that relevant? I'm I know the answer. You already set up with APIs, but explain the transition from the mindset of it's a website. Yeah. Buy stuff on a catalog to full blown API layer. Yeah. Services. >>Absolutely. Well, when you look at all AWS services, you know, our customers will interface, you know, they'll interface them through a console initially, but when they're using them in production, they're, it's all about APIs and marketplace, as you mentioned, did start off as a website. And so we've kind of taken the opposite approach. We've got this great website experience, which is great for demand gen and, you know, highlighting those listings. But what we want to do is really have this API service layer that you're interfacing with so that an ISV effectively is not even in our marketplace. They interfacing over APIs to do a variety of their high, you know, value functions, whether it's listing soy, private offers. We don't have that all available through APIs and the same thing on the buyer side. So it's integrating directly into their AWS environment and then they can view all their third party spend within things like our cost management suites. They can look at things like cost Explorer, see third party software, right next to first party software, and have that all integrated this nice as seamless >>For the customer. That's a nice cloud native kind of native experience. I think that's a huge advantage. I'm gonna track that closer. We're we're gonna follow that. I think that's gonna be the killer killer feature. All right. Now let's get to the killer feature and the business logic. Okay. Yeah. All partners all wanna know what's in it for me. Yeah. How do I make more cash? Yeah. How do I compensate my sales people? Yeah. What do you guys don't compete with me? Give me leads. Yeah. Can I get MDF market development funds? Yeah. So take me through the, how you're thinking about supporting the partners that are leaning in that, you know, the parachute will open when they jump outta the plane. Yeah. It's gonna be, they're gonna land safely with you. Yeah. MDF marketing to leads. What are you doing to support the partners to help them serve their >>Customers? It's interesting. Market marketplace has become much more of an accepted way to buy, you know, our customers are, are really defaulting to that as the way to go get that third party software. So we've had some industry analysts do some studies and in what they found, they interviewed a whole cohort of ISVs across various categories within marketplace, whether it was security or network or even line of business software. And what they've found is that on average, our ISVs will see a 24% increased close rate by using marketplace. Right. So when I go talk to a CRO and say, do you want to close, you know, more deals? Yes. Right. And we've got data to show that we're also finding that customers on average, when an ISV sales marketplace, they're seeing an 80% uplift in the actual deal size. And so if your ASP is a hundred K 180 K has a heck of a lot better, right? >>So we're seeing increased deal sizes by going through marketplace. And then the third thing that we've seen, that's a value prop for ISVs is speed of closure. And so on average, what we're finding is that our ISVs are closing deals 40% faster by using marketplace. So if you've got a 10 month sales cycle, shaving four months off of a sales cycle means you're bringing deals in, in an earlier calendar year, earlier quarter. And for ISVs getting that cash flow early is very important. So those are great metrics that we're seeing. And, and, you know, we think that they're only >>Gonna improve and from startups who also want, they don't have a lot of cash ISVs that are rich and doing well. Yeah. They have good, good, good, good, good to market funding. Yeah. You got the range of partners and you know, the next startup could be the next Figma could be in that batch startups. Exactly. Yeah. You don't know the game is changing. Yeah. The next brand could be one of those batch of startups. Yeah. What's the message to the startup community. Yeah. >>I mean, marketplace in a lot of ways becomes a level in effect, right. Because, you know, if, if you look at pre marketplace, if you were a startup, you were having to go generate sales, have a sales force, go compete, you know, kind of hand to hand with these largest ISVs marketplace is really kind of leveling that because now you can both list in marketplace. You have the same advantage of putting that directly in the AWS bill, taking advantage of all the management go features that we offer all the automation that we bring to the table. And so >>A lot of us joint selling >>And joint selling, right? When it goes through marketplace, you know, it's gonna feed into a number of our APN programs like ISV accelerate, our sales teams are gonna get recognized for those deals. And so, you know, it brings nice co-sell behavior to how we work with our, our field sales teams together. It brings nice automation that, you know, pre marketplaces, they would have to go build all that. And that was a heavy lift that really now becomes just kind of table stakes for any kind of ISV selling to an, any of >>Customer. Well, you know, I'm a big fan of the marketplace. I've always have been, even from the early days, I saw this as a procurement game changer. It makes total sense. It's so obvious. Yeah. Not obvious to everyone, but there's a lot of moving parts behind the scenes behind the curtain. So to speak that you're handling. Yeah. What's your message to the audience out there, both the buyers and the sellers. Yeah. About what your mission is, what you're you wake up every day thinking about. Yeah. And what's your promise to them and what you're gonna work on. Cause it's not easy. You're building a, an operating model. That's not a website. It's a full on cloud service. Yeah. What's your promise. And what's >>Your goals. No. And like, you know, ultimately we're trying to do from an Aus market perspective is, is provide that selection experience to the ABUS customer, right? There's the infamous flywheel that Jeff put together that had the concepts of why Amazon is successful. And one are the concepts he points to is the concept of selection. And, and what we mean by that is if you come to Amazon it's is effectively that everything stored. And when you come across, AWS marketplace becomes that selection experience. And so that's what we're trying to do is provide whatever our AWS customers wanna buy, whatever form factor, whatever software type, whatever data type it's gonna be available in AWS marketplace for consumption. And that ultimately helps our customers because now they can get whatever technologies that they need to use alongside Avis. >>And I want, wanna give you props too. You answered the hard question on stage. I've asked Andy EY this on the cube when he was the CEO, Adam Celski last year, I asked him the same question and the answer has been consistent. We have some solutions that people want a AWS end to end, but your ecosystem, you want people to compete yes. And build a product and mostly point to things like snowflake, new Relic. Yeah. Other people that compete with Amazon services. Yeah. You guys want that. You encourage that. Yeah. You're ratifying that same statement. >>Absolutely. Right. Again, it feeds into that selection experience. Right. If a customer wants something, we wanna make sure it's gonna be a great experience. Right. And so a lot of these ISVs are building on top of AWS. We wanna make sure that they're successful. And, you know, while we have a number of our first party services, we have a variety of third party technologies that run very well in a AWS. And ultimately the customer's gonna make their decision. We're customer obsessed. And if they want to go with a third party product, we're absolutely gonna support them in every way shape we can and make sure that's a successful experience for our customers. >>I, I know you referenced two studies check out the website's got buyer and seller surveys on there for Boer. Yeah. I don't want to get into that. I want to just end on one. Yeah. Kind of final note, you got a lot of successful buyers and a lot of successful sellers. The word billions, yes. With an S was and the slide. Can you say the number, how much, how many billions are sold yeah. Through the marketplace. Yeah. And the buyer experience future what's those two things. >>Yeah. So we went on record at reinvent last year, so it's approaching it birthday, but it was the first year that we've in our 10 year history announced how much was actually being sold to the marketplace. And, you know, we are now selling billions of dollars to our marketplace and that's with an S so you can assume, at least it's two, but it's, it's a, it's a large number and it's going >>Very quickly. Yeah. Can't disclose, you know, >>But it's a, it's been a very healthy part of our business. And you know, we look at this, the experience that we >>Saw, there's a lot of headroom. I mean, oh yeah, you have infrastructure nailed down. That's long, you get better, but you have basically growth up upside with these categor other categories. What's the hot categories. You >>Know, we, we started off with infrastructure related products and we've kind of hit critical mass there. Right? We've, there's very few ISVs left that are in that infrastructure related space that are not in our marketplace. And what's happened now is our customers are saying, well, I've been buying infrastructure products for years. I'm gonna buy everything. I wanna buy my line of business software. I wanna buy my vertical solutions. I wanna buy my data and I wanna buy all my services alongside of that. And so there's tons of upside. We're seeing all of these either horizontal business applications coming to our marketplace or vertical specific solutions. Yeah. Which, you know, when we first designed our marketplace, we weren't sure if that would ever happen. We're starting to see that actually really accelerate because customers are now just defaulting to buying everything through their marketplace. >>Chris, thanks for coming on the queue. I know we went a little extra long. There wanted to get that clarification on the new role. Yeah. New organization. Great, great reorg. It makes a lot of sense. Next level NextGen. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>All right here, covering the new big news here of AWS marketplace and the AWS partner network coming together under one coherent organization, serving fires and sellers, billions sold the future of how people are gonna be buying software, deploying it, managing it, operating it. It's all happening in the marketplace. This is the big trend. It's the cue here in Seattle with more coverage here at Davis marketplace sellers conference. After the short break.

>>Hey guys. Good morning. And welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with John furrier. This is the Cube's third day of Wal Dal coverage of VMware Explorer. We're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. Chris Wolf joins us chief research and innovation officer at VMware. Chris, welcome back to the >>Cube. Yeah. Thanks Lisa. It's always a pleasure. >>This has been a great event. We, we, the key note was standing room only on Tuesday morning. We've had great conversations with VMware's ecosystem and VMware of course, what are some of the, the hot things going on from an R and D perspective? >>Yeah, there's, there's a lot. I mean, we're, we have about four or five different priorities. And these look at this is looking at sovereign clouds and multi-cloud edge computing, modern applications and data services. We're doing quite a bit of work in machine learning as well as insecurity. So we're, we're relatively large organization, but at the same time, we really look to pick our bets. So when we're doing something in ML or security, then we wanna make sure that it's high quality and it's differentiated and adds value for VMware, our partners and our customers. >>Where are our customers in the mix in terms of being influential in the roadmap? >>Very, very much in the mix. What we, what we like to do is in early stage R and D, we want to have five to 10 customers as design partners. And that really helps. And in addition to that, as we get closer to go to market, we look to a lineup between one and three of our SI partners as well, to really help us, you know, in a large company, sometimes your organic innovations can get lost in the shuffle. Yeah. And when we have passionate SI that are like, yes, we want to take this forward with you together. That's just awesome. And it also helps us to understand at a very early stage, what are the integration requirements? So we're not just thinking about the, the core product itself, but how would it play in the ecosystem equally important? >>We had hit Culbert on CTO, great work. He's dealing with the white paper and cross cloud, obviously vSphere, big release, lot of this stuff. Dave ante had mentioned that in the analyst session, you had a lot of good stuff you were talking about. That's coming around the corner. That's shipping coming outta the oven and a big theme this year is multi-cloud cloud native. The relationship what's one's ahead. Bleed dog. No one, you kinda get a feel for multi-cloud. It's kind of out front right now, but now cloud native's got the most history what's coming out of the oven right now in terms of hitting the market. That's not yet in this, in the, in the, in the numbers, in terms of sales, like there's, there's some key cloud native stuff coming out. Where's the action. Can you share what you've shared at the analyst meeting? >>Yeah. So at the analyst meeting, what I was going through was a number of our new innovation projects or projects. And, and these are things that are typically close to being product or service at VMware, you know, somewhere in the year out timeframe. Some, some of these are just a few months out. So let me just go through some of them, I'll start with project keek. So keek is super exciting because when you think about edge, what we're hearing from customers is the, the notion of a single platform, a single piece of hardware that can run their cloud services, their containers, their VMs, their network, and security functions. Doing all of this on one platform, gives them the flexibility that as changes happen, it's a software update. They don't have to buy another piece of hardware, but if we step back, what's the management experience you want, right? >>Simple get ops oriented, simple life cycle and configuration management, very low touch. I don't need technical skills to deploy these types of devices. So this is where keek comes in. So what keek is doing is exposing a Kubernetes API above the ESXi hypervisor and taking a complete, get op style of management. So imagine now, when you need to do an update for infrastructure, you're logging into GitHub, you're editing a YAML file and pushing the update. We're doing the same thing for the applications that reside. I can do all of this through GitHub. So this is very, I would say, even internally disruptive to VMware, but super exciting for our customers and partners that we've shared this with. >>What else is happening? What else on the cloud native side Tansu Monterey those lot areas. >>Oh, there's so much. So if we look at project Monterey, I had a presentation within Invidia yesterday. We're really talking through this. And what I'm seeing now is there's a couple of really interesting inflection points with DPU. The first thing is the performance that you're getting and the number of cores that you can save on an X 86 host is actually providing a very strong business case now to bring DPU into the servers, into the data center. So that's one. So now you have a positive ROI. Number two, you start to decouple core services now from the X 86 host itself. So think about a distributed firewall that I can run on a PCI adapter. Now that's DEC coupled, physically from the server, and it really allows me to scale out east west security in a way that I could not do before. So again, I think that's really exciting and that's where we're seeing a lot of buzz from customers. >>So that DPU, which got a lot of buzz, by the way, Lisa, I never, you had trouble interviews on this. I had to the Dell folks too, V X RS taking the advantage of it, the performances, I see the performance angle on that and deep user hot. Can you talk about that security east west thing? Cuz Tom Gillis was on yesterday talking about that's a killer advantage for the security side. Can you touch on that real >>Quick? Yeah. A hundred percent. So what I can now do is take a, a firewall and run it isolated from the X 86 host that it's trying to protect. So it's right next to the host. I can get line rate speeds in terms of analytics and processing of my network and security traffic. So that's also huge. So I'm running line rate on the host and I'm able to run one of these firewall instances on every host in my data center, you cannot do that. You can never afford it with physical appliances. So to me, this is an inflection point because this is the start of network and security functions moving off of hardware appliances and onto DPU. And if you're the ecosystem vendors, this is how they're going to be able to scale some of their services and offerings into the public >>Cloud. So a lot of good stuff happening within the VMware kind of the hardware, low level atoms and the bits as well as the software. The other thing I wanna get your thoughts on relative to the next question is that takes to the next level is the super cloud world we're living in is about cloud native developers, which is DevOps dev security ops and data ops are now big parts of the, the challenges that the people are reigning in the chaos that that's being reigned in. How does VMware look at the relationship to the cloud providers? Cause we heard cloud universal. We had the cloud. If you believe in multi-cloud, which you guys are saying, people are agreeing with, then you gotta have good tight couple coupled relationships with the cloud services, >>A hundred percent. >>We can be decoupled, but highly cohesive, but you gotta connect in via APIs. What's the vision for the VMware customers who want to connect say AWS, for instance, is that seamless? What makes that happen? What's that roadmap look like for taking that VMware on premises hybrid and making it like turbo charging it to be like public cloud hybrid together? >>Yeah, I think there's some lessons that can be learned here. You know, an analogy I've been using lately is look at the early days of virtualization when VMware had vCenter, right? What was happening was you saw the enterprise management vendors try to do this overlay above virtualization management and say, we can manage all hypervisors. And at the end of the day, these multi hypervisor managers, no one bought 'em because they can do 20% of the functionality of a tool from VMware or Microsoft. And that's the lesson that we have to take to multi-cloud. We don't have to overlay every functionality. There's really good capabilities that the cloud providers are offering through their own tooling and APIs. Right? But you, you, if you step back, you say, well, what do I wanna centralize? I wanna have a centralized, secure software supply chain and I can get that through VMware tan zoo and, and where we're going with Kubernetes. When you're going with native cloud services, you might say, you know what, I wanna have a central view of, of visibility for compliance. So that's what we're doing with secure state or a central view of cost management. And we're doing that with cloud health. So you can have some brokering and governance, but then you also have to look from a surgical perspective as to what are the things that I really need to centralize versus what do I not need to centralize? >>One of the themes that we heard on the keynote on Tuesday was the, the different phases and that a lot of customers are still in the cloud chaos phase. We talked a lot about that in the last couple days with VMware, with its partner ecosystem. And, but the goal of getting to cloud smart, how does the R and D organization, how do, how are you helping customers really navigate that journey from the chaos that they're in, maybe they've inherited multi-cloud environment to getting to cloud smart. And what does cloud smart mean from your perspective >>Cloud? Smartt from my perspective means pragmatism. It means really thinking about what should I do here first, right? I don't want to just go somewhere because I can, right. I want to be really mindful of the steps I'm going to take. So one ex one example of this is I've met with a customer this morning and we were talking about using our vRealize network insight tool, because what that allows 'em to do is get a map of all of their application dependencies in their data center. And they can learn like, well, I can move this to the cloud or maybe I can't move this cuz it has all these other dependencies and it would be really difficult. So that's that's one example. It also means really thinking through issues around data sovereignty, you know, what do I wanna hold onto a customer? I just met with yesterday. They were talking about how valuable their data is and their services that they want to use via SA in the cloud. But then there's also services, which is their core research. They wanna make sure that they can maintain that in their data centers and maintain full control because they see researchers will leave. And now all of a sudden, so that intellectual property has actually gone with the person and they need to, they need to have, you know, better accountability there. >>Yeah. One of the things about that we discovered at our super cloud event was is that, you know, we kind didn't really kind of put too much structure on other than our, our vision. It's, it's not just SaaS on cloud and it's not just, multi-cloud, it's a new kind of application end state or reality that if you believe in digital transformation, then technology is everywhere. And like it in the old days, it powered the back office and then terminals and PCs and whatnot, wasn't powering the boardroom obviously or other business. But if, if it happens like that digital transformation, the company is the app, the app is the company. So you're all digital. So that means the operating expenses has to drive an income statement and the CapEx handled by the cloud provides a lot of goodness. So I think everyone's gonna realize that AWS and the hyperscalers are providing great CapEx gifts. They do all the work and you only pay when you've made your success. So that's a great business model. >>Absolutely >>That's and then combine that with open source, which is now growing so fast, going next level, the software industry's open source. That's not even a debate Mo in some circles, maybe like telco, cloud's got the CapEx. The new operating model is this cloud layer. That's going to transform the companies finally in a hundred percent. Okay. That's super cloud. If that's the case, does it really matter who provides the electricity or the power? It's the coders that are in charge. It's the developers that have to make the calls because if the application is the core, the developers are, are not only the front lines, they are the company. This is really kind of where the sea change is. So if, if we believe that, I'm sure you, you agree with that generally? >>Yeah, of >>Course. Okay. So then what's the VMware customer roadmap here. So to me, that's the big story here at the show is that we're at this point in time where the VMware customers are, have to go there >>A hundred percent, >>What's that path. What is the path for the VMware customer to go from here to there? And what's this order of operations or is there a roadmap? Can, can you share your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, I think part of it is, is with these disruptive technologies, you have to start small, you know, whether it's in your data center, into cloud, you have to build the own institutional knowledge of your team members in the organization. It's much easier than trying to attract outside talent, for least for many of our customers. So I think that's important. The other part of this when with the developer and control, like in my organization, I want my innovators to innovate any other noise around them. I don't want them to have to worry about it. And it's the same thing with our customers. So if your developers are building the technologies that is really differentiating your company, then things like security and cryptography shouldn't have to be things they worry about. So we've been doing a lot of work. Like one of the projects we announced this week was around being able to decouple cryptography from the applications themselves. And we can expose that through a proxy through service mesh. And that's really exciting because now it ops can make these changes. Our SecOps teams can make these changes without having to impact the application. So that's really key is focusing the developers on innovation and then really being mindful about how you can build the right automation around everything else. And certainly open source is key to all >>That. So that's so, so then if you, if that's happening, which I'm, I'm not gonna debate that then in essence, what's really going on here is that the companies are decomposing their entire businesses down to levels that are manageable completely different than the way they did them 20, 30 years ago. >>Absolutely. You, you, you could take a modular approach to how you're solving business problems. And we do the same thing with technology, where there might be a ML algorithms that we've developed that we're exposing as SA service, but then all of the interconnects around that service are open source and very flexible so that the businesses and the customers and the VMware partners can decide what's the right way to build a puzzle for a given problem. >>We were talking on day one, I was riffing with an executives. It was Ragu and Victoria. And the concept around cross cloud was if you get to this Nirvana state, which is we, people want to get to this or composability mode, you're not coding, you're composing cuz coding's kinda happening open source and not the old classic, write some code and write that app. It's more orchestrate, compose and orchestrate. Do you, what's your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And it's it's I would add one more part to it too, which is scope. You know, I think sometimes we see projects fail because the, the initial scope is just too big. You know, what is the problem that you need to solve, scope it properly and then continuously calibrate. So even like our customers have to listen to their customers and we have to be thinking about our customers' customers, right? Because that's really how we innovate because then we can really be mindful of a holistic solution for them. >>You know, Lisa, when we had a super cloud event, you know, one of the panels was called the innovators dilemma with a question mark. And of course everyone kinds of quotes that book innovators dilemma, but one of the panelists, Chris ho beaker on Twitter said, let's change the name from the innovator's dilemma to the integrator's dilemma. And we all kind of got chuckled. We all kind of paused and said, Hey, that's actually a good point. Yeah. If you're now in a cloud and you're seeing some of the ecosystem floor vendors out there talking in this game too, they're all kind of fitting in snapping in almost like modular, like you said, so this is a Lego game. Now it feels like, it feels like, you know, let's compose, let's orchestrate, let's integrate. Now I integrations API driven. Now you're seeing a lot more about API security in the news and we've been covering at least I've probably interviewed six companies in the past, you know, six months that are doing API security, who would've thought API, that's the link, frankly, with the web. Now that's now a target area for hackers. >>Oh. And that's such an innovation area for VMware, John. Okay. >>There it is. So, I mean, this is, again, this means the connected tissue is being attacked yet. We need it to grow. No one's debating that is wrong, but it's under siege. >>Yes. Yes. So something else we introduced this week was a project. We called project Trinidad. And the way, the way you can think about it is a lot of the anomaly detection software today is looking at point based anomalies. Like this API header looks funny where we, where we've gone further is we can look at full sequence based anomalies so we can learn the sequences of transactions at an application takes and really understand what is expected behavior within those API calls within the headers, within the payloads. And we can model legitimate application behavior based on what those expectations are. So like a, like a common sequence might be doing an e-commerce checkout, right? There's lots of operations that happen logging into the site, searching, finding a product, going through the cart. Right. All of those things. Right. So if something's out of sequence, like all of a sudden somebody's just trying to do a checkout, but they haven't actually added to the cart. Right. This just seems odd. Right. So we can start to, and that's a simplistic example, but we're able now to use our algorithms to model legitimate application behavior through the entire sequence of how applications behave and then we can start to trap on anomalies. That's very differentiating IP and, and we think it's gonna be really important for the industry. Yeah. >>Because a lot of the hacks, sometimes on the API side, even as a example, are not necessarily on the API, it's the business logic in them. That's what you're getting at here. Yes. The APIs are hard. Oh our APIs are secure. Right. Well, yeah, but you're not actually securing the business logic internally. That's what you're getting at. If I read >>That right. Or exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's the thing it's right. It's great that you can, you can look at a header, but what's the payload, right? What is what's, what's the actual data flow, right. That's associated with the call and that's what we want to really hone in on. And that's just a, it's, it's a, it's a far different level of sophistication in being able to understand east west vulnerabilities, you know, log for JX voice and these kind of things. So we have some real, it's interesting technology >>There. Security conversations now are not about security there about defense ability because security's a state of time, your secure here, you're not secure or someone might be in the network or in the app, but can you defend yourself from, and in >>That's it, you know, our, our, our malware software, right. That we're building to prevent and respond has to be more dynamic than the threats we face. Right. And this is why machine learning is so essential in, in these types of applications. >>Let me ask you a question. So just now zooming out riffing here since day, three's our conversational day where we debate and just riff more like a podcast style. If you had to do a super cloud or build a NextGen cloud multi-cloud with abstraction layer, that's, you know, all singing and dancing and open everyone's happy hardware below it's working ISAs and then apps are killed. Can ass what's in that. What does it look like to you if you had to architect the, the ultimate super cloud enabler, that something that would disrupt the next 10 years, what would it look like and how does, and assuming, and trying to do where everybody wins go, you have 10 seconds. No, >>Yeah, yeah. So the, you know, first of all, there has to be open source at all of the intersections. I think that's really important. And, and this is, this goes from networking constructs to our database, as a service layers, you know, everything in between, you know, the, the, the participants should be able to win on merit there. The other part of super cloud though, that hasn't happened that I probably is the most important area of innovation is going to be decoupled control planes. We have a number of organizations building sovereign cloud initiatives. They wanna have flexibility in where their services physically run. And you're not going to have that with a limited number of control planes that live in very specific public cloud data centers. So that's an area, give >>An example of what a, a, a, a narrowly defined control plane is. >>Yeah, sure. So my database as a service layer, so the, the, the actual portal that the customer is going into to provision databases, right. Rep managed replication, et cetera. Right. I should be able to run that in a colo. I should be able to run that somewhere in region that is guaranteed, that I'm going to have data stay physically in region. You know, we still have some of these challenges in networking in terms of being able to constrain traffic flows and be able to predict and audit them within a particular region as well. >>It's interesting. You bring up region again, more complexity. You know, you got catalogs here, catalogs different. I mean, this is where the chaos really comes down. I mean, it's, it's advancing, but it's advancing the state of functionality, but making it hella complex, I mean, come on. Don't you think it's like pretty amazingly hard to reign in that? Well, or is it maybe you guys making it easier? I just think I just, my mind just went, oh my God, I gotta, I gotta provision to that region, but then it's gotta be the same over there. And >>When you go back to modular architecture constructs, it gets far easier. This has been really key for how VMware is even building our own clouds internally is so that we have a, a shared services platform for the different apps and services that we're building, so that you do have that modularized approach. Like I said, the, the examples of innovation projects I've shared have been really driven by the fact that, you know, what, I don't know how customers are gonna consume it, and I don't have to know. And if you have the right modular architecture, the right APIs around it, you don't have to limit a particular project or technology's future at the time you build >>It. Okay. So your super would have multiple control planes that you can move, manage with that within one place. I get that. What about the data control plane? That seems to be something that used to be the land grab in, in conversations from vendors. But that seems to be much more of a customer side, cuz if I'm a customer, I want my control plane data plane to be, you know, mine. Like I don't want to have anyone cuz data's gotta move around, gotta be secure. >>Oh exactly. >>And that's gonna be complicated. How does, how do you see the data planes emerging? >>Yeah. Yeah. We, we see an opportunity really around having a, a centralized view that can give me consistent indexing and consistent awareness of data, no matter where it resides. And then being able to have that level of integration now between my data services and my applications, because you're right, you know, right now we have data in different places, but we could have a future where data's more perpetually in motion. You know, we're already looking at time sensitive fabrics where we're expecting microservices to sometimes run in different cell towers depending on the SLA that they need to achieve. So then you have data parts that's going to follow, right? That may not always be in the same cloud data center. So there's, this is enormously complicated, not just in terms of meeting application SLAs, but auditing and security. Right. That makes it even further. So having these types of data layers that can give me a consistent purview of data, regardless of where it is, allow me to manage and life cycle data globally, that's going to be super important, I believe going forward. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well, my one last question, Lisa, gonna get a question in here. It's hard. Went for her. I'm getting all the, all the questions in, sorry, Lisa that's okay. What's your favorite, most exciting thing that you think's going on right now that people should pay attention to of all the things you're looking at, the most important thing that that's happening and maybe something that's super important that people aren't talking about or it could be the same thing. So the, the most important thing that you think that's happening in the industry for cloud next today and, and maybe something that you think people should look at and pay more attention to. >>Okay. Yeah, those are good questions. And that's hard to answer because there's, there's probably so much happening. I I've been on here before I've talked about edge. I still think that's really important. I think the value of edge soft of edge velocity being defined by software updates, I think is quite powerful. And that's, that's what we're building towards. And I would say the industry is as well. If you look at AWS and Azure, when they're packaging a service to go out to the edge it's package as a container. So it's already quite flexible and being able to think about how can I have a single platform that can give me all of this flexibility, I think is really, really essential. We're building these capabilities into cars. We have a version of our Velo cloud edge device. That's able to run on a ruggedized hardware in a police car today. We're piloting that with a customer. So there is a shift happening where you can have a core platform that can now allow you to layer on applications that you're not thinking about in the future. So I think that's probably obvious. A lot of people are like, yeah. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about edge, big deal. >>Oh it's, it's, it's big. Yes. It's >>Exploding, but >>It's complicated too. It's not easy. It's not obvious. Right. And it's merging >>There's new things coming every day. Yeah. Yeah. And related to that though, there is this kind of tension that's existing between machine learning and privacy and that's really important. So an area of investment that I don't think enough people are paying attention to today is federated machine learning. There's really good projects in open source that are having tangible impact on, in a lot of industries in VMware. We are, we're investing in a, in a couple of those projects, namely fate in the Linux foundation and open FFL. And in these use cases like the security product I mentioned to you that is looking at analyzing API sequence API call sequences. We architected that originally so that it can run in public cloud, but we're also leveraging now federated machine learning so that we can ensure that those API calls and metadata associated with that is staying on premises for the customers to ensure privacy. So I think those intersections are really important. Federated learning, I think is a, an area not getting enough attention. All right. All >>Right, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. Unfortunately we are out of time. I know you guys could keep going. Yeah. Good stuff. But thank you for sharing. What's going on in R and D the customer impact the outcomes that you're enabling customers to achieve. We appreciate your >>Insights. We're just getting started >>In, in early innings, right? Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff for guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily. >>Okay.

(calm electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here live in New York City for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, but a great conversation here as the day winds down. First of all, 10,000 plus people, this is a big event, just New York City. So sign of the times that some headwinds are happening? I don't think so, not in the cloud enterprise innovation game. Lot going on, this innovation conversation we're going to have now is about the confluence of cloud scale integration data and the future of how FinTech and other markets are going to change with technology. We got Chris Thomas, the CTO of Slalom, and Rob Krugman, chief digital officer at Broadridge. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we had a talk before we came on camera about your firm, what you guys do, take a quick minute to just give the scope and size of your firm and what you guys work on. >> Yeah, so Broadridge is a global financial FinTech company. We work on, part of our business is capital markets and wealth, and that's about a third of our business, about $7 trillion a day clearing through our platforms. And then the other side of our business is communications where we help all different types of organizations communicate with their shareholders, communicate with their customers across a variety of different digital channels and capabilities. >> Yeah, and Slalom, give a quick one minute on Slalom. I know you guys, but for the folks that don't know you. >> Yeah, no problem. So Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. And me personally, I'm part of the element lab, which is focused on forward thinking technology and disruptive technology in the next five to 10 years. >> Awesome, and that's the scope of this conversation. The next five to 10 years, you guys are working on a project together, you're kind of customer partners. You're building something. What are you guys working on? I can't wait to jump into it, explain. >> Sure, so similar to Chris, at Broadridge, we've created innovation capability, innovation incubation capability, and one of the first areas we're experimenting in is digital assets. So what we're looking to do is we're looking at a variety of different areas where we think consolidation network effects that we could bring can add a significant amount of value. And so the area we're working on is this concept of a wallet of wallets. How do we actually consolidate assets that are held across a variety of different wallets, maybe traditional locations- >> Digital wallets. >> Digital wallets, but maybe even traditional accounts, bring that together and then give control back to the consumer of who they want to share that information with, how they want their transactions to be able to control. So the idea of, people talk about Web 3 being the internet of value. I often think about it as the internet of control. How do you return control back to the individual so that they can make decisions about how and who has access to their information and assets? >> It's interesting, I totally like the value angle, but your point is what's the chicken and the egg here, the cart before the horse, you can look at it both ways and say, okay, control is going to drive the value. This is an interesting nuance, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> So in this architectural world, they thought about the data plane and the control plane. Everyone's trying to go old school, middleware thinking. Let's own the data plane, we'll win everything. Not going to happen if it goes decentralized, right, Chris? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're building a decentralized application, but it really is built on top of AWS. We have a serverless architecture that scales as our business scales built on top of things like S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and of course using those security principles like Cognito and AWS Gateway, API Gateway. So we're really building an architecture of Web 3 on top of the Web 2 basics in the cloud. >> I mean, all evolutions are abstractions on top of each other, IG, DNS, Key, it goes the whole nine yards. In digital, at least, that's the way. Question about serverless real quick. I saw that Redshift just launched general availability of serverless in Redshift? >> Yes. >> You're starting to see the serverless now part of almost all the services in AWS. Is that enabling that abstraction, because most people don't see it that way. They go, oh, well, Amazon's not Web 3. They got databases, you could use that stuff. So how do you connect the dots and cross the bridge to the future with the idea that I might not think Web 2 or cloud is Web 3? >> I'll jump in quick. I mean, I think it's the decentralize. If you think about decentralization. serverless and decentralization, you could argue are the same way of, they're saying the same thing in different ways. One is thinking about it from a technology perspective. One is thinking about it from an ecosystem perspective and how things come together. You need serverless components that can talk to each other and communicate with each other to actually really reach the promise of what Web 3 is supposed to be. >> So digital bits or digital assets, I call it digital bits, 'cause I think zero ones. If you digitize everything and everything has value or now control drives the value. I could be a soccer team. I have apparel, I have value in my logos, I have photos, I have CUBE videos. I mean some say that this should be an NFT. Yeah, right, maybe, but digital assets have to be protected, but owned. So ownership drives it too, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how does that fit in, how do you explain that? 'Cause I'm trying to tie the dots here, connect the dots and tie it together. What do I get if I go down this road that you guys are building? >> So I think one of the challenges of digital assets right now is that it's a closed community. And I think the people that play in it, they're really into it. And so you look at things like NFTs and you look at some of the other activities that are happening and there are certain naysayers that look at it and say, this stuff is not based upon value. It's a bunch of artwork, it can't be worth this. Well, how about we do a time out there and we actually look at the underlying technology that's supporting this, the blockchain, and the potential ramifications of that across the entire financial ecosystem, and frankly, all different types of ecosystems of having this immutable record, where information gets stored and gets sent and the ability to go back to it at all times, that's where the real power is. So I think we're starting to see. We've hit a bit of a hiccup, if you will, in the cryptocurrencies. They're going to continue to be there. They won't all be there. A lot of them will probably disappear, but they'll be a finite number. >> What percentage of stuff do you think is vapor BS? If you had to pick an order of magnitude number. >> (laughs) I would say at least 75% of it. (John laughs) >> I mean, there's quite a few projects that are failing right now, but it's interesting in that in the crypto markets, they're failing gracefully. Because it's on the blockchain and it's all very transparent. Things are checked, you know immediately which companies are insolvent and which opportunities are still working. So it's very, very interesting in my opinion. >> Well, and I think the ones that don't have valid premises are the ones that are failing. Like Terra and some of these other ones, if you actually really looked at it, the entire industry knew these things were no good. But then you look at stable coins. And you look at what's going on with CBDCs. These are backed by real underlying assets that people can be comfortable with. And there's not a question of, is this going to happen? The question is, how quickly is it going to happen and how quickly are we going to be using digital currencies? >> It's interesting, we always talk about software, software as money now, money is software and gold and oil's moving over to that crypto. How do you guys see software? 'Cause we were just arguing in the queue, Dave Vellante and I, before you guys came on that the software industry pretty much does not exist anymore, it's open source. So everything's open source as an industry, but the value is integration, innovation. So it's not just software, it's the free. So you got to, it's integration. So how do you guys see this software driving crypto? Because it is software defined money at the end of the day. It's a token. >> No, I think that's absolutely one of the strengths of the crypto markets and the Web 3 market is it's governed by software. And because of that, you can build a trust framework. Everybody knows it's on the public blockchain. Everybody's aware of the software that's driving the rules and the rules of engagement in this blockchain. And it creates that trust network that says, hey, I can transact with you even though I don't know anything about you and I don't need a middleman to tell me I can trust you. Because this software drives that trust framework. >> Lot of disruption, lot of companies go out of business as a middleman in these markets. >> Listen, the intermediaries either have to disrupt themselves or they will be disrupted. I think that's what we're going to learn here. And it's going to start in financial services, but it's going to go to a lot of different places. I think the interesting thing that's happening now is for the first time, you're starting to see the regulators start to get involved. Which is actually a really good thing for the market. Because to Chris's point, transparency is here, how do you actually present that transparency and that trust back to consumers so they feel comfortable once that problem is solved. And I think everyone in the industry welcomes it. All of a sudden you have this ecosystem that people can play in, they can build and they can start to actually create real value. >> Every structural change that I've been involved in my 30 plus year career has been around inflection points. There was always some sort of underbelly. So I'm not going to judge crypto. It's been in the market for a while, but it's a good sign there's innovation happening. So as now, clarity comes into what's real. I think you guys are talking a conversation I think is refreshing because you're saying, okay, cloud is real, Lambda, serverless, all these tools. So Web 3 is certainly real because it's a future architecture, but it's attracting the young, it's a cultural shift. And it's also cooler than boring Web 2 and cloud. So I think the cultural shift, the fact that it's got data involved, there's some disruption around middleman and intermediaries, makes it very attractive to tech geeks. You look at, I read a stat, I heard a stat from a friend in the Bay Area that 30% of Cal computer science students are dropping out and jumping into crypto. So it's attracting the technical nerds, alpha geeks. It's a cultural revolution and there's some cool stuff going on from a business model standpoint. >> There's one thing missing. The thing that's missing, it's what we're trying to work on, I think is experience. I think if you're being honest about the entire marketplace, what you would agree is that this stuff is not easy to use today, and that's got to be satisfied. You need to do something that if it's the 85 year old grandma that wants to actually participate in these markets that not only can they feel comfortable, but they actually know how to do it. You can't use these crazy tools where you use these terms. And I think the industry, as it grows up, will satisfy a lot of those issues. >> And I think this is why I want to tie back and get your reaction to this. I think that's why you guys talking about building on top of AWS is refreshing, 'cause it's not dogmatic. Well, we can't use Amazon, it's not really Web 3. Well, a database could be used when you need it. You don't need to write everything through the blockchain. Databases are a very valuable capability, you get serverless. So all these things now can work together. So what do you guys see for companies that want to be Web 3 for all the good reasons and how do they leverage cloud specifically to get there? What are some things that you guys have learned that you can point to and share, you want to start? >> Well, I think not everything has to be open and public to everybody. You're going to want to have some things that are secret. You're going to want to encrypt some things. You're going to want to put some things within your own walls. And that's where AWS really excels. I think you can have the best of both worlds. So that's my perspective on it. >> The only thing I would add to it, so my view is it's 2022. I actually was joking earlier. I think I was at the first re:Invent. And I remember walking in and this was a new industry. >> It was tiny. >> This is foundational. Like cloud is not a, I don't view like, we shouldn't be having that conversation anymore. Of course you should build this stuff on top of the cloud. Of course you should build it on top of AWS. It just makes sense. And we should, instead of worrying about those challenges, what we should be worrying about are how do we make these applications easier to use? How do we actually- >> Energy efficient. >> How do we enable the promise of what these things are going to bring, and actually make it real, because if it happens, think about traditional assets. There's projects going on globally that are looking at how do you take equity securities and actually move them to the blockchain. When that stuff happens, boom. >> And I like what you guys are doing, I saw the news out through this crypto winter, some major wallet exchanges that have been advertising are hurting. Take me through what you guys are thinking, what the vision is around the wallet of wallets. Is it to provide an experience for the user or the market industry itself? What's the target, is it both? Share the design goals for the wallet of wallets. >> My favorite thing about innovation and innovation labs is that we can experiment. So I'll go in saying we don't know what the final answer is going to be, but this is the premise that we have. In this disparate decentralized ecosystem, you need some mechanism to be able to control what's actually happening at the consumer level. So I think the key target is how do you create an experience where the consumer feels like they're in control of that value? How do they actually control the underlying assets? And then how does it actually get delivered to them? Is it something that comes from their bank, from their broker? Is it coming from an independent organization? How do they manage all of that information? And I think the last part of it are the assets. It's easy to think about cryptos and NFTs, but thinking about traditional assets, thinking about identity information and healthcare records, all of that stuff is going to become part of this ecosystem. And imagine being able to go someplace and saying, oh, you need my information. Well, I'm going to give it to you off my phone and I'm going to give it to you for the next 24 hours so you can use it, but after that you have no access to it. Or you're my financial advisor, here's a view of what I actually have, my underlying assets. What do you recommend I do? So I think we're going to see an evolution in the market. >> Like a data clean room. >> Yeah, but that you control. >> Yes! (laughs) >> Yes! >> I think about it very similarly as well. As my journey into the crypto market has gone through different pathways, different avenues. And I've come to a place where I'm really managing eight different wallets and it's difficult to figure exactly where all my assets are and having a tool like this will allow me to visualize and aggregate those assets and maybe even recombine them in unique ways, I think is hugely valuable. >> My biggest fear is losing my key. >> Well, and that's an experience problem that has to be solved, but let me give you, my favorite use case in this space is, 'cause NFTs, right? People are like, what does NFTs really mean? Title insurance, right? Anyone buy a house or refinance your mortgage? You go through this crazy process that costs seven or eight thousand dollars every single time you close on something to get title insurance so they could validate it. What if that title was actually sitting on the chain, you got an NFT that you put in your wallet and when it goes time to sell your house or to refinance, everything's there. Okay, I'm the owner of the house. I don't know, JP Morgan Chase has the actual mortgage. There's another lien, there's some taxes. >> It's like a link tree in the wallet. (laughs) >> Yeah, think about it, you got a smart contract. Boom, closing happens immediately. >> I think that's one of the most important things. I think people look at NFTs and they think, oh, this is art. And that's sort of how it started in the art and collectable space, but it's actually quickly moving towards utilities and tokenization and passes. And that's where I think the value is. >> And ownership and the token. >> Identity and ownership, especially. >> And the digital rights ownership and the economics behind it really have a lot of scale 'cause I appreciate the FinTech angle you are coming from because I can now see what's going on here with you. It's like, okay, we got to start somewhere. Let's start with the experience. The wallet's a tough nut to crack, 'cause that requires defacto participation in the industry as a defacto standard. So how are you guys doing there? Can you give an update and then how can people get, what's the project called and how do people get involved? >> Yeah, so we're still in the innovation, incubation stages. So we're not launching it yet. But what I will tell you is what a lot of our focus is, how do we make these transactional things that you do? How do we make it easy to pull all your assets together? How do we make it easy to move things from one location to the other location in ways that you're not using a weird cryptographic numeric value for your wallet, but you actually can use real nomenclature that you can renumber and it's easy to understand. Our expectation is that sometime in the fall, we'll actually be in a position to launch this. What we're going to do over the summer is we're going to start allowing people to play with it, get their feedback, and we're going to iterate. >> So sandbox in when, November? >> I think launch in the fall, sometime in the fall. >> Oh, this fall. >> But over the summer, what we're expecting is some type of friends and family type release where we can start to realize what people are doing and then fix the challenges, see if we're on the right track and make the appropriate corrections. >> So right now you guys are just together on this? >> Yep. >> The opening up friends and family or community is going to be controlled. >> It is, yeah. >> Yeah, as a group, I think one thing that's really important to highlight is that we're an innovation lab. We're working with Broadridge's innovation lab, that partnership across innovation labs has allowed us to move very, very quickly to build this. Actually, if you think about it, we were talking about this not too long ago and we're almost close to having an internal launch. So I think it's very rapid development. We follow a lot of the- >> There's buy-in across the board. >> Exactly, exactly, and we saw lot of very- >> So who's going to run this? A Dow, or your companies, is it going to be a separate company? >> So to be honest, we're not entirely sure yet. It's a new product that we're going to be creating. What we actually do with it. Our thought is within an innovation environment, there's three things you could do with something. You can make it a product within the existing infrastructure, you can create a new business unit or you can spin it off as something new. I do think this becomes a product within the organization based upon it's so aligned to what we do today, but we'll see. >> But you guys are financing it? >> Yes. >> As collective companies? >> Yeah, right. >> Got it, okay, cool. Well, let us know how we can help. If you guys want to do a remote in to theCUBE. I would love the mission you guys are on. I think this is the kind of work that every company should be doing in the new R and D. You got to jump in the deep end and swim as fast as possible. But I think you can do it. I think that is refreshing and that's smart. >> And you have to do it quick because this market, I think the one thing we would probably agree on is that it's moving faster than we could, every week there's something else that happens. >> Okay, so now you guys were at Consensus down in Austin when the winter hit and you've been in the business for a long time, you got to know the industries. You see where it's going. What was the big thing you guys learned, any scar tissue from the early data coming in from the collaboration? Was there some aha moments, was there some oh shoot moments? Oh, wow, I didn't think that was going to happen. Share some anecdotal stories from the experience. Good, bad, and if you want to be bold say ugly, too. >> Well, I think the first thing I want to say about the timing, it is the crypto winter, but I actually think now's a really great time to build something because everybody's continuing to build. Folks are focused on the future and that's what we are as well. In terms of some of the challenges, well, the Web 3 space is so new. And there's not a way to just go online and copy somebody else's work and rinse and repeat. We had to figure a lot of things on our own. We had to try different technologies, see which worked better and make sure that it was functioning the way we wanted it to function. Really, so it was not easy. >> They oversold that product out, that's good, like this team. >> But think about it, so the joke is that when winter is when real work happens. If you look at the companies that have not been affected by this it's the infrastructure companies and what it reminds me of, it's a little bit different, but 2001, we had the dot com bust. The entire industry blew up, but what came out of that? >> Everything that exists. >> Amazon, lots of companies grew up out of that environment. >> Everything that was promoted actually happened. >> Yes, but you know what didn't happen- >> Food delivery. >> But you know what's interesting that didn't happen- >> (laughs) Pet food, the soccer never happened. >> The whole Super Bowl, yes. (John laughs) In financial services we built on top of legacy. I think what Web 3 is doing, it's getting rid of that legacy infrastructure. And the banks are going to be involved. There's going to be new players and stuff. But what I'm seeing now is a doubling down of the infrastructure investment of saying okay, how do we actually make this stuff real so we can actually show the promise? >> One of the things I just shared, Rob, you'd appreciate this, is that the digital advertising market's changing because now banner ads and the old techniques are based on Web 2 infrastructure, basically DNS as we know it. And token problems are everywhere. Sites and silos are built because LinkedIn doesn't share information. And the sites want first party data. It's a hoarding exercise, so those practices are going to get decimated. So in comes token economics, that's going to get decimated. So you're already seeing the decline of media. And advertising, cookies are going away. >> I think it's going to change, it's going to be a flip, because I think right now you're not in control. Other people are in control. And I think with tokenomics and some of the other things that are going to happen, it gives back control to the individual. Think about it, right now you get advertising. Now you didn't say I wanted this advertising. Imagine the value of advertising when you say, you know what, I am interested in getting information about this particular type of product. The lead generation, the value of that advertising is significantly higher. >> Organic notifications. >> Yeah. >> Well, gentlemen, I'd love to follow up with you. I'm definitely going to ping in. Now I'm going to put CUBE coin back on the table. For our audience CUBE coin's coming. Really appreciate it, thanks for sharing your insights. Great conversation. >> Excellent, thank you for having us. >> Excellent, thank you so much. >> theCUBE's coverage here from New York City. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more live coverage to close out the day. Stay with us, we'll be right back. >> Excellent. (calm electronic music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in beautiful, warm, and sunny Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. I got the Chris and Chris show, next. Bear with me. Chris Degnan joins us again. One of our alumni, the Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake. Good to have you back, Chris. >> Thank you for having us. >> Lisa: Chris Grusz also joins us. Director of Business Development AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog at AWS. Chris and Chris, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Good to be back in person. >> Isn't it great. >> Chris G: It's so much better. >> Chris D: Yeah. >> Nothing like it. So let's talk. There's been so much momentum, Chris D, at Snowflake the last few years. I mean the momentum at this show since we launched yesterday, I know you guys launched the day before with partners, has been amazing. A lot of change, and it's like this for Snowflake. Talk to us about AWS working together with Snowflake and some of the benefits in it from your customer. And then Chris G, I'll go to you for the same question. >> Chris G: Yep. >> You know, first of all, it's awesome. Like, I just, you know, it's been three years since I've had a Snowflake Summit in person, and it's crazy to see the growth that we've seen. You know, I can't, our first cloud that we ever launched on top of was, was AWS, and AWS is our largest cloud, you know, in in terms of revenue today. And they've been, they just kind of know how to do it right. And they've been a wonderful partner all along. There's been challenges, and we've kind of leaned in together and figured out ways to work together, you know, and to solve those challenges. So, been a wonderful partnership. >> And talk about it, Chris G, from your perspective obviously from a coopetition perspective. >> Yep. >> AWS has databases, cloud data forms. >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Talk to us about it. What was the impetus for the partnership with Snowflake from AWS's standpoint? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, they're building on top of AWS. And so that, by default, makes them a great partner. And it's interesting, Chris and I have been working together for, gosh, seven years now? And the relationship's come a really long way. You know, when we first started off, we were trying to sort out how we were going to work together, when we were competing, and when we're working together. And, you know, you fast forward to today, and it's just such a good relationship. Because both companies work backwards from customers. And so that's, you know, kind of in both of our DNA. And so if the customer makes that selection, we're going to support them, even from an AWS perspective. When they're going with Snowflake, that's still a really good thing for AWS, 'cause there's a lot of associated services that Snowflake either integrates to, or we're integrating to them. And so, it's really kind of contributed to how we can really work together in a co-sell motion. >> Talk to us, talk about that. The joint GOTO market and the co-selling motion from Snowflake's perspective, how do customers get engaged? >> Well, I think, you know, typically we, where we are really good at co-selling together is we identify on premise systems. So whether it's, you know, some Legacy UDP system, some Legacy database solution, and they want to move to the cloud? You know, Amazon is all in on getting everyone to the cloud. And I think that's their approach they've taken with us is saying we're really good at accelerating that adoption and moving all these, you know, massive workloads into the cloud. And then to Chris's point, you know, we've integrated so nicely into things like SageMaker and other tool sets. And we, we even have exciting scenarios where they've allowed us to use, you know, some of their Amazon.com retail data sets that we actually use in data sharing via the partnership. So we continue to find unique ways to partner with our great friends at Amazon. >> Sounds like a very deep partnership. >> Chris D: Yeah. Absolutely. >> Chris G: Oh, absolutely, yeah. We're integrating into Snowflake, and they're integrating to AWS. And so it just provides a great combined experience for our customers. And again, that's kind of what we're both looking forward from both of our organizations. >> That customer centricity is, >> Yeah. >> is I think the center of the flywheel that is both that both of you, your companies have. Chris D, talk about the the industry's solutions, specific, industry-specific solutions that Snowflake and AWS have. I know we talked yesterday about the pivot from a sales perspective >> Chris D: Yes. >> That snowflake made in recent months. Talk to us about the industries that you are help, really targeting with AWS to help customers solve problems. >> Yeah. I think there's, you know, we're focused on a number of industries. I think, you know, some of the examples, like I said, I gave you the example of we're using data sharing to help the retail space. And I think it's a really good partnership. Because some of the, some companies view Amazon as a competitor in the retail space, and I think we kind of soften that blow. And we actually leverage some of the Amazon.com data sets. And this is where the partnership's been really strong. In the healthcare space, in the life sciences space, we have customers like Anthem, where we're really focused on helping actually Anthem solve real business problems. Not necessarily like technical problems. It's like, oh no, they want to get, you know, figure out how they can get the whole customer and take care of their whole customer, and get them using the Anthem platform more effectively. So there's a really great, wonderful partnership there. >> We've heard a lot in the last day and a half on theCUBE from a lot of retail customers and partners. There seems to be a lot of growth in that. So there's so much change in the retail market. I was just talking with Click and Snowflake about Urban Outfitters, as an example. And you think of how what these companies are doing together and obviously AWS and Snowflake, helping companies not just pivot during the pandemic, but really survive. I mean, in the beginning with, you know, retail that didn't have a digital presence, what were they going to do? And then the supply chain issues. So it really seems to be what Snowflake and its partner Ecosystem is doing, is helping companies now, obviously, thrive. But it was really kind of like a no-go sort of situation for a lot of industries. >> Yeah, and I think the neat part of, you know, both the combined, you know, Snowflake and AWS solution is in, a good example is DoorDash, you know. They had hyper growth, and they could not have handled, especially during COVID, as we all know. We all used DoorDash, right? We were just talking about it. Chipotle, like, you know, like (laughter) and I think they were able to really take advantage of our hyper elastic platforms, both on the Amazon side and the Snowflake side to scale their business and meet the high demand that they were seeing. And that's kind of some of the great examples of where we've enabled customer growth to really accelerate. >> Yeah. Yeah, right. And I'd add to that, you know, while we saw good growth for those types of companies, a lot of your traditional companies saw a ton of benefit as well. Like another good example, and it's been talked about here at the show, is Western Union, right? So they're a company that's been around for a long time. They do cross border payments and cross currency, you know, exchanges, and, you know, like a lot of companies that have been around for a while, they have data all over the place. And so they started to look at that, and that became an inhibitor to their growth. 'Cause they couldn't get a full view of what was actually going on. And so they did a lengthy evaluation, and they ended up going with Snowflake. And, it was great, 'cause it provided a lot of immediate benefits, so first of all, they were able to take all those disparate systems and pull that into Snowflake. So they finally had a single source of the truth, which was lacking before that. So that was one of the big benefits. The second benefit, and Chris has mentioned this a couple times, is the fact that they could use data sharing. And so now they could pull in third data. And now that they had a holistic view of their entire data set, they could pull in that third party data, and now they could get insights that they never could get before. And so that was another large benefit. And then the third part, and this is where the relationship between AWS and Snowflake is great, is they could then use Amazon SageMaker. So one of the decisions that Western Union made a long time ago is they use R for their data science platform, and SageMaker supports R. And so it really allowed them to dovetail the skill sets that they had around data science into SageMaker. They could now look across all of Snowflake. And so that was just a really good benefit. And so it drove the cost down for Western Union which was a big benefit, but the even bigger benefit is they were now able to start to package and promote different solutions to their customers. So they were effectively able to monetize all the data that they were now getting and the information they were getting out of Snowflake. And then of course, once it was in there, they could also use things like Tableau or ThoughtSpot, both of which available in AWS Marketplace. And it allowed them to get all kinds of visualization of data that they never got in the past. >> The monetization piece is, is interesting. It's so challenging for organizations, one, to get that single source view, to be able to have a customer 360, but to also then be able to monetize data. When you're in customer conversations, how do you help customers on that journey, start? Because the, their competitors are clearly right behind them, ready to take first place spot. How do you help customers go, all right this is what we're going to do to help you on this journey with AWS to monetize your data? >> I think, you know, it's everything from, you know, looking at removing the silos of data. So one of the challenges they've had is they have these Legacy systems, and a lot of times they don't want to just take the Legacy systems and throw them into the cloud. They want to say, we need a holistic view of our customer, 360 view of our customer data. And then they're saying, hey, how can we actually monetize that data? That's where we do everything from, you know, Snowflake has the data marketplace where we list it in the data marketplace. We help them monetize it there. And we use some of the data sets from Amazon to help them do that. We use the technologies like Chris said with SageMaker and other tool sets to help them realize the value of their data in a real, meaningful way. >> So this sounds like a very strategic and technical partnership. >> Yeah, well, >> On both sides. >> It's technical and it's GOTO market. So if you take a look at, you know, Snowflake where they've built over 20 integrations now to different AWS services. So if you're using S3 for object storage, you can use Snowflake on top of that. If you want to load up Snowflake with Glue which is our ETL tool, you can do that. If you want to use QuickSite to do your data visualization on top of Snowflake, you can do that. So they've built integration to all of our services. And then we've built integrations like SageMaker back into Snowflake, and so that supports all kinds of specific customer use cases. So if you think of people that are doing any kind of cloud data platform workload, stuff like data engineering, data warehousing, data lakes, it could be even data applications, cyber security, unistore type things, Snowflake does an excellent job of helping our customers get into those types of environments. And so that's why we support the relationship with a variety of, you know, credit programs. We have a lot of co-sell motions on top of these technical integrations because we want to make sure that we not only have the right technical platform, but we've got the right GOTO market motion. And that's super important. >> Yeah, and I would add to that is like, you know one of the things that customers do is they make these large commitments to Amazon. And one of the best things that Amazon did was allow those customers to draw down Snowflake via the AWS Marketplace. So it's been wonderful to his point around the GOTO market, that was a huge issue for us. And, and again, this is where Amazon was innovative on identifying the ways to help make the customer have a better experience >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Chris D: and put the customer first. And this has been, you know, wonderful partnership there. >> Yeah. It really has. It's been a great, it's been really good. >> Well, and the customers are here. Like we said, >> Yep. >> Yes. Yes they are. >> we're north of 10,000 folks total, and customers are just chomping at the bit. There's been so much growth in the last three years from the last time, I think I heard the 2019 Snowflake Summit had about 1500 people. And here we are at 10,000 plus now, and standing-room-only keynote, the very big queue to get in, people turned away, pushed back to an overflow area to be able to see that, and that was yesterday. I didn't even get a chance to see what it was like today, but I imagine it was probably the same. Talk about the, when you're in customer conversations, where do you bring, from a GTM perspective, Where do you bring Snowflake into the conversation? >> Yeah >> Obviously, there's Redshift there, what does that look like? I imagine it follows the customer's needs, challenges. >> Exactly. >> Compelling events. >> Yeah. We're always going to work backwards from the customer need, and so that is the starting point for kindling both organizations. And so we're going to, you know, look at what they need. And from an AWS perspective, you know, if they're going with Snowflake, that's a very good thing. Right? 'Cause one of the things that we want to support is a selection experience to our AWS customers and make sure that no matter what they're doing, they're getting a very good, supported experience. And so we're always going to work backwards from the customer. And then once they make that technology decision, then we're going to support them, as I mentioned, with a whole bunch of co-sell resources. We have technical resources in the field. We have credit programs and in, you know, and, of course, we're going to market in a variety of different verticals as well with Snowflake. If you take a look at all the industry clouds that Snowflake has spun up, financial services and healthcare, and media entertainment, you know, those are all very specific use cases that are very valuable to an AWS customer. And AWS is going more and more to market on a vertical approach, and so Snowflake really just fits right in with our overall strategy. >> Right. Sounds like very tight alignment there. That mission alignment that Frank talked about yesterday. I know he was talking about that with respect to customers, but it sounds like there's a mission alignment between AWS and Snowflake. >> Mission alignment, yeah. >> I live that every week. (laughter) >> Sorry if I brought up a pain point. >> Yeah. Little bit. No. >> Guys, what's, in terms of use cases, obviously we've been here for a couple days. I'm sure you've had tremendous feedback, >> Chris G: Yeah. >> from, from customers, from partners, from the ecosystem. What's next, what can we expect to hear next? Maybe give us a preview of re:Invent in the few months. >> Preview of re:Invent. Yeah. No, well, one of the things we really want to start doing is just, you know, making the use case of, of launching Snowflake on AWS a lot easier. So what can we do to streamline those types of experiences? 'Cause a lot of times we'll find that customers, once they buy a third party solution like Snowflake, they have to then go through a whole series of configuration steps, and what can we do to streamline that? And so we're going to continue to work on that front. One of the other places that we've been exploring with Snowflake is how we work with channel partners. And, you know, when we first launched Marketplace it was really more of an app store model that was ISVs on one side and channel partners on the other, and there wasn't really a good fit for channel partners. And so four years ago we retrofitted the platform and have opened it up to resellers like an SHI or SIs like Salam or Deloitte who are top, two top SIs for Snowflake. And now they can use Marketplace to resell those technologies and also sell their services on top of that. So Snowflake's got a big, you know, practice with Salam, as I mentioned. You know, Salam can now sell through Marketplace and they can actually sell that statement of work and put that on the AWS bill all by virtue of using Marketplace, that automation platform. >> Ease of use for customers, ease of use for partners as well. >> Yes. >> And that ease of use is it's no joke. It's, it's not just a marketing term. It's measurable and it's about time-to-value, time-to-market, getting customers ahead of their competition so that they can be successful. Guys, thanks for joining me on theCUBE today. Talking about AWS and >> Nice to be back. Nice to be back in person. >> Isn't it nice to be back. It's great to be actually sitting across from another human. >> Exactly. >> Thank you so much for your insights, what you shared about the partnership and where it's going. We appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Cool. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right guys. For Chris and Chris, I'm Lisa Martin, here watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas. I'll be back with my next guest momentarily, so stick around. (Upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Villante. We are at Caesar's Forum, having lots of great conversations. As I mentioned, this is just the start of day two, a tremendous amount of content yesterday. I'm coming at you today. Two guests join us from Slalom, now, we've got Chris Samuels, Principal Machine Learning, and Bethany Mudd, Senior Director, Experience Design. Welcome to theCube, guys. >> Hi, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, Slalom and Snowflake, over 200 joint customers, over 1,800 plus engagements, lots of synergies there, partnership. We're here today to talk about intelligent products. Talk to us about what- how do you define intelligent products, and then kind of break that down? >> Yeah, I can, I can start with the simple version, right? So, when we think about intelligent products, what they're doing, is they're doing more than they were explicitly programmed to do. So, instead of having a developer write all of these rules and have, "If this, then that," right, we're using data, and real time insights to make products that are more performing and improving over time. >> Chris: Yeah, it's really bringing together an ecosystem of a series of things to have integrated capabilities working together that themselves offer constant improvement, better understanding, better flexibility, and better usability, for everyone involved. >> Lisa: And there are four pillars of intelligent products that let's walk through those: technology, intelligence, experiences, and operations. >> Sure. So for technology, like most modern data architectures, it has sort of a data component and it has a modern cloud platform, but here, the key is is sort of things being disconnected, things being self contained, and decoupled, such that there's better integration time, better iteration time, more cross use, and more extensibility and scalability with the cloud native portion of that. >> And the intelligence piece? >> The intelligence piece is the data that's been processed by machine learning algorithms, or by predictive analytics that provides sort of the most valuable, or more- most insightful inferences, or conclusions. So, by bringing together again, the tech and the intelligence, that's, you know, sort of the, two of the pillars that begin to move forward that enable sort of the other two pillars, which are- >> Experiences and operations. >> Yeah. >> Perfect. >> And if we think about those, all of the technology, all of the intelligence in the world, doesn't mean anything if it doesn't actually work for people. Without use, there is no value. So, as we're designing these products, we want to make sure that they're supporting people. As we're automating, there are still people accountable for those tasks. There are still impacts to people in the real world. So, we want to make sure that we're doing that intentionally. So, we're building the greater good. >> Yeah. And from the operations perspective, it's you can think of traditional DevOps becoming MLOps, where there's an overall platform and a framework in place to manage not only the software components of it, but the overall workflow, and the data flow, and the model life cycle such that we have tools and people from different backgrounds and different teams developing and maintaining this than you would previously see with something like product engineering. >> Dave: Can you guys walk us through an example of how you work with a customer? I'm envisioning, you know, meeting with a lot of yellow stickies, and prioritization, and I don't know if that's how it works, but take us through like the start and the sequence. >> You have my heart, I am a workshop lover. Anytime you have the scratch off, like, lottery stickers on something, you know it's a good one. But, as we think about our approach, we typically start with either a discovery or mobilized phase. We're really, we're starting by gathering context, and really understanding the business, the client, the users, and that full path the value. Who are all the teams that are going to have to come together and start working together to deliver this intelligent product? And once we've got that context, we can start solutioning and ideating on that. But, really it comes down to making sure that we've earned the right, and we've got the smarts to move into the space intelligently. >> Yeah, and, truly, it's the intelligent product itself is sort of tied to the use case. The business knows what the most- what is potentially the most valuable here. And so, so by communicating and working and co-creating with the business, we can define then, okay, here are the use cases and here are where machine learning and the overall intelligent product can maybe add more disruptive value than others. By saying, let's pretend that, you know, maybe your ML model or your predictive analytics is like a dial that we could turn up to 11. Which one of those dials turning turned up to 11 could add the most value or disruption to your business? And therefore, you know, how can we prioritize and then work toward that pie-in-the-sky goal. >> Okay. So the client comes and says, "This is the outcome we want." Okay, and then you help them. You gather the right people, sort of extract all the little, you know, pieces of knowledge, and then help them prioritize so they can focus. And then what? >> Yeah. So, from there we're going to take the approach that seeing is solving. We want to make sure that we get the right voices in the room, and we've got the right alignment. So, we're going to map out everything. We're going to diagram what that experience is going to look like, how technology's going to play into it, all of the roles and actors involved. We're going to draw a map of the ecosystem that everyone can understand, whether you're in marketing, or the IT sort of area, once again, so we can get crisp on that outcome and how we're going to deliver it. And, from there, we start building out that roadmap and backlog, and we deliver iteratively. So, by not thinking of things as getting to the final product after a three year push, we really want to shrink those build, measure, and learn loops. So, we're getting all of that feedback and we're listening and evolving and growing the same way that our products are. >> Yeah. Something like an intelligent product is is pretty heady. So it's a pretty heavy concept to talk about. And so, the question becomes, "What is the outcome that ultimately needs to be achieved?" And then, who, from where in the business across the different potentially business product lines or business departments needs to be brought together? What data needs to be brought together? Such that the people can understand how they themselves can shape. The stakeholders can, how the product itself can be shaped. And therefore, what is the ultimate outcome, collectively, for everybody involved? 'Cause while your data might be fueling, you know, finances or someone else's intelligence and that kind of thing, bringing it all together allows for a more seamless product that might benefit more of the overall structure of the organization. >> Can you talk a little bit about how Slalom and Snowflake are enabling, like a customer example? A customer to take that data, flex that muscle, and create intelligent products that delight and surprise their customers? >> Chris: Yeah, so here's a great story. We worked to co-create with Kawasaki Heavy Industries. So, we created an intelligent product with them to enable safer rail travel, more preventative, more efficient, preventative maintenance, and a more efficient and real time track status feedback to the rail operators. So, in this case, we brought, yeah, the intelligent product itself was, "Okay, how do you create a better rail monitoring service?" And while that itself was the primary driver of the data, multiple other parts of the organization are using sort of the intelligent product as part of their now daily routine, whether it's from the preventative maintenance perspective, or it's from route usage, route prediction. Or, indeed, helping KHI move forward into making trains a more software centered set of products in the future. >> So, taking that example, I would imagine when you running- like I'm going to call that a project. I hope that's okay. So, when I'm running a project, that I would imagine that sometimes you run into, "Oh, wow. Okay." To really be successful at this, the company- project versus whole house. The company doesn't have the right data architecture, the right skills or the right, you know, data team. Now, is it as simple as, oh yeah, just put it all into Snowflake? I doubt it. So how do you, do you encounter that often? How do you deal with that? >> Bethany: It's a journey. So, I think it's really about making sure we're meeting clients where they are. And I think that's something that we actually do pretty well. So, as we think about delivery co-creation, and co-delivering is a huge part of our model. So, we want to make sure that we have the client teams, with us. So, as we start thinking about intelligent products, it can be incorporating a small feature, with subscription based services. It doesn't have to be creating your own model and sort of going deep. It really does come down to like what value do you want to get out of this? Right? >> Yeah. It is important that it is a journey, right? So, it doesn't have to be okay, there's a big bang applied to you and your company's tech industry or tech ecosystem. You can just start by saying, "Okay, how will I bring my data together at a data lake? How do I see across my different pillars of excellence in my own business?" And then, "How do I manage, potentially, this in an overall MLOps platform such that it can be sustainable and gather more insights and improve itself with time, and therefore be more impactful to the ultimate users of the tool?" 'Cause again, as Bethany said that without use, these things are just tools on the shelf somewhere that have little value. >> So, it's a journey, as you both said, completely agree with that. It's a journey that's getting faster and faster. Because, I mean, we've seen so much acceleration in the last couple of the years, the consumer demands have massively changed. >> Bethany: Absolutely. >> In every industry, how do Slalom and Snowflake come together to help businesses define the journey, but also accelerate it, so that they can stay ahead or get ahead of the competition? >> Yeah. So, one thing I think is interesting about the technology field right now is I feel like we're at the point where it's not the technology or the tools that's limiting us or, you know, constraining what we can build, it's our imaginations. Right? And, when I think about intelligent products and all of the things that are capable, that you can achieve with AI and ML, that's not widely known. There's so much tech jargon. And, we put all of those statistical words on it, and you know the things you don't know. And, instead, really, what we're doing is we're providing different ways to learn and grow. So, I think if we can demystify and humanize some of that language, I really would love to see all of these companies better understand the crayons and the tools in their toolbox. >> Speaking from a creative perspective, I love it. >> No, And I'll do the tech nerd bit. So, there is- you're right. There is a portion where you need to bring data together, and tech together, and that kind of thing. So, something like Snowflake is a great enabler for how to actually bring the data of multiple parts of an organization together into, you know, a data warehouse, or a data lake, and then be able to manage that sort of in an MLOps platform, particularly with some of the press that Snowflake has put out this week. Things becoming more Python-native, allowing for more ML experimentation, and some more native insights on the platform, rather than going off Snowflake platform to do some of that kind of thing. Makes Snowflake an incredibly valuable portion of the data management and of the tech and of the engineering of the overall product. >> So, I agree, Bethany, lack of imagination sometimes is the barrier we get so down into the weeds, but there's also lack of skills, as mentioned the organizational, you know, structural issues, politics, you know, whatever it is, you know, specific agendas, how do you guys help with that? Can, will you bring in, you know, resources to help and fill gaps? >> Yeah, so we will bring in a cross-disciplinary team of experts. So, you will see an experienced designer, as well as your ML architects, as well as other technical architects, and what we call solution owners, because we want to make sure that we've got a lot of perspectives, so we can see that problem from a lot of different angles. The other thing that we're bringing in is a repeatable process, a repeatable engineering methodology, which, when you zoom out, and you look at it, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But, what we're doing, is we're training against it. We're building tools, we're building templates, we're re-imagining what our deliverables look like for intelligent products, just so, we're not only speeding up the development and getting to those outcomes faster, but we're also continuing to grow and we can gift those things to our clients, and help support them as well. >> And not only that, what we do at Slalom is we want to think about transition from the beginning. And so, by having all the stakeholders in the room from the earliest point, both the business stakeholders, the technical stakeholders, if they have data scientists, if they have engineers, who's going to be taking this and maintaining this intelligent product long after we're gone, because again, we will transition, and someone else will be taking over the maintenance of this team. One, they will understand, you know, early from beginning the path that it is on, and be more capable of maintaining this, and two, understand sort of the ethical concerns behind, okay, here's how parts of your system affect this other parts of the system. And, you know, sometimes ML gets some bad press because it's misapplied, or there are concerns, or models or data are used outside of context. And there's some, you know, there are potentially some ill effects to be had. By bringing those people together much earlier, it allows for the business to truly understand and the stakeholders to ask the questions that they- that need to be continually asked to evaluate, is this the right thing to do? How do I, how does my part affect the whole? And, how do I have an overall impact that is in a positive way and is something, you know, truly being done most effectively. >> So, that's that knowledge transfer. I hesitate to even say that because it makes it sound so black and white, because you're co-creating here. But, essentially, you're, you know, to use the the cliche, you're teaching them how to fish. Not, you know, going to ongoing, you know, do the fishing for them, so. >> Lisa: That thought diversity is so critical, as is the internal alignment. Last question for you guys, before we wrap here, where can customers go to get started? Do they engage Slalom, Snowflake? Can they do both? >> Chris: You definitely can. We can come through. I mean, we're fortunate that snowflake has blessed us with the title of partner of the year again for the fifth time. >> Lisa: Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. We are incredibly humbled in that. So, we would do a lot of work with Snowflake. You could certainly come to Slalom, any one of our local markets, or build or emerge. We'll definitely work together. We'll figure out what the right team is. We'll have lots and lots of conversations, because it is most important for you as a set of business stakeholders to define what is right for you and what you need. >> Yeah. Good stuff, you guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about intelligent products, what they are, how you co-design them, and the impact that data can make with customers if they really bring the right minds together and get creative. We appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us guys. Yeah. >> All right. For Dave Villante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage, day two, Snowflake Summit 22, from Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Snowflake Summit 22, the fourth annual Snowflake Summit. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, We're live in Vegas, as I mentioned. We've got a couple of guests here with us. We're going to be unpacking some more great information that has come out of the show news today. Please welcome Chris Child back to theCUBE, Senior Director of Product Management at Snowflake, and Lisa Cramer is here, Head of Embedded Products at LiveRamp, guys welcome. >> Thank you. >> Hi. >> Tell us a little bit about LiveRamp, what you guys do, what your differentiators are and a little bit about the Snowflake partnership? >> Sure, well, LiveRamp makes it safe and easy to connect data. And we're powered by core identity resolution capabilities, which enable our clients to resolve their data, and connect it with other data sets. And so we've brought these identity infrastructure capabilities to Snowflake, and built into the Native Application Framework. We focused on two initial products around device resolution, which enables our clients to connect customer data from the digital ecosystem. This powers things like, measurement use cases, and understanding campaign effectiveness and ROI. And the second capability we built into the Native Application Framework is called transcoding. And this enables a translation layer between identifiers, so that parties can safely and effectively share data at a person-based view. >> Chris, talk to us about, Snowflake just announced a lot of news this morning, just announced, the new Snowflake Native Application Framework. You alluded to this, Lisa, talk to us about that. What does it mean for customers, what does it do? Give us all the backstory. >> Yeah, so we had seen a bunch of cases for our customers where they wanted to be able to take application logic, and have other people use it. So LiveRamp, as an example of that, they've built a bunch of complicated logic to help you figure out who is the same person in different systems. But the problem was always that, that application had to run outside of the Data Cloud. And that required you to take your data outside of Snowflake, entrust your data to a third party. And so every time that companies have to go, become a vendor, they have to go through a security review, and go through a long onerous process, to be able to be allowed to process the really sensitive data that these customers have. So with the Native Applications Framework, you can take your application code, all of the logic, and the data that's needed to build it together, and actually push that through secure data sharing into a customer's account, where it runs, and is able to access their data, join it with data from the provider, all without actually having to give that provider access to your core data assets themselves. >> Is it proper to think of the Native Application Framework as a PaaS layer within the Data Cloud? >> That's a great way to think about it. And so, this is where we've integrated with the marketplace as well. So providers like LiveRamp will be able to publish these applications. They'll run entirely on effectively a PaaS layer that's powered by Snowflake, and be able to deliver those to any region, any cloud, any place that Snowflake runs. >> So, we get a lot of grief for this term, but we've coined a term called "supercloud". Okay, and the supercloud is an abstraction layer that hovers above the hyperscale infrastructure. Companies like yours, build on top of that. So you don't have to worry about the underlying complexities. And we've said that, in order to make that a reality, you have to have a super PaaS. So is that essentially what you're doing? You're building your product on top of that? You're not worrying about, okay, now I'm going to go to Azure, I'm going to go to AWS, or I'm going to go to, wherever, is that a right way to think about it? >> That's exactly right. And I think, Snowflake has really helped us, kind of shift the paradigm in how we work with our customers, and enabled us to bring our capabilities to where their data lives, right? And enabled them to, kind of run the analytics, and run the identity resolution where their data sits. And so that's really exciting. And I think, specifically with the Native Application Framework, Snowflake delivered on the promise of minimizing data movement, right? The application is installed. You don't have to move your data at all. And so for us, that was a really compelling reason to build into it. And we love when our customers can maintain control of their data. >> So the difference between what you are doing as partners, and a SaaS, is that, you're not worrying about all the capabilities, there in the data, all the governance, and the security components. You're relying on the Data Cloud for that, is that right? Or is it a SaaS? >> Yeah, I think there's components, like certainly parts of our business still run in the SaaS model. But I think the ability to rely on some of the infrastructure that Snowflake provides, and honestly kind of the connectivity, and the verticalized solutions that Snowflake brings to bear with data providers, and technology providers, that matter most to that vertical, really enable us to kind of rely on some of that to ensure that we can serve our customers as they want us to. >> So you're extending your SaaS platform and bringing new capabilities, as opposed to building, or are you building new apps in the Data Cloud? This is, I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but I'm trying to understand from your perspective. >> Oh yeah, so we built new capabilities within the Data Cloud. It's based on our core identity infrastructure capabilities, but we wanted to build into the Native Application Framework, so that data doesn't have to move and we can serve our customers, and they can maintain control over their data in their environment. So we built new capabilities, but it's all based on our core identity infrastructure. >> So safe sharing reminds me of like when procurement says, do we have an MSA? Yes, okay, go. You know, it's just frictionless. Versus no, okay, send some paper, go back and forth and it just takes forever. >> That's one of the big goals that we see. And to your point on, is it a PaaS, is it a SaaS? We honestly think of it as something a little bit different, in a similar way to where, at Snowflake we saw a whole generation of SaaS business models, and as a utility, and a consumption-based model, we think of ourselves as different from a SaaS business model. We're now trying to enable application providers, like LiveRamp, to take the core technology in IP that they've built over many, many years, but deliver it in a completely new different way that wasn't possible. And so part of this is extending what they're doing, and making it a little easier to deploy, and not having to go through the MSA process in the same way. But also we do think that this will allow entirely new capabilities to be brought that wouldn't be possible, unless they could be deployed and run inside the Data Cloud. >> Is LiveRamp a consumption pricing model, or is it a subscription, or a combo? >> We are actually a subscription, but with some usage capabilities. >> It's an hybrid. >> Chris, talk a little bit about the framework that you guys have both discussed. How is it part of the overall Snowflake vision of delivering secure and governed, powerful analytics, and data sharing to customers, and ecosystem partners? >> So this, for us we view this as kind of the next evolution of Snowflake. So Snowflake was all built on helping people consolidate their data, bring all your data into one place and then run all of your different workloads on it. And what we've seen over the years is, there are still a lot of different use cases, where you need to take your data out of the Data Cloud, in order to do certain different things. So we made a bunch of announcements today around machine learning, so that you don't have to take your data out to train models. And native applications is built on the idea of don't bring your data to the applications you need. Whether they're machine learning models, whether they're identity resolution, whether they're really even just analytics. Instead, take the application logic and bring that into the Data Cloud, and run it right on your data where it is. And so the big benefit of that is, I don't need copies of my data that are getting out of sync, and getting out of date. I don't need to give a copy of my data to anyone else. I get to keep it, I get to govern it. I get to secure it. I know exactly what's going on. But now, we can open this up to workloads, not just ones that Snowflake's building, but workloads that partners like LiveRamp, or anyone else is building. All those workloads can then run in a single copy of your data, in a single secure environment. >> And when you say in one place, Chris, people can get confused by that, 'cause it's really not in one place. it's the global thing that Benoit stressed this morning >> And that right, and so these, once you write a native app once, so the native app that they've written is one piece of code, one application, that now can be deployed by customers in any region, or on any cloud that they're running on without any changes at all. So to your point on the PaaS, that's where it gets very PaaS-like, because they write once to the Snowflake APIs, and now it can run literally anywhere the Snowflake runs. >> But the premise that we've put forth in supercloud is that, this is a new era. It's not multicloud. And it's consistent with a digital business, right? You're building, you've got a digital business, and this is a new value layer of a digital business. If I've got capabilities, I want to bring them to the cloud. I want to bring them to, every company's a software company, software's eating the world, data's eating software. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but it's not like 10 years ago. This is a whole new life cycle that we're just starting. Is that valid? I mean do you feel that way about LiveRamp? >> Definitely, I mean, I think it's really exciting to see all of the data connectivity that is happening. At the same time, I think the challenges still remain, right? So there are still challenges around being able to resolve your data, and being able to connect your data to a person-based view in a privacy safe way, to be able to partner with others in a data collaboration model, right? And to be able to do all of that without sharing anything from a sensitive identifier standpoint, or not having a resolved data set. And so I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot of really cool, awesome innovation happening, but the customer challenges, kind of still exist. And so that's why it's exciting to build these applications that can now solve those problems, where that data is. >> It's the cloud benefit, the heavy lifting thing, for data? 'Cause you don't have to worry about all that. You can focus on campaign ROI, or whatever new innovation that you want to bring out. >> And think about it from the end customer's perspective. They now, can come into their single environment where they have all their data, they can say, I need to match the identity, and they can pull in LiveRamp with a few clicks, and then they can say, I'm ready to take some actions on this. And they can pull in action tools with just a few more clicks. And they haven't made current marketing stack that you see. There's 20 different tools and you're schlepping data back and forth between each of them, and LiveRamp's just one stop on your journey to get this data out to where I'm actually sending emails or targeting ads. Our vision is that, all that happens on one copy of the data, each of these different tools are grabbing the parts they need, again in a secure well-governed, well-controlled way, enriching in ways that they need, taking actions that they need, pulling in other data sets that they need. But the end consumer maintains control over the data, and over the process, the entire way through. >> So one copy data. So you sometimes might make a copy, right? But you'd make as many copies as you need to, but no more, kind of thing, to paraphrase Einstein, or is that right? >> There's literally one copy of the data. So one of the nice things with Snowflake, with data sharing, and with native applications, the data is stored once in one file on disc and S3, which eventually is a disc somewhere. >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> But what can happen is, I'm really just granting permission to these different applications, to read and write from that single copy of the data. So as soon as a new customer touches my website, that immediately shows up in my data. LiveRamp gets access to that instantly. They enrich it. Before I've even noticed that that new customer signed up, the data's already been enriched, the identity's been matched, and they're already put into a bucket about what campaign I should run against them. >> So the data stays where it is. You bring the ISO compute, but the application. And then you take the results, right? And then I can read them back? >> You bring the next application, right to that same copy of the data. So what'll happen is you'll have a view that LiveRamp is accessing and reading and making changes on, LiveRamp is exposing its own view, I have another application reading from the LiveRamp view, exposing its own view. And ultimately someone's taking an action based on that. But there's one copy of the data all the way through. That's the really powerful thing. >> Okay, so yeah, so you're not moving the data. So you're not dealing with latency problems, but I can, if I'm in Australia and I'm running on US West, it's not a problem? >> Yes, so there, if you do want to run across different clouds, we will copy the data in that case, we've found it's much faster. >> Okay, great, I thought I was losing my mind. >> No, but as long as you're staying within a single region, there will be no copies of the data. >> Yeah, okay, totally makes sense, great. >> One of the efficiency there in speed to be able to get the insights. That's what it's all about, being able to turn the volume up on the data from a value perspective. Thanks so much guys for joining us on the program today talking about what LiveRamp and Snowflake are doing together and breaking down the Snowflake Native Application Framework. We appreciate your insights and your time, And thanks for joining us. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests, and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Snowflake Summit 22 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>mhm. >>Good morning. Live from Las Vegas. That snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin With Day Volonte David's Great. We have three wall to wall days of coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 this year. >>Yeah, it's all about data and bringing data to applications. And we've got some big announcements coming this week. Super exciting >>collaboration around data. We are excited to welcome our first two guests before the keynote. We have seen Nielsen in S V. P of data and Analytics Service offering head at emphasis. And Chris Dignan alumni is back with us to chief revenue officer at stuff like guys. Great to have you on the programme. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So he'll tell us what's going on with emphasis and snowflake and the partnership. Give us all that good stuff. >>Yeah, No, I think with the convergence of, uh, data digital and computing economy, um, you know that convergence is creating so much possibilities for for customers, uh, snowflake and emphases working together to help our customers realise the vision and these possibilities that are getting driven. We share a very strategic partnership where we are thinking ahead for our customers in terms of what, uh, we can do together in order to build solutions in order to bring out the expertise that is needed for such transformations and also influencing the thinking, Um, and the and the point of view in the market together so that, you know there is there is cohesive approach to doing this transformation and getting to those business outcomes. So it's a It's a partnership that's very successful and its strategic for for our customers, and we continue to invest for the market. >>Got some great customer. Some of my favourite CVS, Nike, William Sanoma. Gotta love that one. Chris talked to us about the snowflake data cloud. What makes it so unique and compelling in the market? >>Well, I think our customers, really they are going through digital transformation today, and they're moving from on premise to the cloud and historically speaking, there just hasn't been the right tool set to help them do that. I think snowflake brings to the table an opportunity for them to take all of their data and take it and and allow it to go from one cloud to the other so they can sit on a W s it can sit on Azure can sit on G, C, P and I can move around from cloud to cloud, and they can do analytics on top of that. >>So data has been traditionally really hard. And we saw that in the big data movement. But we learned a lot. Uh, and AI has been, you know, challenging. So what are you seeing with with customers? What are they struggling with? And how are you guys helping them? >>Yeah. So if you look at the customer journey, they have invested in a number of technologies in the past and are now at a juncture where they need to transform that landscape. They have the challenges of legacy debt that they need to, you know, get rid of or transform. They have the challenges of really bringing, you know, a cohesive understanding within the enterprise as to what these possibilities are for their business. Given the strategy that they are pursuing, um, business and I t cycles are not necessarily aligned. Um, you have the challenge of very fragmented data landscape that they have created over a period of time. How do you, you know, put all these together and work with a specific outcome in mind so that you're not doing transformation for the purpose of transformation. But to be able to actually drive new business models, new data driven products and services ability for you to collaborate with your partners and create unique competitive advantage in the market. And how do you bring those purposes together with the transformation that that's really happening? And and that's where you know our our customers, um, you know, grapple with the challenges of bringing it together. So, >>Chris, how do you see? Because it was talking about, uh, legacy that I think technical debt. Um, you kind of started out making the data warehouse easier. Then this data cloud thing comes out. You're like, Oh, that's an interesting vision and all of a sudden it's way more than vision. You get this huge ecosystem you're extending, we're gonna hear the announcements this morning. We won't. We won't spill the beans, but but really expanding the data cloud. So it's hard to keep up with with where you're at. So I think modernisation, right? So how do you think about modernisation? How are your customers thinking about it? And what's the scope of Snowflake. >>Well, you know, I think historically, you asked about AI and Ml and, you know, in the A I world historically, they've lacked data, and I think because we're the data cloud, we're bringing data, you know, and making it available and democratising it for everybody. And then, you know, partners like emphasis are actually helping us bring, you know, applications and new business models to to the table to our customers and their innovating on top of the data that we already have in the Snowflake Data Club. >>Chris, can you talk about some of the verticals where you guys are successful with emphasis that the three that I mentioned are retailers, But I know that finance, healthcare and life sciences are are huge for smooth, like talk to me, give us a perspective of the verticals that are coming to you. Guys saying help us out with transport. >>You know, I'll give you just an example. So So in the in the retail space, for example, Kraft Heinz is a is a joint customer of ours. And, you know, they've been all in on on snowflakes, Data Cloud and one of our big customers as well it is is Albertsons, and Albertans realises, Oh my gosh, I have all this information around the consumer in in the grocery stores and Kraft Heinz. They want access to that, and they actually can make supply chain decisions a lot faster if they have access to it. So with snowflakes data sharing, we can actually allow them to share data. Albertans share data directly with Kraft, Heinz and Kraft. Heinz can actually make supply chain decisions in real time so that these are some of the stuff that emphasis and stuff like help our customers self. >>So traditionally, the data pipeline goes through some very highly specialised individuals, whether the data engineer, the data scientists and data analyst. So that example that you just gave our organisation you mentioned before democratisation. So democratisation needs to be as a businessperson, I actually can get access to the data. So in that example that you gave between Kraft, Heinz and and and Albertson, is it the the highly hyper specialised teams sharing that data? Or is it actually extending into the line of business focus? >>That's so that's the interesting part for us is I think, snowflake, we just recently reorganise my sales team this year into verticals, and the reason we did that is customers no longer want to talk to us about speeds and feeds of how fast my database goes. They want to actually talk about business outcomes. How do I solve for demand forecasting? How do I supply fix my supply chain issues? Those are things. Those are the. That's how we're aligning with emphasis. So well is they've been doing this for a long time, Can only we haven't. And so we need their help on getting us to the next level of of the sales motion and talking to our customers on solving these business challenges in >>terms of that next level. So no question for you. Where are the customer conversations happening? At what level? I mean, we've seen such dramatic changes in the market in the last couple of years. Now we're dealing with inflation rising interest rates. Ukraine. Are you seeing the conversations in terms of building data platforms rising up the C suite? As every company recognises, we're going to be a data company. We're not gonna be a business. >>Absolutely. And I think all the macroeconomic forces that you talked about that's working on the enterprises globally is actually leading them to think about how to future proof their business models. Right? And there are tonnes of learning that they've hired in the last two or three years and digitising in embracing more digital models. The conversation with the customers have really pivoted towards business outcome. It is a C suite conversation. It is no longer just an incremental change for the for the companies they recognise. That data has been touted as a strategic asset for a long time, but I think it's taking a purpose and a meaning as to what it does for for the customers, the conversations are around industry verticals. You know, what are the specific challenges and opportunities that the the enterprises have, uh, and how you realise those and these cuts across multiple different layers. You know, we're talking about how your democratised data, which in our point of view, is absolute, must in terms of putting a foundation that doesn't take super specialised people to be able to run every operation and every bit of data that you process we have invested in building autonomous data and a state that can process data as it comes in without any manual intervention and take it all the way to consumption but also investing in those industry solutions. Along with snowflake, we launched the healthcare and life Sciences solution. We launched the only channel for retail and CPG. And these are great examples of how Snowflake Foundation enables democratisation on one side but also help solve business problems. In fact, with Snowflake, we have a very, uh, special partnership because our point of view on data economy is about how you connect with the network partners externally, and snowflake brings native capabilities. On this, we leverage that to Dr Exchanges for our customers and one of the services company in the recycling business. Uh, we're actually building and in exchange, which will allow the data points from multiple different sources and partners to come together. So they have a better understanding of their customers, their operations, the field operations and things >>like building a data ecosystem. Yes. Alright, They they Is it a two sided market place where you guys are observers and providing the the technology and the process, you know, guidance. What's your role in that? >>Yeah. So, um, we were seeing their revolution coming? Uh, two stages. Maybe even more. Um, customers are comfortable building an ecosystem. That's kind of private for them. Which means that they know who they are sharing data with. They know what the data is getting used for. And how do you really put governance on this? So that on one side you can trust it on the other side. There is a good use of that data, Uh, and not, uh, you know, compromise on their quality or privacy and some of the other regulations. But we do see this opening up to the two sided market places as well. Uh, some of the industry's lend themselves extremely well for that kind of play. We have seen that happening in trading area. We've seen that happen. And, uh, you know, the credit checks and things like that which are usually open for, you know, those kind of ecosystem. But the conversations and the and the programmes are really leading towards towards that in the market. >>You know, Lisa, one of things I wrote about this weekend is I was decided to come to stuff like summit and and see one of the, you know, thesis I have is that we're going to move not just beyond analytics, including analytics, but also building data products that can be monetised and and I'm hoping we're going to see some of that here. Are you seeing that Christian in the customer? It's It's >>a great question, David. So So we have You know, I just thought of it as as he was talking about. We have a customer who's a very large customer of ours who's in the financial services space, and they handle roughly 40% of the credit card transactions that happen in the US and they're coming to us and saying they want to go from zero in data business today to a $2 billion business over the next five years, and they're leaning on us to help them do that. And one of the things that's exciting for me is they're coming to us not saying Hey, how do you do it? You know, they're saying, Hey, we want to build a consumption model on top of snowflake and we want to use you as the delivery mechanism and the billing mechanism to help us actually monetise that data. So yes, the answer is. You know, I I used to sell to, you know, chief Data Officers and and see IOS. Now I'm talking to VPs of sales and I'm talking to chief operating officers and I'm talking to CEOs about how do we actually create a new revenue stream? And that's just I mean, it's exhilarating to have those conversations. That's >>data products. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure that comes from the cloud. They don't have to worry about the governance, as Senior was saying, Just put >>it in stuff like Just >>put stuff like that. So I call it The super cloud is kind of a, you know, a funny little tongue in cheek. But it's happening. It's this layer. It's not just multiple clouds. You see a lot of your critical competitors adjacent competitors saying, Hey, we're now running in in Google or we're running in Azure. We've been running on AWS. This is different. This is different, isn't it? It's a cloud that floats above the The infrastructure of the hyper scale is, and that's that's a new era. I think >>it's a new error. I think they're you know, I think the hyper scholars want to, you know, keep us as a as a data warehouse and and we're not. The customers are not letting them so So I think that's you know where emphasis kind of saw the light early on. And they were our innovation partner of the year, uh, this past year and they're helping us in our customers innovate, >>but you're uniquely qualified to do that where? I don't think it's the hyper scholars agenda. At least I never say never with the hyper scale is, but yeah, they have focused on providing infrastructure. And, yeah, they have databases and other tools. But that that cross cloud that continuum to your point, talking to VPs of sales and how do you generate revenue? That maybe, is a conversation that they have, but not explicitly as to how to actually do it in a data >>cloud. That's right. I mean, those and those are the Those are the fun conversations because you're you're saying, Hey, we can actually create a new revenue stream. And how can we actually help you solve our joint customers problems? So, yes, it is. Well, >>that's competitive differentiation for businesses. I mean, this is, as I mentioned Every company has to be a data company. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. They've got to be able to to leverage a data platform like snowflake, to find insights, be able to act on them and create value new services, new products to stay competitive, to stay ahead of the competition. That's no longer nice to have >>100%. I mean, I think they're they're all scared. I mean, you know, like if you look in the financial services space, they look at some of the fintech, as you know, the giant £800 gorillas look at the small fintech has huge threats to the business, and they're coming to us and say, How can we innovate our business now? And they're looking at us as the the innovator, and they're looking at emphasis to help them do that. So I think these are These are incredible times. >>So the narrative on Wall Street, of course, this past earnings season was consumption and who has best visibility and and they they were able to snowflake had a couple of large customers dial down consumption, some consumer facing. Here's the thing. If you're selling a data product for more than it costs you to make. If you dial down consumption in the future, you're gonna dial down revenue. So that's it's going to become less and less discretionary over time. And that, to me, is the next error. That's really exciting. >>The key, The key there is understanding the unit of measure. I think that's the number. One question that we get from customers is what is the unit of measure that we care about, that we want to monetise because to your point, it costs you more to make the product. You're not going to sell it right? And so I think that those are the things that the energy that we're spending with customers today is advising them, jointly advising them on how to actually monetise the specific, you know, unit of measure that they care >>about because when they get the Amazon bill or the snowflake bill, the CFO starts knocking the door. The answer has to be well, look at all the revenue that we generated and all the operating profit and the free cash flow that we drove, and then it's like, Oh, I get it. Keep doing it well, if I'm >>if I'm going on sales calls with the VP of sales and his their sales team, fantastic, right generated helping them generate revenue, right? That's a great conversation >>dynamic. And I think the adoption is really driven through the value, uh, that they can drive in their ecosystem. Their products are similar to products and services that these companies sell. And if you're embedding data inside Syria into your products services, that makes you that much more competitive in the market and drive value for your stakeholders. And that's essentially the future business model that we're talking about. On one side, the other one is the agility. Things aren't remaining constant, they are constantly changing, and we talked about some of those forces earlier. All of this is changing. The landscape is changing the the needs in the economy and things like that, and how you adapt to those kind of models in the future and pivoted on data capabilities that lets you identify new opportunities and and create new value. >>Speaking of creating new value last question guys, before we wrap, what's the go to market approach here between the two companies working customers go to get engaged. I imagine both sides. >>Yeah. I mean, the way that partnership looks good to me is is sell with co selling. So So I think, you know, we look at developing joint solutions with emphasis. They've done a wonderful job of leading into our partnership. So, you know, Sue Neill and I have a regular cadence where we talked every quarter, and our sales teams and our partner teams are are all leaning in and co selling. I don't know if you >>have Absolutely, um, you know, we we proactively identify, you know, the opportunities for our customers. And we work together at all levels within, you know, between the two companies to be able to bring a cohesive solution and a proposition for the customers. Really help them understand how to, you know, what is it that they can, um, get to and how you get that journey actually executed. And it's a partnership that works very seamlessly through that entire process, not just upstream when we're selling, but also downstream and we're executing. And we've had tremendous success together and look forward to more. >>Congratulations on that success, guys. Thank you so much for coming on talking about new possibilities with data and AI and sharing some of the impact that the technologies are making. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Thank you So much >>for our guests and a Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live in Las Vegas from Snowflake Summit 22 back after the keynote with more breaking news. Mhm, mhm.