>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas: It's theCUBE covering AWS reInvent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. 45,000 people here at Amazon Web Services reInvent. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guests are Barry Russell, general manager and business development of Amazon Web Services marketplace, growing like a weed, and Chad Whalen, who is the global Vice President of Public Cloud for F5, guys, welcome back to theCUBE. Barry, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, just, you can kinda see it now. Clear as day, no more, I mean, Andy says, "We're okay to be misunderstood." That quote, okay, no one's gonna misunderstand the Marketplace. >> Barry: I think it's pretty clear. >> You get in there, and you make money. It's pretty straightforward. >> Barry: Reducing a bunch of friction for customers. >> What's the current pitch, I mean, because this sounds like an easy sell at this point, what's the real benefits? Because, more of services are coming in. You got composability. What's the current state of the Marketplace? >> Yeah, you know, I think it's a couple of things. Uh, it's about selection and customer choice, so we've really grown the catalog, in terms of number of listings that are available and now more than 4200 listings in the catalog, and we announced three key features that we launched on Tuesday: AWS private link which enables SAS products to be run in a VPC. We announced Private Image Build that allows enterprise customers to run their own hardened OS underneath an image, and then we announced Enterprise Contract to reduce friction in the procurement process between large enterprise customers and software vendors. >> Okay, so I gotta ask, the AWS question: What was the working backwards document on this? Was it a main request from the customers? What was the main driver for some of these features because it sounds like they want to be cloud native, but, yet, they still gotta get that migration over, or was it something else, what was the driver? >> The driver was customer feedback. We went out, and we interviewed hundreds of customers over the last 12 months before we started building some of these features, and, without a doubt, they told us they wanted broader selection, broader deployment options, and to reduce friction around the contracting process, and then we just started building, and, over the course of the last nine to 10 months, that's what we've delivered. >> Awesome, all right, F5, you guys are in the Marketplace. You're partnered with AWS. What's your relationship with AWS, how's that going? >> Oh, I would say our relationship with AWS is fantastic. I mean, they're obviously the innovator in the Cloud space. Public Cloud is a strategic imperative for F5. They're at the vanguard of really the innovation of what's taking place in Public Cloud, and Marketplace is that fantastic medium to reach market, and, so, we really have the premise around meeting our customers how and when they want to be met. Marketplace is an excellent vehicle for us to do that, and we've enjoyed a lot of success with launch. >> How has your customers' consumption changed with the Cloud 'cause I can only imagine that, as they look at the mix of how they're gonna consume technology, they want some Cloud. How did you guys hone in on AWS? What was the real factor there? Was is acquisition of the technology? Was it the performance, what was some of the key things? >> You know, I think it's all about really reducing the friction in the process, right? Our customers are moving to the Cloud to have real-time agility and velocity in their business. What we get out of Marketplace is a fantastic set of options from a commercial construct. This solved the customer requirements. If it's going to be at development, we do it on a utility by the hour. When you start to go into production, we can do it in a subscription or a BYOL, so it's really about what application is there permanence and what's the best outcome for the customer, and we have all of that in front of us in multi-year agreements or otherwise leverage in this vehicle. >> So they're tailoring the products, basically. >> Absolutely. >> It sounds like customers are looking at this tailored model, whatever their needs are. They don't wanna be forced into a. >> Correct. >> Certain use case, they can just kind of mix and match. >> Yup, absolutely. >> Yeah, Barry, you know, think networking security have been spaces that I've seen really exploding in this ecosystem over the last couple a years. It, building off of what John was say, I mean, how much of it is custom stuff? You know, things that they're coming, working with Amazon versus just, you know, oh, it's the everything store where I can go get pieces? >> Well, we work with each vendor that lists in the catalog. We have a SA team, Solution Architect team, to work with them on the optimal architecture, be that an omni-based, API-based, and SAS-based, and then we give that vendor and their product development teams the ability to price those products in utility consumption model metered, for example, on the amount of data or band-width consumed, multi-year contracts that are publicly priced or negotiated behind the scenes. So, both in the innovation and the engineering and how the customer actually deploys the product, we innovate on pricing and consumption models to match those deployment options, and we give vendors, all vendors, that enter the catalog, whether they're open-source or commercial products, like F5, the option to use all of those features. >> Yeah, Chad, I think back to, you know, there was the wave of like software, you know, happening kind of networking and secured and everything, but, you know, you've always been in kind of the application delivery portion of this. How is Cloud accelerating your customers' journey and impacting how fast you need to change inside at F5? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think that because Public Cloud is such a fantastic vehicle for our customers it was really customers-focused, right? So, when you work back from what the customer wants both in terms of how you orchestrate, how you automate, and then with the commercial construct is then they can use it in a best-fit application, and that's really the grounding point for us, and, when we get friction, any time you have a new medium there's going to be friction points and learning points. We've worked in concert with AWS, Marketplace in particular, about solving these ways, whether it's in private offers or custom negotiated offers specifically for customers to meet their needs from an economic and a delivery standpoint. >> I gotta ask the question 'cause it always pops into my head, especially at this reInvent, the pace of services being released, Lambda, Serverless, you can just see it coming. It's going to put more pressure under the hood for automation, that heavy lifting that's Dev Ops, as we know, right, so no new news there. The question is what does it mean for the Marketplace 'cause now you're gonna be under a lot of pressure to integrate a lot of these plumbing and or, abstracted away dev ops-like tools that developers don't wanna provision, so you have the automate so that seems like a challenge. How are you guys dealing with that? How do you make Lambda sing? How do you guys make this thing go smoother? >> Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, one of the challenges that you get in, when you get into what I would say Cloud Sprawl, within an organization, is how do you maintain the governance and compliance of those workloads? And so we're really lookin' at it from that basis. We want to give as much flexibility into the model while still maintaining what was designed from the beginning, and so our customers wanna use the rules. They wanna have that portability into Public Cloud so they have the assurance. The underlying technologies are just the delivery vehicles, whether it's containers or Lambda or whatever in a server-less architecture, we're focused really on making sure that we have that ubiquity of posture across the asset wherever that asset is. >> Jeff: Makes your sources work together properly. >> Absolutely. >> Barry, what's the trends that you're seeing in the Marketplace? I mean, obviously, there's a lot of growth. Lot of data, and one of the things that I love about this reInvent is they're servicing this new playbook of, hey, use the data, your own data. We saw a new relic had a great report, Sumo Logic kind of report, that basically anonymizes the data, but they're using real data and Verner will talk about this at the keynote. What data can you share about the Marketplace that shows some trends that indicates or allows us to read the tea leaves of what's gonna happen next? >> Well, I think the customer growth stat that we shared, in terms of active monthly customers, we've gone from a hundred active monthly customers we announced last reInvent last year when we were here to now 160,000 active customers using the Marketplace, so we see steady growth. We see growth and adoption from the enterprise, and customers like Shell and Thomson Reuters, that we announced were part of Enterprise contracts on Tuesday, really beginning to think about using the Marketplace to go from traditional procurement moving to digital procurement model allows their IT organizations' dev ops teams to move much fast when pairing with services like a Kinesis, like an S3, like a Red Shift, when they're matching third party software with an AWS-native service. >> Jeff: Are you happy with things right now? Pretty much looking pretty good! >> I'm happy. >> Jeff: Middle of the fairway. >> I think it's been a fantastic show! (laughing) >> I'm happy, F5 has been a great partner of ours in the Marketplace, I'm a happy camper. >> Jeff: What's next? >> What's next? I think what's next for us next year is continuing to grow the Enterprise contract that we deployed, so we started with a small set of customers and vendors that participated to help us arrive at that contract that they both could use, and, I think that over the course of the next 12 months, we really need to think about the types of customers and vendors that enter that program. >> All right, Barry Russell and Chad Whalen with F5. Barry will be back on our next segment with another partner. A lot of partner goodness here. Amazon's ecosystem's exploding, and there's a lot of value to be had by all. That's theCUBE bringing you some content value on our third day live coverage. 45,000 people here this year at Amazon Webster's reInvent. More after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. (techno music)