(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) (electronic whooshing) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Washington, DC, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. This is the reinvent for the global public sector. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman is here as well, he'll be coming out. Our next guest is Jeff Valentine, who is the Chief Product Officer at Cloudchecker, a really hot, growing company, innovating with the cloud around security and data management, all kinds of great stuff around compliance. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So we've been following you guys, you guys are at all the reinvents and summits with huge booths, you guys are growing like crazy. You guys cracked the code on using the cloud's scale and really delivering great value properties. And before we get into some of the public sector news and also new things for you guys, what's the core business for Cloudchecker and how are you different, and why are you guys winning? >> Yeah, no that's a great question. You know, businesses that are moving to the cloud have this huge problem, once you get to the cloud, it's probably more expensive than you thought, it's probably less secure than you thought, and you really don't know how to run it like you used to run your own data center. So we solve those problems, that's what a CMP does, a cloud Management Platform. Our system controls costs for government, it actually helps you to hit your budget, for security, we're monitoring continuously for all these weird things that might happen. And, of course, we're making a new announcement today, around compliance. >> Yeah, I mean, the phenomenon that we've seen, this is a pattern, including us, we're on Amazon, we started using it. You don't really know what happened 'til you look at your bill. (laughs) Once you go, oh damn, that's kind of elementary. But as it gets more complicated, new services are coming out, Amazon announces at every reinvent a zillion services. So you got Redshift, you got Stagement, all this new stuff's going on, you got to really manage that in like, a portfolio, you guys do that. >> We do. >> Now, how does that translate to the public sector? 'Cause some companies actually can't translate, and that's something that we looked at for who's successful. If a company can be good in commercial enterprise and also move to the public sector, they've got something going on that's right. The one's that can't, don't. And you guys are doing it, what's the unique public sector pivot or linkage or linchpin for you guys? >> That's a great question, you know, public sector, to us, is a large enterprise and we go to that market the same way we go to other large enterprises, we go through our partners. Sometimes agencies will come to us directly, that's great when they do. Oftentimes they need help from some of our partners around the show floor today. They're going to go to them for the people power and they'll come to Cloudchecker for the software or the automation. >> Jeff, when you said earlier that sometimes you go to the cloud, you're all excited to get in, and then you find out, maybe it's less secure than you thought. Where are the gaps? Help us square the circle, because you hear from, you know, the large cloud providers, cloud's more secure. People like myself actually believe it's probably more secure than what I can do as a small business, but where are the gaps that you're filling? >> Yeah, so here's the issue. It is inherently secure when it's used that way. Now, you've got 3500 developers that are writing code for various agencies, and if one of them forgets to close off a certain setting on, maybe an S3 bucket for Amazon, all of a sudden, somebody can get to that data. Our system is there to be a backstop, so we're automatically checking and alerting when there's a problem like that. >> So you automate that entire process. >> We automate that, we look at the whole thing every second. >> Awesome. >> Tell me about the customers' challenges, migrating to the cloud. How would you summarize the challenges that an agency or a group within the public sector migration challenges? What are the key things that goes through the customer that you guys can talk to directly? >> Sure, I mean, there's really three categories again. On the cost side, they have a budget to hit, and you really can't be over by a penny. It has to be matched up to the penny every single time. So we help them to do that, spend exactly what you're supposed to spend, not a penny more. The next problem they run into, of course, is the security. You need to be able to prove that you're secure, not just think you're secure, but know you're secure all the time. Our software's there to automate it. And then they have to actually prove through an audit process that they're compliant with various federal standards, like NIST 800-53 and others. They have to be compliant in that environment, as well, our software can automate that compliance. >> Tell me about the hard news you guys had. You had a press release that had gone out this morning, you guys had got some news, share the breaking news here on theCUBE. >> Sure, yeah. For years we've always been a security product and a cost product. The third leg of that stool is now total compliance. That total compliance module is free for all our customers, is free for all our current and future customers. But it automatically checks against 37 different compliance standards. So, HIPAA, PCI, all the NIST standards, et cetera, we're giving you a score card and a dashboard, how you're doing, and let's you remediate those problems when you see them. >> And what's the impact of the customer base? >> Well, they literally can't pass their security audits unless they do a lot of work today, to prove that they're in compliance with these standards. Our software now saves them the time to do that. >> So the trend is automation in this. >> It is. >> What's the secret sauce on the product side? Can you share a little bit of the Cloudchecker magic? >> Sure, let me try to describe it this way, Amazon's price list, which is complicated to understand, because there's 100,000 items on it, changes all the time. Nobody really gets that. They add new products, little variations, little instant sizes, little restrictions, little price changes, (chuckles) for every different type of way you can buy it, whether it's a reserved instance or not. And being able then, to unblend those to all your different customers, if you're a service provider and selling it again, you have to go share those costs. And, by the way, you then need to calculate your own margin on top of that. That manipulation of 100,000 things every second, we actually generate terabytes of data per month from each one of our customers and we store it for seven years. That volume, it's a really big data problem, that's our secret sauce, yeah. >> So, talk a little bit about the architecture of your products, 'cause when I think about security, you know, cost management, asset management, governance, even just within those categories, oftentimes, there's like a zillion point products. >> Yeah. >> It sounds like your philosophy is to have a, sort of an all-in-one. Maybe talk about some of the challenges of developing that product and how you're approaching it architecturally? >> Yeah, it starts with being deep on everything that we do. Our cost only product, if you just look at cost, hundreds of functions and reports, very complex product. Take that same level of complexity to security, we have 550 best practice checks, not 10 or 20, Amazon has 80, we have 550. (laughs) Take that now to compliance, not just a few standards, 37 different standards that we automatically monitor for. You have to have the depth in each one of those to be able to do any of them. >> And the depth comes from, obviously you've got to have some domain expertise, but then you've got codify that. >> We do, yeah, I mean, honestly, we started in 2011, so it's a maturity. You can't do it if you just started six months ago, (laughs) you have to build up. >> And how do you charge for the product? >> Our customers pay us on a percentage basis of what it costs them to run in the cloud. So if they're paying Amazon $10, they'll pay us a percentage of $10 to manage that. >> And that will vary by how many functions they turn on? Or, like for instance, the announcements that you had today, do I have to pay more for that or is that included in the cost? Maybe explain that. >> No, it's all included. Our philosophy has been, we don't want to nickel and dime our customers, they expect great value from our product. I have to keep adding value every day to keep them excited, so I'm going to continue to develop that product. It's never done, it's an ongoing process and we're going to keep adding free features to the product. >> So you have a solution, basically they win, you win. >> That's right, we get a percentage of all of cloud. I mean, Gartner says cloud's growing at 40%, yeah, we're growing it much faster, because our partners are growing and they're getting new customers that are growing and you get this compounding effect. >> Dave and I was talking about software economics, and then you add to that the cloud, it's amazing. Alright, I want to get into one last area before you go. You guys are an advanced technology partner of AWS. What does that mean? Obviously you bring a lot to the table with the product, you went into detail on that. What is being an advanced technology partner mean for agencies and potentially customers that are looking to work with you guys? >> Sure, now, being a technology partner of Amazon means that we have security and governments competencies, so we're experts in what we do. It means that we have staff that is certified on Amazon, we have top-secret clearance staff, we have partnerships with top-secret cleared agencies that work with us. Our software uniquely runs, not only in commercial, it runs on GovCloud and it runs on the IC region, the secret region, Amazon calls it, that's completely air-gapped from the rest of the world. That C2S marketplace is something that we do get a lot of business from. It's funny, Amazon can't tell us who the customer is, like, we get anonymized data, but they're using us. (laughter) We get the checks in the mail. >> You're doing the Cloudchecker thing. >> We're doing the Cloudchecker. But it's part of our business model to be able to serve, by being experts at Amazon. >> Last question, if I may, you know, the big talk about multi-cloud and, you know, different types of cloud. What are you seeing as the trend there and how does Cloudchecker, you know, help customers? >> Sure, I think today there's a competition amongst the cloud providers for the same workloads. I don't think that's going to be there in the future, I think cloud providers are going to specialize in certain areas. You're going to have some generalists that can do everything, like Amazon, I think there are going to be some that are better suited to working only in certain regions or only with certain functions. If you just wanted to do realtime video processing for theCUBE, there's other ways that you might look at doing that. In the future, a combination of best of breed for multi-cloud providers, needs a central management platform, and that's where we're enacting into it. >> That's an interesting dynamic, I totally like that approach on that observation. But also, I want to ask you, with respect to partnering, 'cause if you believe that to be true, which I think it's true, more providers are going to come into the space specialized, but also, they're going to look like service providers and professional services. We saw REAN Cloud being very successful, although they got cut back on that contract on the DOD, a new kind of system integratives are emerging. >> That's right. >> How do you talk about that, and what is happening with that model? 'Cause you can automate it. >> We can. >> And it kind of takes away the labor piece. How is the SI market changing? >> No, that's a good question. Most of the SIs with Amazon are our customers, so they all use our software. They'll put there logo on it, but they end up, you know, using our software to help them complete projects. When you end up competing for a project amongst other SIs, they're all competing for the same business, right? So, when you can go in with an automation solution that cuts your costs and maintains your margin, you're going to win that business more often. So they need to bring in automation to be competitive against the others that are doing it. >> And also speed of deployment's another factor, scale. >> I think that's right. >> How is that changing the game? >> No, it's totally true. We're going from, you know, state of local workloads to federal workloads and this JEDI program. You're going to start to see massive movements from data centers to the cloud. That's going to take time, but it requires both people and technology, we're the technology piece of that. >> It's not going to be years, it's going to be weeks. >> (laughs) That's true. >> Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cloudchecker, check them out, great company, advanced technology partner with Amazon Web Services. Here on theCUBE, talking about public sector, this is theCUBE, here in Washington, DC, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more live coverage, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our exclusive Cube Coverage here in San Francisco, California for Amazon Web Services AWS Summit 2018. We are all day covering the regional event for Amazon Web Services. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest is Steve Hall, vice president of partnerships at a company called, CloudCheckr. Cloud check with an r dot com. Companies we see in the ecosystem doing great stuff really capturing the growth of the cloud. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I got to ask you, so you guys are like Switzerland, you guys are involved in a lot of the stuff. Before I go into some of the pointed questions, we'll have to get your thoughts on the cloud, but take a minute first to explain what CloudCheckr does, your core business, and why are you calling yourself "Switzerland". Is it like you play nice with all the clouds? Is that where all the cryptocurrency is going to go? I mean give us a straight scoop. >> Sure you bet, so CloudCheckr is a cloud management platform, right, that helps organizations get visibility in control across their public cloud estate. So, you know the challenges that we're seeing really typically fall into two categories. It's "I thought it was going to save me money when going to the cloud" and "I thought that my data was going to be less secure going into the cloud". CloudCheckr helps solve both those problems by helping you reduce costs, eliminate waste, all that good stuff, as well as, identify your attack surface and make sure that its protected. >> John: Is it SaaS offering or is it more... >> SaaS offering, born in the cloud for the cloud. We focus as you said, Switzerland, we really focus on sort of a management layer that sits across a multi-cloud environment where you're not just looking at Amazon and AWSs, but also the Azures and GCPs of the world to make sure that you have kind of that unified single pane of glass that everyone kind of wishes for but they don't necessarily know how to get. >> Yeah and I get the joke on Switzerland with the cryptocurrency. There's legit people are going to Switzerland but metaphorically you guys are, you're independent you want to play with all clouds cause you got to look at the holistic picture. What's the critical thing that you're seeing right now? We had a guest on earlier talking about you leave the lights on so to speak. You know the EC2 is running a lot of inefficiencies. You got security. Are you guys kind of like a dashboard, single pane of management glass in there? Is it other services? What specifically are you guys focused on right now? Obviously the growth of the cloud is what it is. You guys, that's a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah I mean. >> The key thing that you do? >> So I mean I think the biggest thing that we see driving our business right is the economics around the cloud. Everyone's moving, the workloads are you know obviously whether they're in the early days or kind of more mature, everyone thinks that by moving to the cloud they're going to save money. And there's data out there to suggest that there's upwards of 30 to 40 percent wastage happening inside of the cloud environments today just because people, using that analogy, leave light switches on, and they didn't even realize that they, they didn't know how to find them, right. So where we see a lot of pain, right, is what do I do, right? Where do I start? And so partnering with not only the native tools that Amazon brings to bear, you know trusted advisor and specter, all the other cool tools... >> So is a new term being developed called cloud sprawl? Stu we talked about server sprawl. I mean you've got Lambda now. I mean is it cloud sprawl? Is that an issue? >> Oh there's so surely. And cloud spend sprawl, right. You know it's this shadow IT thing that goes on. Somebody told me a story of the CMO at Bank of America got a phone call a couple of years ago from the CEO after a Superbowl ad that ran and said what is this thing that you're doing? And she said oh we just turned it on in the cloud. And he's like did you talk to IT? Did you have anybody do it? And she's like why would I do that? Why would I even bother? I can just go do it myself. So how do I get my arms around that. Right obviously is somewhat of an opportunity but also challenge. >> Steve you talk about getting your arms around something. When we talk to customers, you know IT is heterogeneous. >> Steve: Right. >> So you know yes public cloud and people are growing and using more Amazon, but there's other clouds, there's by service providers, and oh yeah I've still probably got some data centers because you know there's 35 years after you stopped building those a few years back for you to do that. How do you help them get around there? And I'd love to hear how are you seeing Amazon maturing and working in some of those environments. It used to be Amazon is all in public cloud only. Then it was oh there's the VMWare stuff, there's the RedHat stuff. Oh hey they're starting to work with service providers even. What are you seeing and how are you involved in that? >> Yeah you bet. I mean again I think you touch on again probably the biggest problem which is visibility, right? And transparency. And how do I create accountability around all of that because there's new roles that are emerging inside of these organizations to try to do things with this cloud stuff as well as a lot of questions are being asked. They don't even know how to answer them. And so you know where Amazon I think is really maturing, we'll start there, right is not only providing a lot of just the native tooling, it's somewhat kind of yes Amazon focused but focused really on kind of providing that, that visibility that they need. Where I think CloudCheckr really kind of steps in is sort of a little bit deeper level view of what they have as well as how do you cross-pollinate that with the other environments. Whether it's a hybrid environment or another cloud provider that you want to again kind of bring into one singular view. That's really how we try to help. And then I think that the other piece that you touched on, which is there's this whole managed service provider and reseller community that's really quite mature in fact within the AWS ecosystem. Which I think is one of the things that AWS really kind of differentiates itself with by empowering partners to be able to build a practice around AWS. Because again another challenge that we see is cloud is great, but I don't have the people to do it. Or I don't know what the people that I do have don't know what to do and so having a trusted like a managed service provider to turn to to go do that stuff is like a blessing. >> What sort of areas, where can that local managed service provider, where can they help? You know is it just cause they have localized people? But what services od they have, is it just enabling people to get up into the cloud? Or are there things that they're doing between you know the service provider and Amazon with direct connect and the like? >> Well I think that so the first thing honestly ends up becomes billing truthfully. And that sounds so boring in many respects, but okay I get a bill, but the billing is really... >> Stu: Yeah the CFO doesn't think it's boring. >> But they don't. As well as you get the bill, how do I make sense of it right? And so you know clients are looking for managed service providers to sort of make sense of all of this cost data and usage data and give them sort of the view of who's using what and how much should we spend right? Because money talks. And so that is driving a different conversation for managed service providers. So building, we're seeing a lot of our partners working up new practices around cost optimization and how to build an entire, not only just billing portal, but a practice on top of that to help optimize the environment for... >> Well there's such a huge opportunity there. I've talked to customers that were like I dedicated engineer to do financial engineering rather than architecting. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So there's an opportunity when you see that it's like oh wait, do you want a head count of a highly trained engineer? >> Right. >> Or you know is there, that's what the partner can help with right? >> Yeah and there's a couple of different ways that they can do it too. We see partners, some that are hiring the smart guy in the room, putting him in a back room and doing the analytics and analysis around that data. Others are literally just creating white labeled portals and putting it in front of their customers. So there's lots of different ways that AWS makes it easy for a partner to build new products and actually turn their seven percent margins into 20 percent margins by building more services and solutions around the AWS infrastructure. >> Steve I want to get your industry expertise on something. You're the vice president of partnerships and you know we always talk on theCUBE, Stu, myself, Dave Vellante, Jeff, Rick, and the team around what it's like to compete in a modern era. And we commented on Amazon's competitive strategy. For the first time they've got to actually deal with heavy dose of competition. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And no one's going to give up the market share. They've got to fight tooth and nail. You deal with all the cloud providers. But people are learning there's a new kind of partnership. If everything's API based you've got SAASified, platform as a service kind of going away to infrastructure as a service. You have this cloud fabric, global reach with regions, all kinds of new moving parts. How is it changing partnerships? How do, how should people who are in trying to partner with the big clouds. >> Steve: Yep. >> Is there a posture, is there an approach, is there a playbook that you see that's different than the old way? The old was you know, press the pavement, press the palms together, you get dinner, you get coffee, whenever you do a deal, longer time horizon. Now it's you've got to have services, you got the data, whole different landscape. What's your thoughts on the partner equation. How should people partner, what's the playbook? >> And I'll speak on for CloudCheckr's perspective. So we've been going to REInvent and these summits for the last five, six years, right. So I remember when this was 500 people in a room, right. You know and there's 10 vendors exhibiting. And here you have 7,000 plus people now that are, you know where you have lots of vendors that you're very familiar with, right. That are large scale kind of like global vendors. So definitely the competitive landscape has changed and it's partly just like you said, the opportunity, right. This is a... I heard somebody say it's probably market cap of a a trillion dollars in public cloud right at the end of the day. So everyone sees the opportunity but how do you actually make good use of it as a partner to the cloud providers? First of all you solve a real problem. Right? There's a lot of... I tend to see a lot people that are just cloud dipping their solutions and kind of coming to market around things because they want a piece of the pie. But if you really focus yourself on how do I solve some of the most pressing needs. And that's where again we see, you know, our product helping customers around cost and security but even our partners. >> So the ecosystem is the key. You've got to be part of a ecosystem. Is that the criteria? >> You got to play, well yeah, it's not just go to coffee and have drinks. Right you know what I mean. It's connect with the people inside of your community. Whether it's at these events or whether it's in your local AWS offices or in the smaller sort of settings to say what are your customers asking for right? And how can we help you with that? I mean it's pretty obvious stuff. >> So Steve, you mentioned security a few times. You know if you go back a few years it was like oh I'm going to be less secure if I go to cloud. Now most people realize it's an opportunity for me to readdress security. >> Yeah. >> And chances are security's better because when's the last time I really updated all my security. >> Yeah. >> What are the hot buttons? What are you seeing? What's Amazon doing well? What does the industry as a whole need to do better? >> Absolutely well I mean you touched on it. Security used to be the reason not to go and now it is the reason to go. And I think companies realize oh my God they've got hundreds of security engineers. We have two. So I think that their infrastructure's probably more secure. What we're seeing as the hot press buttons. I mean I think the last 18 months, 12 months have been all about S3 buckets, right. You know and all of this data that's been exposed sitting out there on the internet. And I think AWS did a fabulous job of changing some of the configurations to allow customers not to stab themselves in the foot. But I think that a lot of it ends up being human error, right. You know really it's the human element inside of security that continues to plague the industry. And the cloud only makes it harder because now you don't have IT people doing IT. You've got business people doing IT, right. Back to the Bank of America example. So, sorry Bank of America. So my point is yeah I think that you know it's really back to how do we create solutions that non-IT people can use and make sense of it so that we can put common sense good controls in place. >> Business models are critical nailing the business model's critical. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Alright Steve final question for you. I want to kind of just put you on the spot a little bit here. You guys are trying to solve a real big need in the market place. Becoming a trusted source for cloud optimization, cloud costs, I mean it's going to impact obviously financial workflows and rolling the data up so a lot of moving parts at AWS and other clouds. >> Yeah. >> So are you guys using machine learning and AI because if Werner Vogels says hey look at all the magic that can happen in the cloud, how are you guys using all these data points? How are you rolling them up? Can you share >> Yeah. >> the philosophy, the tech. >> Yeah. >> Are you guys cutting edge? Are you on the front bleeding edge? What... >> Absolutely. >> Are you guys eating your own job food? I mean I'm obviously putting you on the spot there. >> Yeah, no no that's fine. I mean so we are absolutely using machine learning and artificial intelligence on the back end. Using AWS technology in fact to empower a lot of that inside of the project or platform. And it is all about taking all of these disparate data sources, I called them machine exhaust, of the cloud right that's kind of coming out. How do I put good sense to that? And CloudCheckr really is that layer above all of that whether it's your cloud trail logs or your cloud watch metrics or your cloud usage report, putting it all into one place and then doing machine learning and predictive analytics around that. That's exactly what CloudCheckr's all about. >> So it's an interpretation challenge, right. >> Right, right I mean, go ahead. >> Yeah so Steve it's just we talked about kind of the heterogeneous nature and you brought up a term a service area. >> Steve: Yeah. >> When we start adding in things like IOT, service area's going to grow exponentially and the heterogeneous nature >> Yes. is just going to go up you know. >> Steve: Yeah. >> The same. Is CloudCheckr going to help there? Is that something your customers are ready for? >> I think they're already there right. So I mean I think a lot of our customers, like the use cases that we see are either big data analytics or IOT or you know some other use case around why they're using public cloud to begin with. And so really it's about as that expansion increased usage occurs, how do I protect that attack surface? How do I look for known good state information and then lock my doors and windows if you will? As well as how do I make sure that I'm using the right resources in the right way? So that again I have that visibility and transparency and then you can have the right controls and automation around it to do something about it. >> Steve thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Check out CloudCheckr. >> Thanks. >> Again this is one of those things as you use the cloud there's going to be more bells and whistles, more services to watch and instrument. Obviously cost containment and managing the growth is certainly going to be something to watch using the data and managing that's what CloudCheckr does. Of course theCUBE is bringing all the data here at the trusted source for all the action at AWS Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Manhattan, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit New York City 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> John Walls: Welcome back here at the Javits Center. We're in midtown, New York, with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage here all day, livestreaming from AWS Summit. Thanks for being with us here. Aaron Newman now joins us, he's the co-founder and CEO of CrowdCheckr, and... CloudCheckr rather, and Aaron, the first employee of the company, period, to be on theCUBE, so you're really breaking out in a big way today. >> Yeah, thanks for having us here, and we're excited to be a part of this. >> I see your tag, first I thought it was "I love AWS," and then I saw it closer, "I CloudChecked AWS." >> Absolutely, but also we love AWS. So it works either way. >> So, CloudCheckr, first off tell us a little bit about you, and then how did you get here? >> Okay so, CloudCheckr is a software company. I am the CEO and one of the founders of it. Been around about six years. We build software to help enable, um, enable you to move workloads into the cloud and then manage them successfully. So there's lots of challenges as you move, and how you're going to deal with those is a little different than you did in your data center, so it's important you have the right tools, and processes, and people in place, to manage that move. >> So is the game changing any in that respect? Has it changed any in the last year or two? Is it just that you've got more options now? >> Well, I mean absolutely, this is the disruption for our generation, right? This idea of moving from the data center into the cloud is that disruption. Previously, it was the internet was the big disruption. The cloud is really this generation's disruption, and it's really a matter of how quickly are people moving workloads. Every year AWS gets more mature, they offer more services and more regions, you know, more robust service, so it's just a case of how quickly can people move workloads over. If you go back to a couple years, people thought this was for test workloads, dev workloads. It's just not the case. It's for production workloads, and the people who are taking advantage of it have a competitive advantage today. >> This is a real complex space, so last year at re:Invent I believe, Amazon gave a presentation, they were like, the eight R's to get from where you were to where you want to be. There's lift-and-shift was replatform, there was refactoring, you know, to completely building from scratch, to kind of just trying to move the whole piece. What are you seeing from customers, I'm sure it's a lot of everything, but what are kind of some of the main challenges, what's really slowing things down, and what is changing over the last couple of years? >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean change never comes fast enough, and we'd all love to be able to rewrite all our apps to work in the cloud the way that it was meant to, and that's the right and the best way to do it, you're just going to get way more return in terms of cost and security, and all the other great things that come out of the cloud, but the fact is most people are still lifting and shifting, right? They're taking their apps the way that it ran at the data center, moving into the cloud. And so you see some advantages, but you just clearly don't see the real 10x advantages. So most people are doing that, and it's just that it's expensive. New workloads, as they go in, are architected with this cloud in mind, and that's really powerful, and that's great, but it's going to take time, and it's not going to take five years, it's not going to take ten years, it's going to take 20, 30, 40 years to really get rid of all this old architecture, and convert it over. The same way nobody's putting anything on a mainframe today, but there's a whole lot of the world that's still run by mainframes, right? But you would never put a new app on a mainframe. >> Yeah, if you look at refresh cycles, you know, your server, your network takes a certain amount of time, it's your applications that's a huge amount of time, and the problem we had is, I think back and most of your applications, they kind of suck, and your users of those applications would love for you to update them. So the migration costs are so high, how do we get over that hump? >> Well, it is just going to take time for the refresh cycles, but even more important, I think we need to start looking at going back to the universities. Are universities teaching the right architectures for how to build this stuff? And I can go for hours and hours on some of the minute details, but the idea was, I used to have an application, I'd buy 20 servers, and that's what I ran it on. Now it's like, I build an application, and I don't know where it's really going to sit, it's going to sit on a server somewhere, and that server may use it for minutes or hours, and then it may be on a different server, and all of a sudden you have to think about, how am I going to architect, how am I going to write the code, how am I going to deploy that code? All that stuff is a little different than when you had 20 servers. How am I going to patch it for security holes? So we need to be educating people about that. We need to show them how to do that, back to universities, continuing education programs, all of that, needs to get brought up to date. >> A couple years ago, it seemed like security was the thing that would stop a lot of people, to say, "I'm not ready to go into it." We were talking to one of the Amazon spokespeople about security, and it seems that it's almost a driver now, because I know I need to stay up to date, I need to manage my security much closer, and in many ways, if you're running on Amazon, if you're running on Azure, if you're running on a public hub, they're going to manage some of the patching and testing and everything. So what are you seeing in kind of the security landscape? Is it an opportunity, is it still a challenge? Is it still some of both? >> I think you're absolutely right, security was the biggest fear factor that people were like, and I'm from Rochester, New York, and there are some more older, old-school technology companies there that, their attitude was, "We're not going to go to the cloud, because we don't know where the data sits," and there's a lot of server huggers, that if I can't see the server, it's not secure, and that's just not the case. Let me start with, Amazon has way better security people than you could hire, right? They just have a scale, caliber, programs, all of that that's so much better than anyone else. And you know what, if you had any question about it, the day the head of technology, the CIO for the CIA, stood on stage at an Amazon conference, and said we are going to the cloud, it's like if you think your security needs to be higher than the CIA's, you're wrong. So, it absolutely does, if you do things in the cloud properly, it can be 10 times more secure than what you're in your own data center, right? But you need to do things like think about, how am I doing deployment, so I can get out patches, right? What's the big problem with security in the data center is I have a patch, it hits, and it's going to take me a year to get that out to my 10,000 servers. In the cloud, if I've done things where I have this idea of no-patching strategies, and redeploying instantaneously, then you could fix a patch in a day, right? And all of a sudden it can create a much more secure world, where we don't have these ransomware problems. You don't have all these worms and such causing havoc. >> Go ahead, John. >> You touched on something just a few minutes ago, and you're talking about 20, 30, 40 years, right, catching up, and legacy systems, and people who can leapfrog, and I'm thinking, that's like this perpetual cycle of never catching up, because the technology innovates so quickly, and things are moving so fast. So somebody that might feel like they're really behind? How do they ever just relax and get there if they feel like they really can't catch up? >> Well, so I guess I'll start by saying that people in this room are on the leading edge, and I like to say if you're not bleeding, you're not leading, right? If you're on that leading edge, you're going to have more challenges, you're not going to be able to relax and take it easy. The question is, you know, do you want to be a firm that's trying to take advantage of every competitive edge they can, trying to drive a little bit more, then you're not going to be relaxed. That's just the state of technology today is, it is a marathon, it's not a sprint. But that means you have to find a pace that's appropriate for you, and if you're a brand new software company, like CloudCheckr, I've never bought a server, I built everything in the cloud day-one, so I never have the old legacy architecture. That makes my life much easier. If I am the postal service, it's going to take me a long time to get off the system, and that's just the fact of life, you know. You don't have to throw away your old apps, they'll be around for a long time, but be proactive about saying, "I'm going to build something new," do it the right way so you don't have to wait for a refresh cycle for that. >> Walls: Right, gotcha. >> I mean think about, on the mainframe, remember some of the problems with getting apps off the mainframe was? Nobody had the source code anymore. You couldn't fix Y2K bugs, because you didn't have source code, so you couldn't redeploy it, because they wrote code, and the person that wrote it retired 15 years ago, and now what do I do? I'm stuck. So we're going to be in that same scenario for a long time. >> The other place where you're involved is, once we'd actually got in the cloud, how do we make sure my expenses don't just run away? So you know, maybe talk to us a little bit about that. Amazon's always an interesting one. I was talking in our intro this morning, early in this year, I was talking to a lot of SMB customers that were just like, Google's really attractive, and Amazon doesn't seem to be listening to us, and a week after the Google conference, Amazon changed their pricing, to be able to really match what Google's doing. So what are the some of the biggest challenges in pricing, how are you helping customers, where are some of the pitfalls that they're seeing? >> I mean, absolutely, AWS is the smartest people out there, they know when they need to change and pivot, and somehow they're a billion dollar company that can still pivot, which is a miracle. I don't know how they do it, but they are amazing at that. But let me start by giving you a little of the analogy of, think back to in the 1850's when you had power plants. Everybody built their own power plant, right? And it would cost a million dollars to build a power plant, and then most of your power would be free, right? And then they decided, let's build power plants, I'll spend 50 million dollars to build it, and then everyone will use that, right? We're in the same place now, 150 years later, but it's just different, it's technology. Instead of building a data center and spending millions of dollars on it, instead Amazon has built a data center that's designed for everybody to use, and it's so much more efficient to do that, just like, God, who would build their own power plant anymore? That's the analogy. But think about the other side of it, though, is now if I'm getting my power from a power plant, well I got to start putting in a meter, and understanding turning off the lights at night, and I got to put windows in to keep the heat in the house, and put insulation, right? So we're in the same situation. Yes, Amazon is cheaper, except if you turn all of your servers on, you leave them on, and you don't meter it, you don't understand it, you don't try to put insulation in. So you got to do those things in the cloud. It was easy before, because I just paid for the servers and I was done. Now it's complicated, but it's complicated because you're going to save a lot of money if you do it right. But you know, I love to make that analogy of the physical world, we're no different. You got to actually do things to get your build out. >> Are you starting to see many customers looking at Lambda, because that's something, at least many customers we've talked to, significantly reduced the cost of your infrastructure, because it's not just, I'm choosing when to use it, but only when the function calls it. >> So I think, AWS, you can effectively drive your cost to zero by using the cloud, and by effectively, it never gets to zero, but you can really keep driving it down the more work you put into it. But there's a balance, right? If you put too much work, you offset the savings you're going to have, right? So you go to the cloud, and you start doing work, more work to reduce costs by rightsizing, turning things off, and then you say, let me go to Lambda, because that's even cheaper, but today Lambda still, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, it's still very much the bleeding edge. So, if you can do it, if you have a fresh application, the expertise to do it, it's a great place to go, and I think in 20 years, everybody's going to be doing everything serverless, all new stuff. We're very early though, right now. We're still inventing this stuff, we're still figuring it out, we're still trying to understand how do I structure an entire application using this serverless architecture? It's trickier than doing it, when you go out there and you try to find 20 programmers to run a project, to get ones that know how to build serverless is very hard, so that's the real challenge. It's not the technology challenge, it's the people, where am I going to find the resources, how much is it going to cost me, all of that. >> I'm still thinking about the power plant. I'm still back in 1850 right now. (laughs) Thanks for being with us. >> You're welcome. >> I appreciate the time here on theCUBE, and best of luck down the road, and glad to see that you are cloudchecking with AWS. >> Check your cloud before you wreck your cloud, right? >> There you go, alright. Aaron Newman, CloudCheckr. Continuing our coverage, we are just a moment here from AWS Summit 2017, we are live at the Javits Center, in New York City. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. We are doing one of the most important industry events, hybrid events this year with Amazon and its massive ecosystem of partners, some of which are joining me next. We've got two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program, I'm going to be talking about the next decade in Cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back Anthony Lye to the program, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. Anthony good to see you. >> Nice to see you again thanks for... >> Nice to see you in person. >> I know... >> It's been a couple of years. And Amiram Shachar is here, the VP and GM of Spot by NetApp, Amiram it's great to have you on the program, welcome. >> Likewise, thank you. >> So the acquisition, the Spot acquisition was during the pandemic mid 2020, Amiram talk to me about that why NetApp, how's it going? Give us the lay of the land. >> I think that's the, it's one of the greatest things that NetApp has done, and I think it's one of the most amazing outcomes we could have as a company. And if you think about it in a first sight, when you look at storage company and compute company, what's the connection? But the thing is that NetApp is a company that is going through a huge transformation into Cloud. And by doing this acquisition, it's really like signaling where it's going. It's going way beyond, and honestly I just wanted to be part of it. >> And what's the customer sentiment been the 18 months or so, post acquisition? >> I think NetApp has done specifically with Anthony leading that acquisition, NetApp has done a phenomenal job of keeping Spot as a business unit, independent business unit. So our customers didn't really feel that something had happened, like the only thing we told them is we're going to have more funding, so. >> I'm sure they like that. Anthony talk to us about NetApp's transformation, transition, Spot as part of that. And then of course, CloudCheckr which acquisition was just announced I believe yesterday? >> We closed on actually November 7th. >> Lisa: Okay. >> So it's almost been a month now since we closed, but I've been at NetApp my gosh, it'll be five years in February. And you know, I think that the company had a real desire to sort of, to re-imagine itself and to sort of to embrace the public Clouds and to give its customers you know, what I think it's done incredibly well is this idea of symmetry. That we wanted to build something on Amazon that was as good or maybe a little bit better than on-premise. And customers really I think appreciated, they appreciate that sort of, that desire for us to do those kinds of things. Now of course, CloudCheckr was my ninth acquisition in four years. Just to sort of, to build on what Amiram said I mean, CloudCheckr we acquired four Spot and we acquired what? Four companies in the last 12 months for Spot. So we really believe that as a company now we can address all of their potential opportunities, whether it's in a legacy application, whether it's a virtual desktop, whether it's a Cloud native application, or we just went and announced Ocean for Apache Spark. So Spot now has an optimization and automation solution for Spark on AWS which we announced, I think just yesterday. >> Correct. >> But I'd like to get both of your perspectives on keeping Spot as a brand, Anthony we'll start with you and then Amiram we'll go to you. >> Amiram is the founder, and he was the CEO of the company and built a fantastic company. And we, NetApp I think has a phenomenal brand, but a brand that's that's associated with the sort of the traditional IT organization. And as you note in the Cloud the buyers are slightly different. They're sort of the application owners, or they operate in a sort of a construct that most people call CloudOps or DevOps. And we felt that Spot represented that new buyer in ways that NetApp didn't and probably couldn't. And so we really liked the idea of having the structure of the big N supported by a little pink and a little blue and a more sort of Cloud native brand. >> And that's key, especially the dynamics in the market that we've seen the last 22 months with the rapid changes, the pivot to Cloud customers that weren't that digital needing to go in that direction to survive in the very beginning, I imagine this was really kind of core to NetApp's strategy, but also helping both of your customers to survive initially and then to be able to thrive and identify some of those key areas where they can cut costs would be a far more efficient. >> Okay I think you are in here, if you were born physical you're now digital, and if you weren't born physical you were born digital. And you know, digital is a very effective medium accelerated by the pandemic because as you said, we couldn't really get close to each other and you just look at the innovation around us here at Amazon, it's just amazing to watch. And we've just been really, really good partners with Amazon now for many, many years. And we continue to see just huge, huge opportunities. >> Well Adam Selipsky this morning in his keynote, one of the partners he called out was NetApp. >> Yeah I know I mean, I'll talk a little bit later on maybe with Yancey and I but you know, Amazon now sells our product. They haven't done that with anybody. So ONTAP is now a product that Amazon sells. >> Lisa: Okay. >> Amazon supports, Amazon bills, Amazon runs. So we've really, really demonstrated I think not just to our customers, that sort of a high rate of innovation and an opportunity to sort of accelerate their businesses, but we've demonstrated it to Amazon themselves, that we can operate like them. And we can develop with them at a speed that they are comfortable with. That maybe a few years ago many people would have doubted that a legacy company could operate this way. >> Right, one of the things we know about Amazon is the speed, but also their focus on the customer it's laser-focused, that whole flywheel of Amazon everything that was being announced this morning was exciting to your point Anthony, but it's also showing how involved the customers and the partners are in the ecosystem and that flywheel. Amiram talk to me from your perspective what are some of the, from a visionary standpoint what are some of the things that you're looking forward to going forward with CloudCheckr, but also knowing how deeply connected and integrated NetApp is with a big powerhouse like AWS? >> Yeah, so a few things about that. I think the first thing is also my take from today, like listening to the keynote and looking at all the new announcements. I think the trend is that deployment to the Cloud is becoming easier, but operations is becoming messier. And I think when we look at our category and where we aspire, where we want to be and where we're going. So I think with the CloudCheckr acquisition. So we're expanding into an area that we haven't been to because there are two categories in Cloud cost, there is optimization and there is cost management. What we've done, what we've built, what we've, the business we had is in the optimization space. It's actively reducing and optimizing resources for customers. And there are very few companies in that category as I can say. But right now we're expanding into that area of cost management, so we can meet our customers sooner and you can see us doing it in multiple areas, not only here, but also if we look at a customer journey in the Cloud, it starts with bring workloads in the Cloud, deploy them, and then secure them, and then automate them and then optimize them. Nobody moves to the Cloud and optimizes. So we're typically meeting customers at the end of their journey, we're meeting customers where they need an optimization and they have everything already set up. And right now with Ocean for Apache Spark, Ocean continuous delivery, Spot security, we're meeting customers sooner in their journey so we can provide a much more holistic solution and platform to customers wherever they are in their migration to the Cloud and scaling into Cloud. And with CloudCheckr also taking us to a whole new world of cost management. So, I think we're scaling and ramping and doing all these things, and it's so amazing to realize that we haven't unleashed even 1% of what we can do. >> Really, so there's much more under the covers that we're still waiting for? >> I think the good news is you know, to comment more on what you said, our roadmaps are now largely being driven by customers. And that's just so refreshing to know that you've not only solved a problem for a particular customer, but the customer wants you to solve more problems and that they trust us to be that sort of organization that can help them. So, we're full steam ahead. You know, we're going to continue to acquire in areas where we think we can get acceleration. But our acquisition of Spot was very much about as Amiram said, bringing not just a great company into the business, but to invest significantly in it. And that's really proven I think to me, as Amiram said, one of the most if not the most successful acquisition NetApp has ever done. >> Well congratulations, that's fantastic. But it also sounds like from that customer focus there's clear, strong alignment with how AWS operates, how it values its customers from NetApp's perspective and I imagine from Spots as well. >> You know, if there's one thing I was really proud of during the acquisition, is I got a phone call from a customer, it's the largest food delivery company in South America, and they were very worried about this acquisition and I asked them why? And they told me, "Because your customer service, Spot's customer service is the best customer service I've ever gotten, and if I'm not going to continue to get this customer service, I need to look how I'm finding another vendor." And they told me that, when they want to even tell AWS like which company they can learn from, they're always pointing at Spot. So, and that was a very refreshing moment for me to realize how much also at Spot we care about our customers, but not only as a gimmick, as something that customer obsession, as something that we really live. And that was interesting to see that, that was a concern by our customers when we got acquired. >> Well that's proof in the pudding, because you're right it's one thing to say, companies can always say, "We're customer obsessed, we're customer first, we're customer focused." It's one thing to say it as a marketing term it's a whole other thing to actually live it and demonstrate it, and actually have people coming to you saying that, "We want to model that." I'm curious Anthony, what did you pull over from that? What has NetApp learned from this? >> I always tell Amiram that the idea was that they would essentially take us over. That you know, we sort of loved their culture, we loved their people and their process. And we literally changed a lot of how NetApp operated to operate along the Spot model. So we really did, as Amiram said earlier on, we let them not just sort of exist, but we let them thrive. And we encourage them to point at other areas that NetApp, that they thought we should change to be more like them. And it's raised the bar across everything we do now. And so, we now have a lot of the Spot business processes, a lot of the Spot cultures sort of seeping into the whole of the company. >> That's a very empathetic approach, and that's one of the things that we've learned in the last year and a half that's been, it's key to leadership, it's key to anything is that empathy. But the ability to recognize where there are things within an organization that can be improved and looking at leaders like Spot to go, "Let's actually make this really symbiotic and bi-directional." And I imagine with CloudCheckr it's going to be the same type of influence? >> Well as I've always said, and I say this to the employees and to the acquisitions that we make, what we are acquiring is people. You know the logo, the software, even in many ways the customer base is really very much I think a function of the people. And we work incredibly hard to retain the people, but we do so by sort of empowering them and encouraging them to lead. We really don't want to have the historical perspective of acquisitions, where big company swamps the little company. And I think we've tried very hard to make that a part of our acquisition strategy. And so CloudCheckr is very early in the process but very much, we're following those things, even Amiram and his team are learning from them. If they're doing something a little better than Spot is, then that's something we'll pick up from them. >> And that's just from a very open cultural perspective, that's a big change for NetApp but it's also a smart way to go, 'cause you're right it's, you're acquiring people. And we often talk about people, process, technology. But it's, sometimes to be honest with you it's rare that we hear companies talking about the people focus as being that's critical. It's because of our people that we have successful support, happy successful customers. So that people focus is (inaudible). >> You know, it's the company and culture is not something you can manufacture. It's something that happens and it happens I think through people. And it's an important thing is, if you can establish an organization with the right kinds of people and again, all credit goes to Amiram as the founder and CEO of the company. I think you sort of demanded a kind of person and a kind of culture that set you apart from so many other companies. >> I think the focus on culture was, I was very obsessed with it from very early on in the process that even Spot investors were very, they were questioning like, how come that you are so much obsessed with culture so early on? And I think it paid off big time. There was a book I read while being a CEO that really helped me to scale from quarter to quarter, because I really believe that as a CEO of a startup, every quarter you're basically applying again to your job because you're getting a new company every quarter. And about people, processes, technology, so at Spot it was a little bit different through the book I read, which is "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz, it's people, product, revenue, PPR. And you need to take care of the people, and if you don't take care of the people, so nothing else matter, like it's nothing else just... >> Right. >> And if the people and the product are not working well, so the revenue are not going to come. So revenue was always for us as something that is coming, it's trailing after a good product and good people. >> I love that, what a great, honest focus and vision you guys both have congratulations on the acquisition, CloudCheckr. But also just the cultural alignment that you've done that's really driven by your people and the customers, it's really refreshing to hear that and congrats on NetApp's continued partnership with AWS. We look forward to having you on again next time we can see you in person and talk more about customer successes. >> Thank you very much for hosting us. >> My pleasure guys. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)