(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about Women in Tech. Hillary Ashton joins us, the chief product officer at Teradata, and Danielle Greshock is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS Ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic. Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background and a little bit about Teradata. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering, product management, officer of the CTO team at Teradata. I've been with Teradata for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades, if I can say that in the data and analytics space. I spent time really focused on the value of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's lots of different dimensions and angles of that. At Teradata we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that throughout this discussion as well. >> Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look at Teradata's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a topic that's important to everyone but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Teradata has there. >> Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through a series of transformations but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. And we use data to back that up. In fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. And all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around DE&I, that's available on LinkedIn as well. So in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50/50 men and women which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a diverse and equitable team. And I think it really improves the behaviors that we can bring to our office. >> There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50/50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >> I'm going to pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. I started off thinking that, I started off as a political science major or a government major and I was probably destined to go into the law field but actually took a summer course at Harvard, I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how data and analytics can truly provide value and outcomes to our customers. And I have been living that life ever since I graduated from college. So I was very excited and privileged in my early career to work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing kids, people who had graduated from Harvard Business School and from MIT Sloan School. And that was super crazy 'cause I did not go to either of those schools but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help organizations really extract value from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >> I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring... Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times, you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective that really is such a value add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get, and underrepresented groups as well to get into STEM and stay. >> Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. But for me, it's really been about looking at that, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that, yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in to be able to help really provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology which requires all sorts of perspectives. >> Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value, revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on DE&I at Teradata, but what do you think can be done to encourage, sorry, to recruit more young women and under represented groups into tech, any carrots there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the bringing in diverse understandings of customer outcomes, I mean, we've really moved from technology for technology's sake. And I know AWS and Entirety have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer-centric. And technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand voice of customer, who understand those outcomes and those are not necessarily the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and and how to program, but also the value and outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >> Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills but the soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >> That's right. >> What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >> Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day to day behaviors when it comes to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of of diverse and underrepresented folks in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning what that can look like, how that can show up, we might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that as you learn more about different types of bias that actually you do need to kind of account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us, if we're leaders, know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better. We're not going to be perfect anytime soon, but I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable when things aren't going in a copesthetic way, and being able to talk openly about that felt like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we make good on that? How do we change our behavior fundamentally. Of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the technology aspect of bias, looking at at ethical AI I think is a really important additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias and the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >> Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there, you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable, ourselves, our teammates that's critical to being able to dial that back down. Danielle, I want to get your perspective on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >> I definitely think in both technical and product roles we definitely have some work to do. And when I think about our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies, what they differentiate on, how they figure out insights into their business. And it's all about the product itself and the data, and the same is true at AWS. And we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles as well as in the product, shaping the products, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes in order to move bias out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have better outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >> I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day. We need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. We've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years. Hillary, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro, is silver lining, the opposite? What are you seeing? >> Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been very difficult for women during COVID-19. Women have dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of reasons. And that I think is going to set us back all of us, the Royal us or the Royal we back years and years. And it's very unfortunate because I think we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID setting us back in such a powerful way I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce? How do we do that understanding work life balance better, understanding virtual and remote working better. I think in the technology sector we've really embraced hybrid virtual work and are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. And I think if anything, these Zoom calls have, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more so for the men on my team, we're seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about other responsibilities that maybe they had, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe day cares were shut down and maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of people bringing their whole selves to the office which I think was really wonderful. Even our CEO saw some of that. And I think that that really changes the dialogue. It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when people can do it after daycare drop off and really allowing that both for men and for women, makes it better for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working environment and that this whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for, probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for people who are at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in coming out of the old COVID, I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people to transform how we do work, leveraging data and analytics but also overcoming some of the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >> Yeah, I think there's, like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately, if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits. Our work, we're more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers. There's so much value that can be gleaned from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to work when we can. We've learned that you don't have to be in an office 24/7 commuting crazy hours, flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. I want to get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we would both agree on like, ask more questions, don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech? >> Oh, inspired in being in tech. I think looking at technology as, in some ways I feel like we do a disservice to inclusion when we talk about STEM, 'cause I think stem can be kind of daunting, it can be a little scary for people, for younger people. When I go and talk to folks at schools, I think STEM is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all, like maybe they're all men. And so it's a little intimidating. And STEM is actually, especially for people joining the workforce today, it's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know STEM inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology fundamentally. And so demystifying STEM as something that is around how we actually make our our lives useful and how we can change outcomes through technology, I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. And there's absolutely, for hard scientists, there's absolutely a great place in the world for folks who want to pursue that, and men and women can do that. So I don't want to be setting the wrong expectations but I think STEM is very holistic in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in some of that world change can participate in STEM. It just may be through a different lens than how we classically talk about STEM. So I think there's great opportunity to demystify STEM. I think also what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost but I think choose the person that you're going to work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be selective. Maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important, but the person you're going to spend in your early career, a lot of your day with, who's going to influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be a standout or that person can hold you back and that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self, I just lucked out actually, but I think that my first boss really set me up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. And some of it was really hard to hear but it really set me up for the path that I've been on ever since. So that would be my advice. >> I love that advice. It's brilliant. And I think it, choose your bosses wisely, isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they want to go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice, and also more work to do to demystify STEM. But luckily we have great female leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I want to thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in DE&I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you, Lisa. >> Nice to see you. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Thank you for that. My name's Stephanie curs. Lisa mentioned I'm the worldwide head of sales for AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS going back 25 years now, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. I'd come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, but had been in a different career. And I had an opportunity to try something new. I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. And it, it turned out to be a 25 year career that I'm really, really excited about and, and really thankful for that person for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie, I'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities, and put that forth to our customers in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performing teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my career note, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. We find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that. So I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we show them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team. >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of 'em was an, an interview on the cube I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of, of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective in AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent and, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. And then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women at solution architecture organizations. We have, you know, I just personally connect people as well and feel like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a long tenure Amazonian, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who ha has been a sponsor of my career has Matt ion, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph who's cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. And, you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, you know, and, and get things done inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And know S I've had, I've been agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really key difference. I thinks also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. He actually is in the distribution, was in distribution with advent tech data no longer there, Cory Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. So a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies. And when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference, I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take an extra approach and extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One, I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. And they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups. So early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know the massive influence they've had Danielle back. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ that AWS employs to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. But I think just making sure that, you know, both E everything from recruit to onboard to ever boarding that they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as though they have someone working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. For me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner, or with a colleague. And then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor to, to people on my team. That is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that and, and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment, a great place for those women are marginalized communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it. And it much like Danielle and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp on my team personally, I think leading by example is really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the life stuff still lands on the women, whether we like it or not, I have a very active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. And I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week. Now obviously make sure your job' covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. So it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. You both talked about kind of being what you can see. And, and I know both companies are obsess customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Some of the maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp, with that key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. So, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just the trajectory between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. We feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people on my team often say we feel like Amazonians, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company, into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the dis in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, female, male race, and so forth, and just to really have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. So we definitely feel like we're part of the family. We are absolutely loving working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back 25 years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the, the turns and, and serendipitous route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your younger Stephanie self? >>I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you, but, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they are, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >>Absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. It's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs. This thing, you know, I genuinely now took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products, and I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine Young, who's our other founder. And then Liz Frank Jones, who's our, our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You two leaders, you mentioned that you liked the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females and the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You could do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using honeycomb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that realtime visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>You back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I know that this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There is kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele, telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it land was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I, I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is we'll lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI headstart program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teens at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice or your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love it there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million other people in the room that probably has the, have the same question. And because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. >>My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director a at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine yen, who our other founder, and then Liz Frank Jones, who our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have. >>Vera a back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I Don know that this Predates me to some extent, but I Don know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does also in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year, we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and demand was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D E and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach Vera? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that end, we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be Africa, tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teen at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions, and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead. Love that various same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a bit, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because an imposter syndrome don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand and ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us talking to >>My pleasure. Likewise, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle GShock. One of our alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called Ruba, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, uh, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to grow, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I've benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you be benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers and technology, which there's a lot of value there. >>Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions. Uh, there's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave. >>It seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS and attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also a more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that when those younger girls, >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, you're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and glean the insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing E ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's that metaphor I do too. But we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is Showcase season one, episode two. I've got Danielle Greshock, Worldwide Director of ISV Partner Solutions Architects At AWS. Welcome to the kickoff, Speeding Innovation with AWS. Good to see you. >> Good to see you as well. Thanks, John. >> Okay, we've got some great companies we're presenting with this week, talking about kind of speeding innovation, really with the cloud. And obviously Amazon, you guys are number one and doing this has been the big theme from Reinvent, this past conference. A lot of people are refactoring in the cloud, from observability to new ways to counter ransomware, to even back up and recover. These were once point solutions, now they're not point solutions, they're part of the cloud platform that's powering new modern application. You know, from DS city pipelining, cloud native, it's out there now, it's now well known, people are looking at this and going, "okay, this is cloud next level," or "super cloud," or whatever we want to call it. It's happening, and people are having solutions and you're in the middle of it. So what's your take on this? Because you know, Veeam, Splunk Clumio and others, they're all doing great business and now refactoring in the cloud with AWS. >> Yeah, well I think that what a lot of companies are finding now is that moving to the cloud is really speeding their innovation. And of course there's been a faster move to the cloud because they realize the benefits that they can get from that movement. And, you know, companies like Veeam, like Clumio, they are building on top of AWS and coming up with new ways to solve customer problems. And then of course the other thing is that there's so much much access to data and insights that you weren't able to have before. But now that you can retain that data with the scale of the cloud, lots of companies are finding new and exciting things to do and innovate with that data that they are able to hang onto. >> You know, it's interesting, you see the entrepreneurial activity. I mean, I was reading- >> Yeah >> This is what I do on the weekends. I go back to 2006 and I look at the early Amazon posts of EC2 and S3. And that was a real great startup movement and that changed the game. Now, even today, the startups are out there. You look at Clumio, right? Poojan over there, he's been doing great stuff. He came from Nutanix, a hyperscale, and now he's got a startup that's growing like a weed out there and Amazon's powering that. You got Cohesity, they're almost going to go public, I believe. They've announced that, they're about to go public so they're going to be a public company. And you have Veeam, which has been in the ecosystems for many, many years, a decade. So these are a good mix of companies, and this is the makeup of the kind of customers you have. What's the thing that they have in common? Why should people pay attention to these companies and the relationship with Amazon web services? >> I mean, I think the thing that these companies really have in common is thinking about the cloud as this new paradigm that they are building for. You know, if I think about Veeam, you know we have really amped up a lot of, both our building and co-selling with Veeam and they're having a lot of success with small companies, medium companies big companies as well, just with their product. And so that is what I think is the difference is they are looking at us as an opportunity to innovate with their product and take advantage to what the opportunities the cloud provides there. >> What are you guys seeing as solution architects in your customer base? Look at AWS from a partnership standpoint. It used to be you get into the marketplace, you have some programs, okay, all good. You guys have shifted that. Can you give us an update on what you guys are doing with respect to offering new kinds of value as your customers change and grow? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely we've seen a lot of success with our SaaS factory program that is looking to, you know help companies make the transformation to SaaS. Also our workload migration program, helping ISVs to move even faster, their on premises business into AWS for sure. But I also just think that, you know, what our customers demand actually at this point is, they're really looking for full blown solutions. So us working with them on solutions, working closely with systems integrators who can help execute on those solutions. Those are all things that our successful ISVs are really leaning into. >> This month's featured companies all have one thing in common, they're all using data at scale and data as part of the developer process. You're seeing data being available, and they have to be available for machine learning and other things cause you have to be more agile. And the scale. So you got more flow and also scalable in terms of users and whatnot. So this is a common theme. What's happening from a customer standpoint as they start to rearchitect? Because you guys have to provide that now next level headroom. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, again we're seeing a lot of companies wanting to do different things with the volume of data that they actually have, and things that they were never even considering in on-prem. So we talk about refactoring, it's not simply a lift and shift, they're looking to get some technology benefit out of the move, right? So just kind of having a net net from on-prem into the cloud is not going to be good enough. And so we're looking to add that value when they go and make that investment. >> You know, we've been always writing about and covering Snowflake as an example, bring them up. You know you have Redshift that's also, you know competing I guess, with Redshift. But they're a partner, they're growing. They built on AWS and became valuable because they did it differently in the cloud. We're using that, there's many other examples like that, they're companies are coming in and building and taking advantage of the gift called scale. CapEx gift from AWS. And also you got Silicon coming, so more and more goodness on the Amazon side, enabling the partners. So I have to ask you, and that's all kind of documenting that's happening in real time, but what it's teasing out is that the integrations are changing, right? So you're seeing a lot more tightly coupled engineering or solutions with AWS and your top partners. Can you share insight into what that looks like and how you guys think about that? >> Yeah, and definitely a lot of our top partnerships really do start with integrations. That's where we're able to, you know, find the value, that differentiated solution on AWS. So, you know, Snowflake, as an example, just talked about how their integration with private link and some of their serverless integrations were really the cornerstones of the new partnership that they've built with us. And same thing with other ISVs, they've really looked at the integrations to be core, building the value with AWS, with our services and for our AWS customers. Of course these are very bespoke, you know? What's going to be important to a data company isn't going to be the same thing that's important to a storage based company, but still being able to bring the full value of the innovation that AWS makes and have that better together story is really where we find a lot of value there. >> Yeah, and you're in the middle of it too. You have the keys to the kingdom. Solution architects are all where the action is right now. Everyone's looking, okay I got to build on what I got and also I got to build the architecture in real time. And build on top, it's not a tear down, it's a continuation of what they had. >> Yeah, and even our most mature solutions and partnerships, those that are full SaaS solutions, the companies that are innovating and continuing to bring new features to market are the ones that we end up finding to have the most success with. And that is really what my team does is building those integrations and new solutions on AWS. It is our core reason we exist and you know, what we feel is the cornerstone to great partnerships >> You know, Dave Vellante and I on our team, we're always commenting about how the cloud scale is a real benefit to anyone, whether it's leveling up talent, bias, and you know women in tech is coming up, international women's day coming up around the corner. >> Yeah. >> That's happening, so it's all good, right? So, whether you're a startup or a big company if you get that one feature right in the cloud you can and really change your business. And I think this always used to be elusive for the product marketing teams of the old way things were built. You know, you got to test it out and put it out there. Now you got real time information, and for companies that are ISVs out there, they really can be nimble. >> Well, and that's the thing too, is we try very hard to make sure our ISVs have access to customers, our customers, and that's how they can figure out like what is the right thing to build for them. >> Whether you're big or small, the cloud's great. So I got to ask you, this is season one of the AWS partner showcase, we're proud to present that with you guys. It's been a great partnership, we love getting the stories out there. Episode two is about this theme about, you got little data here, you got backup recovery you got ransomware, you know, old point solutions. We've had a great conversation. Why should people pay attention to this episode in your opinion? What's the big aha going on here in this episode? >> I mean, for me, I think ISVs ask me all the time, how can I innovate with AWS? How can I have a successful partnership? This series will give you that answer. You can see real world examples of what other companies are doing to be successful. So I mean, that is reason enough when it's a very competitive tech technology market. So, you know, lots of good ideas there to see. >> Great stuff, and of course, again, these are big ISVs, they're doing great stuff. They're software developers, they're building the next modern applications. Danielle, thanks for coming out. You're the worldwide director of the ISV Partner Solution Architects at AWS, you're in the middle of all the great action. Must be fun, isn't it? >> It's a lot of fun. I couldn't ask for a better job. >> Alright, well thanks for coming on this keynote kickoff. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, you're watching, and we've got the whole series coming up, but this is the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. Showcase season one, episode two, enjoy the great presentations. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Yeah. Welcome back to a W s reinvent 20 twenty-one. This is the live. In addition, the last year, of course, it was virtual. This is probably the most important hybrid event of the year. Over 20,000 people. We have two sets here at the Cube. My name is David. I'm really excited to have Caroline see more on the vice president of product marketing at Serato, which is now an H p e company. And Daniel, who is the director of worldwide partner Essays at A W s. Folks, welcome to the good to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. So, >>Caroline, you got some news. Why don't we start their hard news? We always like to start with that. >>First of all, I think I just like to talk a little bit about the acquisition because it has been acquired by H. P. And in September, we announced, um, disaster recovery as a service is part of the Green Lake platform. And so that's really exciting. Both from, uh, customers as well is also H B customers. But the innovation continues here at a W s reinvent, we are announcing a new solution 02 in cloud, which is a disaster recovery for Amazon. Easy to, um, and if I think about the value that it brings to the customers, it's delivering orchestrated disaster. Recovery is delivering that simplicity at scale and scale is very important aspect because it will deliver that from tends to thousands of work clothes and as well, it's helping organizations to drive more operational efficiencies around their processes. So that's sort of a nutshell of the news. The cloud for a W s >>great. Thank you for that. So I wanna ask you, obviously, in lock down, people look to the cloud. Uh, and you know, data protection used to be just back up, and then people realize that recovery is important, but it used to be a bolt on an afterthought. You sort of launch the application of the service. And so we got to protect this thing and whatever and throw it on there that that's unacceptable. Today, if you're not going to run your digital business with a bolt on, So what? Our customers telling you in terms of what they want to see from their data protection portfolios and how are you seeing the ecosystem and a W s helping them to integrate that >>absolutely well to your point, the pandemic has absolutely accelerated a lot of businesses movement into the cloud. So companies that hadn't formerly thought about using cloud technologies are now doing that. And for them, in order to have a very simple and easy and scalable data protection solution, is critical for them to feel comfortable into moving into a W s. And so that's what we're seeing from a lot of customers. Um, and of course, back to your point about recovery with the challenges around ransomware, Um, that is definitely an area where a lot of companies have just done their back up. But they're also testing it and making sure that it's something that they know that they can rely on, um, as they moved there, workloads into the club. >>And speaking of ransomware, I mean, it's just front and center. Anybody can be a ransomware. Today they go in the dark web by ransomware service. They put a stick into a server and then bad things happen. Hopefully that that individual ends up in handcuffs, but not always so when we've seen Ransom's getting paid $40 million ransom's multi-million dollar. And we all know about the fact that our front and center So what are you seeing in terms of the customer base? How How h b n z two helping and where does a W s fit? Maybe you could start off Caroline. >>Great question, because I think from the perspective, we look at it from the need for recovery. Uh, strategy as part of your overarching, um, security and prevention is is one aspect that you always need two prevention. But to us, it's a matter of not if you're going to be attacked. It's when and when that gets through your firewall. And so you need to be able to have a recovery strategy in place that allows you to recover in minutes to set to within seconds of when that when an attack actually happens. And, um, I can give a case in, for example, for there's a company 10 Carter Protective fabric, textiles manufacturing company, MULTI-MILLION business. And they suffered to to a tax crypto attack first time, and they were using more traditional, um, back up to take. And it took him two weeks to recover having been attacked, and they suffered significant data loss, and then they deployed photo photo. Um, unfortunately, a little while later, they were attacked a second time with more sophisticated case of So it continues. Um, but this time the recovery was very different. What happened was that they were able to recover within minutes and they had seconds of data loss. And that is because of r c d p technology C D. P. Being continuous data protection. And that is with our replication and a unique journaling capability that allows you to, uh, set up the different checkpoint. So you have thousands of recovery points and you can recover to a specific recovery point with within seconds of that attack. Very, very powerful. >>I wanna ask you a question and what Caroline was just talking about with the classic metrics in this business r P O R T r P o recovery point objective. Always say, how much data do you want to lose? And people say none. Okay, how much? What kind of budget do you have? So that's always been the trade-off, although, as you mentioned, it's getting a little bit more cost-effective and then recovery time objective. How long does it take you to get back up. Absolutely. So so. Those are some of the concepts that you were talking about. I wanna ask you, Daniel, it feels like an Caroline. You feel like data protection is now becoming. It's certainly a tight adjacent to overall security. It's not security per se sick of it, so but it's but it's becoming. The lines are blurring. How do you see that you have a shared responsibility model? Where does this whole topic fit in? >>Well, I think lots of companies are really finding a lot of value in their data, right. Whereas, you know, perhaps years ago it was less. It was easy to hang on to it, to actually make it valuable to do metrics and analytics on it to do machine learning, perhaps on it. And so, by having, um, products such as the product, you know, they're now able to hang on to that data and make sure that they have it in perpetuity so that they can do what they need to do on it. So, yes, we're seeing, you know, companies that were traditionally storage cos thinking about security, security cos thinking about data, so yes, all of those lines are being blurred for sure. And I think that, you know, as far as the short security model we think of the you know, we think of our partners and ourselves, obviously as extensions. And we're really looking to have the best customer experience that we can >>can I think every company security company, Obviously you impact enterprise care a lot about security A W s. I don't know any company because I don't really care about security. That's that's not my swim land out of business. If you If you had that attitude now. So from from your standpoint, where does it fit inside of you know, you're you're thinking, How are you guys thinking about security and data protection? Back up and recovery? Is it all just coming together or they still kind of separate entities? >>No, you're absolutely right. It is coming together, and what we're seeing is we're having a lot more conversations with ISO's, um so the more the security offices of organizations and I think what's happening is that's where the budget is to. And so you're saying they're sort of the working together on the I T and also the Office of Security to um so we're having more conversations there, and we see that, as I mentioned before, the recovery strategy is a key element of our focus. And what we can do is part of the overarching strategy of an organization. >>So what? How should we think about the cloud? Is it another layer of protection? Um, is it a replacement for tape? Maybe not, but we need as much protection as possible. So how should we think about the cloud in the context of data protection? >>Well, the cloud, Yeah, absolutely. Um can provide an alternative to tape or, um disc, for example, of this year. We also added support for a mutability preserved for A W S. With so we are ensuring in the fact that you know you can be changed so that that's absolutely critical. >>So that's a a right once read only technology. That's a service that you tap. So your integrating zero was integrating with that capability. So that's another layer of protection. That's another layer of protection. And then, of course, you know there's there's gaps, is another part of the strategy. So let's talk strategy for a minute. What's the I know it's not one size fits all, but what are you seeing as best practice strategies for customers to protect themselves against traditional just human error? Cyber attacks? What's the what's the sort of prevailing approach? How should we think about that? >>Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. Those the, you know, the filed elections, the database corruptions, and so our solutions, that is, our continuous data protection. It absolutely is, um, the ability to be able to get that granular level of recovery, which you can do with backups. I'm not saying that backup isn't part of your overall strategy, but if you're actually trying to recover quickly and within seconds to whether it's an attack to whether it's a file deleted, a database corruption, you need that continuous data protection. And that's something that you need to us that we've been delivering since the day that um was formed. So >>that's your secret sauce is it is a very granular ability to dial down based on your r p o. That's requirements based on the application requirements, uh, and then bring in the cloud for things like mutability. Maybe gapping. Maybe Last resort is still the last resort. I don't know. Maybe >>there. So, um, you know, a w s to be a target for disaster recovery. So all back up. >>You talk about that? >>Yeah. So, with what we have enabled is first of all, if you want to, um, my great, your work clothes to a W s. And we're seeing an awful lot of that. We provide that capability. So the mobility aspect, if you are looking at instead of an on premises disaster recovery site, you can use a W S D R site. Um, And if you want to back up to a W s and use, um, cost efficient storage, we support that with cloud tearing and mutability. And as I say today, we're announcing cloud for a W s, which is once you've got your work clothes in a W s. We can protect them now in, um, in a W s itself. So the full spectrum. And then earlier this year, we announced for communities for US work clothes, So we're really trying to ensure that we can protect any A W s workload wherever it is. >>So I look around here pretty impressive given that we're in the second year of a pandemic here, pretty packed floor. But the ecosystem is just exploding. That's gonna make you feel good. Cos like choosing to partner with a W s leaning in writing to your cloud-native fooling. Maybe give us the update on how you see this partnership. >>Well, I mean, just to Caroline's earlier point, you can see how Xero is continuing to innovate, right? And that's really key. So, um, having a cloud-native solution and then also having a solution that works for us. We're seeing a lot of companies thinking about containers thinking about server lists. And so, you know, the best partnerships that we have are the ones in which they're innovating with us continuously. And I've known about since I started in 2014. So they've been around for a long time, and they're continuing, um, to do that. And they are working closely with us to do P O. C. D. S. And and to help our customers really get what they need, um, in the data protection space and continuing to innovate, which is >>your customers, they want that they need that your your deep into data protection. Yes. You're scale of cloud But you're not going to have the the capabilities of Stack. So that one plus one hopefully is greater than to How do you where can we find out more information about you know, the new solutions? What's the what's the call to >>action culture as well? A couple of things. We've, uh we just We just launched deserted for a W s hands-on lab. And what that does is allow in your own time in your own environment to be able to try with a W S as a target and back up. Um, so we've just launched that and that enables you to see how it works with a W S. We also have for communities, um, lab as well, so you can see how it works with a K s. Uh, coming soon, we're going to have to in cloud lab that you can actually see how to protect your workload in the cloud in a W s. So those are the really the best ways to be able to Well, for a call to action is try. The lab really is >>awesome. Guys, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Very important topic and keep up the good work. >>Thank you. Thank you. Very well. So >>we're seeing the evolution of data protection rethinking data protection in 2020. No longer is it a Bolton cloud modernization with deep stacks. Fine granularity for your r p o. But also quick recovery protection from Ransomware. It's a whole new world, and we're here to cover it. My name is David. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Mm, yeah.

>>Hey everyone. And welcome to the cubes. Continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. So excited to be here in person with thousands of folks. Everybody covered vaccinated. We are winning one of the largest industry's largest tech hybrid events with AWS and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We're going to be having two black sets. Two remote says over a hundred guests, and I am pleased to welcome two new guests to the queue. Mike Milner is here the head of product management at trend micro and Danielle Greshaw worldwide partner solution architects at AWS guys. Welcome to the program. It's nice robbing us. Isn't it nice to say, I have this background noise of actual humans, >>Such a nice buzz. Yeah, it >>Really isn't. I suppose. So the last, obviously 20, 22 months have been quite challenging for all of us, kudos to AWS for doing this in such a safe manner. But Mike, I wanted to get kind of a background in the last year and a half or so since we last spoke, what's going on at trend micro, we've seen so much change in the security landscape, the threat landscape. What are some of the things that you guys are saying? >>Yeah, good question. So, you know, some things stay the same and some things are always changing certainly lately, a big rise in ransomware, really affecting companies. This is a case where in the past, maybe we were concerned with targeted attacks, but now things like ransomware can affect anyone. So it's really broad attacks looking at any possible threat, any possible vector that can impact >>Company ransomware as a service is on the rise massively. And it's become, I've talked to some about it a lot this last year and a half or so being with it growing so rapidly, it's now a matter of when we got hit, not if so that's a really interesting topic that you bring up. Daniel want to bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about from a partnership perspective and about what you guys are doing together with. >>I mean, we've had a partnership with trend micro. I mean, I've been at AWS almost eight years, as long as I've been there. I can remember, you know, trends being a huge AWS partner. Um, and of course we've evolved over the years. And, um, definitely in the last 12 to 18 months, we've been doing a lot of joint events together trying to broaden our reach of customers, um, about talking about trends, solution. And we're going now to a lot of companies that have not used cloud before and look at a solution such as trend solution as a way in which they can move their workloads into the cloud and feel secure and safe about it. And, you know, not have to worry about, you know, ransomware or any other kinds of cyber attacks and feel good about moving into the cloud, >>Thinking to the cloud while there's still so many folks that are working from home, working from anywhere really that will be for, >>He did that, uh, journey for a lot of companies who maybe weren't thinking about it, but now are making that move a lot faster. >>The, of the challenges that you're seeing in the last 20 months as the acceleration of digital transformation cloud adoption, it was for so many businesses that weren't there. And on that journey, I'm just curious what some of the things are that you guys have observed together in this interesting time. Yeah. >>Oh for sure. Certainly, you know, trend micro has a lot of capability, a lot of products. I focus on the cloud cloud one, but really the endpoint protection users are at home. They're remote, they're accessing their infrastructure from so many different environments. Like you said, it's really set this ahead probably 10 years, really this work from home concept, >>It has to talk to me about some of the other things that are changing. And then there's the security buyer like what's going on there? What are some of the conversations that you're having challenges that they're having, but this is kind of a new, uh, persona that's been. >>Yeah, I think there is a big shift happening here as consumers. We're so used to trying things out, adopting new technology really rapidly. And I think industry is kind of catching up. Historically, this has been kind of top down decisions. Uh, a CSO or executive is making security buying decisions. Increasingly customers want to actually try things out. They want to experience the value, see how it works in their environments. And this could be coming from different business units, different parts of the organization. So we've really been focusing on adapting our products, our capability, and how we address customers to really reach these people who are making these decisions. >>And I think more and more developers are actually part of that process as well, because they're being tasked with, if you're going to build it, you also have to operate it and you also have to secure it. And so, you know, >>What are some of the challenges that the specifically that you're hearing from developers that are helping you surely advanced cloud one and the partnership? >>I mean, I would say like for what I hear from developers is mostly how can I integrate this into my existing process and make it easy, but >>It's really developers who are shaping so much of the infrastructure that needs to be protected in the past. It maybe was the other way around. That's been a massive shift in the industry. And as you say, we need to help developers be secure without them having to learn a whole new set of skills and security. We want them to be security aware, but we can't expect them all to be experts. >>I was a developer myself for like 15, 16 years. And we're terrible at security we're terrible at. So, uh, anything that any products let that, that help in that journey is key >>For sure. And it's not that you don't want to be secure it's that really your goal is providing the business value and security. It needs to be there, but it's always going to be seen as kind of a drag kind of slowing things down. So we want to build tools to help their, >>I imagine too also. So it facilitate from a cultural perspective, the developers, the security folks becoming better partners together because the security, as we talked about in the very beginning, even mentioning ransomware is a massive issue. It's, it's a global issue with say national security issue for the U S and other countries like that. But that cultural shift has got to be interesting, especially Danielle, you as a former developer, talk to me about some of the customer conversations and how are you helping those developers become comfortable with the security responsibility. >>Again, it's back to integrating it into their normal process and to the dev ops process to just have that be an extra step in there, um, where they can, they can see that it's easy and B being easy as key. And then they can just be able to roll that out with everything that they're doing. They've already kind of like made the mind shift to test their work that they do. So it's now secure it. Um, and that's just one other practice that they start doing. So, >>Yeah, and I think it really goes in the other direction as well, security teams who have the responsibility for security. They now have to understand all of the new technologies coming out of AWS, all these new tools with Kubernetes, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And that's a big ask as well. We can't expect security teams to be experts in all that. So really it's the two sides of that coin >>For sure. The results are kind of like a shared responsibility model if you think of it in >>That way. Absolutely. Absolutely. >>Talk to me, Mike, about cloud one, is this a joint solution that just built on AWS? Help me understand it and what's going on with, >>For sure. I mean, cloud one is really a platform to help cloud builders be secure. We want to make security simple, and that is those different personas. We needed it to be simple for security, let them just set their policy goals. Hey, I need to be compliant to this standard or this standard. I want to follow the well-architected framework. These are my goals. And then the development teams need to work, deliver that value that they're trying to do and tools like cloud one, our goal is to really help them deliver that value and be secure following those guard rails and those goals set by security. And we do that across containers. Workloads server lists really extending our offering as customers start using new platforms. >>What are some of the things Mike that you've seen in during the pandemic, as we've seen this massive acceleration and the rush to the cloud what's been going on with cloud one from that perspective and how has the pandemic maybe helped shape the technology and the partnership? >>Yeah, that's a great point. Um, I think of it as well as, I mean, Cloud One, we build our platform and we've been doing that now remotely for the past two years with engineers all over the world, really around the world, five major engineering sites teams working from home. And in that time we've delivered all of our security value, but we've also ourselves deployed cloud one across eight regions worldwide. And now our engineering teams are deploying worldwide and we're making our system compliant and secure. So I really feel like all this remote work has helped us gain a really deeper understanding of the problems our customers are facing. For sure. Yeah. >>I was going to say just for us, as we've done some joint events together, we've had to do all of those things remotely. So that is definitely been a challenge, but also getting good with the messaging and making sure that we are able to connect with those customers, um, online, >>Right, as we knew, things shifted dramatically overnight for everyone in every industry. And it was interesting to see how technology helped shape and paved the pathway for those folks that survived and are now thriving. Um, but I did see some, some of the recent news on cloud one or on cloud security, the data data centers in nine countries. It sounds to me like a differentiator for trend micro in terms of data, sovereignty, data data. >>It's a major issue. These days, our companies, our customers are around the world and they've got their own security requirements. And obviously cloud one is helping them be secure, but they need to trust us with our compliance and with data sovereignty. They might have a specific requirement to store data within their own jurisdiction. And we want to support that, make it easy for them, security, simplified, >>Security stupefied. I like that. If we could only simplify more things in life, guys, that would be fantastic. Talk to me about, uh, a customer example that you think really speaks volumes to the partnership and the capabilities of club one. >>Yeah, I think it's interesting to see the companies come on board using cloud one who you don't typically associate with security issues like media companies who are used to sending information out security is a major concern. We've got major brands from news to media who needs security and it's coming up in more and more industries. Every company is a software company and they need to be secure. >>Really. Every company is a data company. You think of, of the supermarket, the grocery chains here we are at AWS reinvent, the big owning Amazon owning whole foods, for example, but the data challenge that did a growth challenge is huge it's and that's where I think the security, um, focus needs to be is wherever that data is. And now it's scattered everywhere. >>Absolutely trend micro has been in this business for over 30 years, and it's amazing to see the shifts of what's important, what needs to be secured, how it needs to be secured over that long a period. And we always feel that we're leading things. And I think cloud wine is really on the forefront for how customers are building applications, delivering value to their customers and we're helping them be secure. >>Yeah. And just to Mike's point, I mean, I definitely think, you know, years ago it was always financial services company, healthcare companies who had compliance requirements, but more and more travel and hospitality, media, and entertainment. These are all companies that are looking for security solutions. >>We're seeing a lot from a data privacy perspective. We're seeing regulations pop up all over the world, California as China DRCR. Exactly. And I'm sure that's the tip of the iceberg for more data security regulations that we're going to see across the board as we humans and our technology companies are generating more and more and more data. That's the one thing that is not slowing down at all and they're not going to no pandemic. Right. So what's the vision going forward, Danielle, in terms of the partnership with trend micro? >>Um, I mean, I think again, we are always looking for joint customers who are looking for simplicity and looking for the, you know, the value proposition that cloud one has and just continuing to grow that customer base together. >>Yeah, for sure. I think it was two years ago. We were in person here at the cube in 2019. I think talking about cloud one is a new thing. Two years later, a lot has changed, but it's great to see the market validating all the effort we're putting into it. And industry looking at these big platforms that provide that broad security as the way forward. >>And then from an analyst perspective, there's a lot of value if coming down from the analyst for cybersecurity firms, because of the threats that we talked about, the net landscape changing the fact that it is so easy to launch ransomware, the fact that it is coming through every media, we're seeing a lot more value placed on cybersecurity firms from, from the industry, which has gotta be kudos to you guys and what you're doing and also help kind of guide direction in terms of the vision going forward. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have threatened research. We are really into understanding what attackers are doing and they lead our direction. We're always on the forefront of protecting our customers from the leading threats >>And our partnerships, the most successful partnerships that we have, or the ones in which we're consistently innovating and trend has always been doing that with us. Any new service that we released, any, you know, as he taught, as Mike was talking about, uh, Kubernetes, et cetera, all of those new areas in which to go in the CA the partners that are able to keep up with us are the ones who are, you know, the most successful. So >>One of the things I know about many things of AWS is that it's very customer obsessed, focused on the customer. I imagine culturally Mike there's alignment there in turn Microsoft. >>Absolutely. And AWS is a great organization to work with because it shows through throughout interaction that they are customer obsessed. Absolutely. >>That's a good, that's a good thing to be obsessed about all things considered. Last question, guys, tell me what some of the things are that that attendees are going to be learning from both of you guys and from the booth at the event this week. >>So certainly from the cloud one trend micro booth right behind us. If the cameras can see it, uh, we've got demos of all the different functionality in cloud. One from containers, file storage workloads serverless, definitely come check that out to really see the breadth of the platform and what it can do to help. >>Awesome guys, thank you so much. You're now cube alumni got to give, you got branded masks, very COVID friendly. Uh, we appreciate your insights talking to us about trend micro, the AWS partnership and sharing some of those customer examples. Great work in the last 20 months. And it's great to have you here in person. Thanks for having very much for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one episode three and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and a sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. >> I agree, and we're going to get to (indistinct) 'cause advice is one of the the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata. Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb. Stephanie Curry from NetApp. And Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank and the topics that we dig into are, first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion, that is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw, from a thematic perspective, over and over, was that, like Vera Reynolds was talking about, the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives and that intention was a common theme that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where, in the last five to 10 years, there's been a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive environment, working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in and so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another theme that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment. There's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a DE&I alignment that they have and I think everybody also kind of agreed, Stephanie Curry talked about, it's really important for diversity on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities, tech is a little bit behind but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can, just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome, we talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think, especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody, I think that is definitely, when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or, am I going to be able to be at my kid's conference? Or even just have enough work life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work, beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work and then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. You know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work, and that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which, at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely, and definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation, to be able to put up boundaries, but I think, at least I personally, have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up, to effectively have a harmonious work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah absolutely, and a lot of that, from a work life balance perspective, bleeds into one of the next topics that we covered in detail and that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice, where mentors and sponsors are concerned, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way, but I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that but as I reflect through my own career I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from, say a point A to point B, just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role. Have a particular outcome that you want to drive. Have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and it's something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know that's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real, this is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well, about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely and I think the key there is just acknowledging it but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common and hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. You know, one of the things that, when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech, and everybody sort of agreed on the, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader. I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives and that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well and also, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn and you can spend, back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences, all of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, "I don't know all the answers but I want to learn," is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word no doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean, not right now, or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door and I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah totally, I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural and that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. >> Exactly, Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue, and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this Partner Showcase. Season one episode three. Danielle, thank you so much for helping us. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast. I really appreciate it. >> All right, audience, we want to thank you. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Everyone, it's nice to see you. Welcome to the "AWS Partner Showcase". I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA Director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you, and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do, and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So-- >> I agree, and we're going to get to that. 'Cause advice is one of the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata, Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity, equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like Vera Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives. And that intention was a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working in the inside of organizations where in the last five to 10 years there's been a strong push in this direction. Mostly because we've really seen first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional, there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS, there's a DE&I alignment that they have. And I think everybody also kind of agreed. Stephanie Curry talked about it's really important for diversity on impacting performance. Highly performing teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, but I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely... When I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or am I going to be able to be at my kids' conference, or even just have enough work-life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. Initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period. But we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance which at the end of the day it's so much better for product development for the customers as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely. And definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. But I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious work life. Where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work-life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail. And that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice where mentors and sponsors are concerned is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, its brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from say a point A to point B just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role, have a particular outcome that you want to drive, have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through if you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several other women about imposter syndrome. That's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around it or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it, but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it, because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it. And I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common. And hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. One of the things that when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech. And everybody sort of agreed on the don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well, and also for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn. And you can spend... Back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences. All of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers but I want to learn is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end, it can often mean, not right now or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F-word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah, totally. I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, "Your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows, and that's natural." And that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes when you can. >> Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one episode three. Danielle, thanks so much for helping us with this. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast, I really appreciate it. >> All right. Audience, we want to thank you, enjoy the episode. (gentle music)