(upbeat music) [Announcer] Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back here to Las Vegas. We're at the Sands Expo in Hall D, perhaps a friend in the area, come on by, say hi to Justin Warren and John Walls here, on the set of theCUBE, joined here by David Cramer, who is the President of Digital Services Operations for BMC software. David, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Thanks for having me. >> All the way from Austin, Texas, deep in the Lone Star state. >> Yes sir. >> All right, so everyone's going to the cloud, right? That's obviously, why, you know, why so many people are here. What do you see it in terms of how they get in there, what are they doing there, and who hasn't made that move yet, and why not? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So a lot of people are in different spots in this journey. Some people are just starting out with the journey to cloud, which is surprising, but as popular as cloud is there are still some companies out there who just haven't made the move. Sometimes for regulatory reasons, sometimes for cost reasons, or sometimes they just don't have the business need, or they just don't see the opportunity. Then the majority of the customers I talk to are somewhere on that path. They've either begun to move applications or they're actually moving applications and building new applications to take advantage of the cloud. And so for us as a company, we see a tremendous opportunity to help our customers figure out the right way to move to cloud. Because it wasn't that long ago, just a few years back, when you heard people talking about cloud first, lift and shift, I'm moving everything to the cloud. I think people have stepped back from that and said, well, wait a minute, let's think about what cloud infrastructure, cloud services can provide us, and then let's optimize what we put in the cloud because certainly you can spend a lot of money using cloud services if you're not too careful. >> Yeah, you hit a big word there. Optimize. Right, it's about, it's kind of fun to just start throwing, I wouldn't say, mud on the wall, but just making the big move and also you realize you're into it for a little more money than maybe you thought you should have been. >> Absolutely, and there's a cultural phenomenon that's driving this, and that is DevOps and the desire to release more software to get new products, new features, innovation into the market means that you have to let your teams be autonomous. You can't have a command and control structure where every decision comes from the top. But that autonomy creates an opportunity for waste, creates an opportunity for mistakes, misconfigurations, security issues. So one of the reasons that I mention the everybody moves everything there and then says, wait a minute. Maybe that wasn't the right move, maybe we should be cloud smart instead of cloud first. >> Yeah. I do speak a lot with developers and companies in that ecosystem and there's a lot of talk about replatforming, taking applications that we had on our existing on-side infrastructure and then replatforming that to cloud because cloud requires doing things in a completely new way. Whereas, if you just take the old thing that you had, and just lift and shift and move it to cloud it tends not to work out quite so well. We're noticing a trend and we've heard that a lot today here at this show that people aren't moving everything to cloud and we now have a change in Amazon's view of the world, that actually, cloud is not the one true way, you are actually allowed to have some stuff on-site now. Some things can stay there and that's okay. So what is BMC doing with customers to help them decide which things should be moved and which things should stay where they are. >> It's a great point you brought up, because there were a lot of people who were saying let's rearchitect for the cloud and the applications that they were looking at weren't going to benefit from the elasticity or the things that cloud environment provides. And I've talked to lots of CIOs who will tell you I can deliver a virtual machine for a lot less money than the virtual machines the cloud vendors deliver. >> Yeah. >> So to answer the question, BMC has a rich history in the data center. So one of the first things we learn is that our performance data, our capacity data, and the information we have about the application architectures and the way they live in the data center, whether that be physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, containers, we can help a lot to identify what are the high value assets where you can save a lot of money by migrating them to a cloud. What are the assets that aren't going to save you a lot of money and you're just going to lift and shift and not get those benefits. So I say that from a performance and capacity optimization standpoint, that's one of the starting places. A second is application discovery and dependency mapping. One of the challenges in IT has long been is what do I have and how is it configured. If I'm going to move something to the cloud, I sure need to know what it looks like in my data center and we provide a lot of help there with our world class discovery technologies. >> Right. Another thing about moving to the cloud that we've heard with a bunch of previous guests here on theCUBE today, is security. >> Yes. >> Security is a fundamental thing that we have to get right, particularly when we move to cloud. So what are some of the things of BMC, what's your security story, Dave? >> Yeah, it's a very important part of the strategy and one that we developed because we began this journey ourselves about five years ago, as we looked at our customers and the way they wanted to consume services. We said, well, shoot, we should be building new apps in Amazon environments and we actually have services that leverage Amazon Lambda. So, we then said great, now we have to learn about running cloud-hosted applications or cloud-native applications and how to secure them. So a lot of our solutions came from our own learnings. Specifically our focus areas are around optimizing the security and configuration of the cloud infrastructure layer and the platform layer. A lot of customers don't realize the shared responsibility model that Amazon. They've done a great job of telling people about this model. But a lot of customers, like the ostrich in the sand, they're just not thinking, or they're not looking at it, and so they expect Amazon or someone else to take care of all these problems. And when you set up a service and Amazon, certainly, they're taking care of a lot of security but they're not securing the things that you put in that environment, your software, the middleware, the different services you connect together. So we're helping customers secure the configuration of those services, but we're also helping customers with spend, because one of the challenges we just talked about around DevOps and autonomy is if you give a developer access to Amazon and the suite of services they offer, it's like a kid in the candy store. And of course, they want gold-plated everything. I want the best environment with the best database, the most advanced services, and all that ends up costing a whole lot of money. >> Yeah, you got to put me in the candy store. That's exactly where I'm going. >> Right. >> Right. >> All right, so we've also been talking about volume, data volume, and how it kind of boggles the human mind now, right? >> Oh, yeah. >> And why automation is essential. You have to keep up. >> Huge part. >> Is it beyond our ability now to keep up with it as humans. >> I think, most people who we talk would agree that we're past human scale. You know, when you begin to look at the number of containers that services like Google Maps. If you do some research, they're spending up millions of containers every day and then spending them back down in some cases. So, you can't take old methods and old approaches to an environment like that where you're at hyper-scale some of the time, and you're not at hyper-scale other times. And so we've seen a huge shift in mindset. We used to talk about push button automation. 'Cause we've been selling automation in the data center, gosh, all the way back to the mainframe, BMC's been selling automation. But it was smart people figuring out what to automate and then hitting the button. What we're now seeing is trust, where they're allowing the automation routines to take over and actually run. Now in some cases that's driven by machine learning and really advanced algorithms. In other cases, it's very simple policy based. But we are seeing a big shift from I don't trust automation to gosh, I have to trust it. And I think some of that is based on Amazon themselves, with things like auto skill rules. >> It's still got to be hard to cede control like that when you're used to doing it yourself, and now to rely on another mechanism. That just runs against my nature. >> Yeah, and it runs against the DevOps cultural trend we talked about, where you're trying to let the teams be autonomous. Every CIO I've spoken to in the last five years cares about what they call guard rails or governance. They realize that it can't be top-down decision-making. They have to let the teams have some freedom, but they also realize that if they don't put up guard rails, and they don't restrict the choices, restrict the opportunity for mistakes, they're going to be in trouble from a cost or a security or even a performance perspective. >> Innovation is fabulous until you fall off a cliff and die. We do actually need to have a fence at the edge of that cliff. That would be a good plan. >> Well, yeah, if you talk to the DevOps teams themselves, one of the things I always like to ask is who are the ops guys in the room? And normally you have a bunch of developers, and you ask well, who cares about compliance. Nobody. They want to build cool new features. >> Right >> Who cares about code scanning and testing your software. Maybe one guy puts his hand up and says I'm the QA guy, or I'm the security guy. So there's also a cultural thing that we're seeing operations blend into these new models, and we're seeing operations teams who are classically central, IT-Ops teams, moving into the DevOps world, moving into the cloud-Ops world. >> We were just commenting before during the break about the nature of this show. And that IT pros, and your traditional infrastructure type people, they would be at different shows. They're all here now. >> They are. >> We are definitely seeing that real blend between what used to be purely developers, front-end software developers would be at this show. Now we have IT pros, we have all the infrastructure groups, we have all the companies. >> Security guys. >> Security guys. All of these people are now at this show, working together in that one team idea. >> Yeah, it's fascinating. We've talked a lot about ops everywhere. We've talked about development everywhere. Because if you go to any large enterprise, the new IT operators they're trying to hire, all have development skills. They all have programing backgrounds. And they're all coming to shows like this because they're being tasked with this concept that BMC calls run and reinvent. You've got to continue to run your existing business. Well who better than the IT operators to do that. They've been doing that for years. But you've also got to reinvent, and you've got to compete, and who better to do that than our innovators, our developers, the people out front trying to create that innovation that will transform or game-change an industry. So it's fascinating >> Reinvent. I mean, that'd be a great name for a trade show. >> And I didn't even do that on purpose. (laughing) >> David, thank you for sharing your time with us and good luck on down the road. >> Great. Thanks a lot. >> David Kramer, joining us from BMC software. We will be back from re:Invent in just a moment. We're live here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (lively music)