>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today, having ongoing conversations about diversity and really adding more women and also people of color into the corporate environment. And we're really excited to have somebody who's an expert in the field. Joining us for the first time from the East coast. She's Beth Stewart, founder and CEO of Trewstar. Before we get going, tell us a little bit about Trewstar and what you guys are all about. >> Well, we're a search firm and we specialize at the board level, so we don't do executive search. And we further focus on female candidates, and much more recently, I wouldn't want to say we never focused on racial diversity, but let's just say it's getting a lot more attention and that would include men and women. >> Right, right, so that makes a lot of sense. And specifically, what's different about running a search firm that's focused on board members than a search firm that's focused on traditional kind of leadership roles, CEO or other senior executives? >> Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, one of the criteria to be a partner at Trewstar is that you have to have been a board member yourself. And I don't think at other search firms that do the board work as part of their overall practice that that's as important, that's not to say some partners at other firms aren't board members, but it's not as consistent as it is at Trewstar. So one, we feel like we really understand what our clients' issues are. A second thing that differentiates us is that, we spend really all day every day thinking about and sourcing and meeting with and getting referrals from people about diversity candidates. So, I think other firms are focused on people that they can place into leadership positions which aren't necessarily people who are or have been or could be a board member. And going back to that focus on having been in the board room, we have a pretty good sense of who's right and who isn't maybe quite ready or never will be ready to go on a board. >> So I wonder if you could just pull the curtain back a little bit for us, 'cause everyone has worked for a manager or been a manager and had some level of exposure to kind of the senior management in their companies or CEOs. We see him speak at keynotes. That's very different than what happens in the board. So, when you talk about the candidates, and you just mentioned, some people may never be ready for a board position. What are the kind of candidate attributes that you look for that you know is somebody that's good for corporate board? >> Well, so first, it has to start with the skill set that the company has requested, based on their analysis and sometimes we help with this. But their analysis of where there is a gap in the skills on the board. And there are a lot of different people that might fit that skill. Let's just take the audit chair, because it's such an obvious one, there are many, many people who can chair an audit committee. But what we also are going to look for is somebody who you'd like to have dinner with or lunch with. Now I realize when we're in COVID times, everybody's not doing that, but assuming things return to some level of normalcy, you want to have people who are personable, who are easy to get along with, who aren't going to talk too much, who aren't going to talk over each other and who are skilled at the top of their game, if you will. So, for people who might be audit chairs, we're looking for either a CFO or a retired audit partner. And in that case, we might be looking for audit partners who have had leadership positions in their firms that's just an indication of their sort of level of outstandingness. >> Right. >> And when you look for a CFO, you might say, is this a CFO who came up through an investment banking or Treasurer background or is it a CFO who came up through an accounting background? All these depend on the situation, but those are the kinds of considerations for us. >> Right, and one of the things that came up in doing a little research for this interview, is you talked about crafting modern dynamic boards and I think probably a lot of people's perception is that boards just don't turn over that often. And I think even you've said in some of your literature, that the problem's not really a supply side problem, it's a demand side problem. So, I wonder if you can share some insight as to kind of what is happening with boards in terms of turnovers and making seats available for new people, whether that be women or women of color or whomever. Is that changing over time? Are you seeing a dynamic start to change where you're starting to get more fresh blood into corporate boards, where before that was probably a pretty glacial paced activity I would imagine? >> I wouldn't want you to think that anybody's sprinting at this point, we haven't gone from glacial to sprints, but change has happened. And so you talked about a dynamic boardroom, if you can imagine the number of people that are on corporate boards that haven't worked since before the iPhone or before the trade wars with China and other places or before #metoo or before COVID or before dealing with millennials in the workplace. So, there are a lot of people that fall in that category that do offer wisdom and stability on a board, but it's really, I believe, incumbent on them to get that sort of new perspectives and literally new information and skills and have it be a better blend. And you can't do that unless you do create openings, you can always increase the size of the board, but you can't do that unless you take the difficult step of asking some of the longer tenured and older board members to retire. Now, having said that, it's not just an ageist thing. There are often board members that for instance, on a pre-IPO company, who were venture capitalists, and the venture capitalists may not actually know the issues of a public board, they know the issues of smaller companies and growing in a private market. And sometimes you get somebody who's in the middle of their career, who doesn't have the time to spend, because they are in a full-time role. So really, what it comes down to is, someone appropriately managing the boardroom by saying, "who's really got the skills and the time and the personality that we need." And what I find most interesting, Jeff, is you can speak to anybody on a board and they know who it is that shouldn't be there anymore. It doesn't require a whole process and bringing in outsiders and doing exhaustive studies, everybody knows who it is. It's just whether there's somebody who's willing to have those difficult conversations. >> So, it's interesting 'cause you say someone willing to have those difficult conversations which would imply that there's not kind of a systematic way to make sure that things are refreshed to make sure that there's some turnover to make sure that maybe institutionally everybody knows that there's going to be turns if it's really kind of a one off conversation every time and I think, again, doing some research, you talked about, some really older folks that have been around for a long time, not necessarily because they don't have the qualifications anymore, but it's just time for them to potentially give up that chair. So, you're saying that it's not that institutionalized in terms of making sure that this thing is refreshed at some type of frequency? >> Yes, that's what I'm saying. I just don't know how to say it any differently, but it doesn't happen consistently, but what is consistently true, is the dread with which the senior person on the board, the chair of nominating governance, the chair of the board, maybe it's the CEO, has about having the conversation about asking somebody to not stand for re-election, that's consistent and systematized. And there are some other sort of old fashion ways we can expand the board while expanding the board if you've been in a board room, it's a trivial issue. Somebody makes a motion and the board's expanded by one or we can't ask somebody to retire, because their term's not up. Well, why can't you? You're supposed to be representing the shareholders. If they're not doing as great a job as the next person. Having them stay for another 18 months isn't really in the best interest of the shareholders. So, I feel it's a little bit the dirty little secret in corporate boards. This unwillingness of people to either ask somebody to move on or to move on themselves. >> Well, then there's the whole chairman-CEO thing, which I've never quite understood that how you can be both the chairman of the board as well as the CEO of the company if the board is supposed to be the CEO's boss? But I don't think we're going to solve that problem here today. >> That's a third rail that I'm not going to get into and I would suspect that it really varies by person and by situation. Sometimes I'm sure that works just perfectly well and other times, there is a reason to have a separation. >> Right, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some positive news. You had an article that you did, it's been a while now, December 18th, saying that you placed more women in boards, the first quarter of Q1 2018, it's an old article, than you had in all 2017 which is kind of a nice interesting indicator of trending in the right direction. And as you just mentioned, before we turned on the cameras, your phones are lighting up with all this stuff going on with the black lives matter movement. So, people do seem to be in a better place than they were. So how do you see it kind of progressing? What are some ways that other people can contribute to help make sure that the momentum is going up in the correct direction? >> Sure, why don't I talk about what I think caused the change? And there's plenty of room for other people to take these actions. Certainly there has been for many years there were not for profit organizations and academic institutions that wrote about the reasons, wrote about, had conferences etcetera, about the reasons there should be diversity on boards. I have to say, parenthetically, this notion of diversity for me it goes a lot back to the idea of the dynamic board. So, it's not just being a woman per se or racially diverse person per se. It could be a person who actually has those needed skills. But anyway, so, for a long time these not for profits were focused on this. But it was March 7th, 2017, when State Street came out with their proclamation that they were not going to support chairs of nominating governance who didn't create diverse boards. And you might remember when they put the statue of the girl with her arms spread out in front of the bull on Wall Street. That was incredible and that led a number of other financial institutions who voted proxies to support that, that was huge. Another movement or another action that mattered, is the state of California, saying that they're setting up quotas. I'm no fan of quotas, but now that I've actually seen what happens in the state of California. And what's happened to the quality, we aren't putting people who aren't high quality on these boards, we're putting outstanding women on the boards, but there's more of an opportunity. And then the third thing that happened and I realized we're now getting into January of 2020, but I mention it because there are many more, so there are many more states that can do what California did. There are many more financial institutions that can do explicitly what State Street did, and many have, but there's still more. And then the last thing happened at Davos in January of 2020, when David Solomon, who's the CEO of Goldman Sachs, said that they will not take any companies public, unless this year there's at least one woman on the board and next year, two women on the board, and this is huge. So, what I would point out to you is that, in the case of State Street and in the case of Goldman Sachs, the senior member of the organization actually stepped in and did something and set a tone and set an expectation and sort of, if you will, created a rule, which is different than saying my head of diversity and inclusion is going to take care of it. Head of talent is responsible for this, it really has to come from the top. So, there are many, many other organizations with people at the top who can put in similar recommendations or basically new ways of working. >> Right, Beth, but we know from real data and real evidence that a diversity of opinion leads to better outcome and it leads to better business results. So it's funny that even with that kind of data, you still need kind of that personal touch to push it over the line, to really make it. The fearless girl statue is an amazing story, I'm happy to say I've tracked her down and got a couple pictures. I've got a few daughters that I shared it with and kind of the rallying cry that that became in fact, I think they've even moved it to a more prominent position from across from the bull, really is interesting that there's these small little symbols that can mark significant progress in kind of this ongoing journey. >> Yes, I agree with you completely, but maybe it goes back to that whole notion of why can't you? Why don't people want to retire from boards? And what's really these various things have done is it's just forced the conversation and it's forced the action. Being on a board is a great thing. You get paid a lot, you're at the top of the hierarchy, it's the pinnacle of somebody's career. So I'm very sympathetic to why nobody wants to move on, but that doesn't mean it's right. We're supposed to be doing what's right for the company and the shareholders. >> Okay, so before we let you go, just a couple of concrete things that you suggest to people that they can do to kind of help this mission along. >> Well, so back to what differentiates us, we present slates of all women. And what we recommend is interview the women first. And if we don't find a candidate who matches what you need, both the specific skills and the personality, we'll open the search to men. And while we have placed men, whenever we started with an all female slate, we've never been asked to open the slate to men. So, what does it mean? That's not us, we're a client service business, it's the client who's never asked us. So it's incumbent upon us not to just have a slate of women, but to have a slate of outstanding women. And that goes back to focusing on this and spending every day and talking to so many women in advance. So that's the first thing I would say, is that you start with an all female slate. The second thing I would say is people say to me, what's the most important thing about to get a woman on a board, and I say it starts with a signed engagement letter. And so what does that imply? What that implies is that we're a for profit organization doing this from soup to nuts. We don't just find the women and send their resumes out, we run the whole process. We understand the company, we give them materials, we organize the interviews, we do the reference checks, we do what I call the last mile logistics, so that in a three to four month period, which is quite fast for the world of boards, somebody goes on the board. We've never had a failed search. So, it's really managing a whole process. And the signed engagement letter means, somebody actually hired us to do that. So, we start in the very beginning with a board who wants the whole process and wants to have a diverse candidate. So it's not like a question at the end or whatever, it's all lined up. And we try to leave no stone unturned and I would say that that's very important when you start thinking about, there are a lot of databases out there. But sometimes when you just go to a database and get a name, it doesn't actually turn into a woman on the board. >> Right, and I'm just curious to get your personal take, since you've been doing this for a while and as you said, your phone's been lighting up looking for more diverse candidates, not just women, but people of color, etcetera. Do you see a change in attitude from the senior people that are hiring you to move beyond? "I need to check a box, I'm getting pressure I need to do this", versus, "wow I see real benefit, I see this as real important. It's important for me, it's important for my company, it's important, really, to our shareholders, our stakeholders and our constituents to actually take maybe an uncomfortable step or a step", maybe uncomfortable is the wrong word, "that I'm not necessarily used to or is new or foreign to me, to take this action and move this thing down the road." >> Yeah, I would say absolutely, but I think that even if they start with, "I know I have to do this, I might not know why I want to do it, but I'm going to do it anyway." Even for the people that are in that, like take an all male board. Truthfully the all male boards aren't really wild about this, they've been forced for one reason or another. But what's amazing is if you come up with a high quality slate of candidates, what we find over and over again is the inability to choose between one candidate and another, and often the decision to add two women. And that to me is a testament to one the openness of those all male boards to recognizing quality, and being able to now see with a live person, if you will, how that new director could really help them. So, that's terrific that that happens. Now, just to mention on the racial diversity, we're doing the exact same thing or basically, if you will, beefing up, expanding all of our connections in those areas. And one of the things that's different is we've had searches that were underway, whoever is leading the search on the side of the company has said, "Stop. It has to be a racially diverse person, stop whatever you're doing." We did a search for a media company and we had 21 African-American women on the slate that met the spec for one reason or another. And then, of the new calls that we've been getting, I'd say 60 or 70% of them we don't want anything other than a racially diverse man or woman. You talked about the phones lighting up, it's like a set of fireworks at the fourth of July in terms of what's happened here. And we're completely behind it and we've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about what's the right way to approach this in terms of having the conversations with those racially diverse people. And anyway, we're doing all sorts of things. And we're bound and determined to be helpful and to be action-oriented in this current situation. >> That's great news, Beth, because when I talked to some of my black friends, specifically, as this has been going on, a lot of them come back and say, "I don't know why this is so different, we've been having these issues for a long period of time." So, it's nice to find some examples where hopefully, there's some step function activity going on here. And I think what you just outlined very much supports that, that this isn't just more of the same, but actually, there are changes slowly being affected kind of across many fronts, all at the same time, which would certainly be supported by what you just said. >> So, I'd love to Jeff, I don't know whether we're running out of time or not, but I had a conversation with a senior African-American male board member. 'Cause one, he's on the board of a company that's our client, I know how terrific everybody thinks he is and he chairs audit committees and he chairs nominating governance committees. And so I asked him about how to handle this. And in any case, one of the things he told me is that he would advise his friends that if anybody was going on a board to figure out the sincerity of the board, he said, "'cause I don't want to go on a board and check the box. I want to go on a board because I'm part of a company trying to make strides in these areas and where I can add value." He said, "I would tell them up front, "that if all you've got is a black woman in diversity and inclusion, that I don't think you're sincere. And if I find that you're not sincere, I'm going to resign. And when I resign, you the board, will then have to explain to everybody why I resigned and that won't be pleasant." (chuckles) So, I thought, wow, that's- >> You're putting your mouth where your money is, that's for sure. That's terrific. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, we could go on and on and on. Unfortunately, we have other work to do and I'm sure you do as well. But our paths cross because of some of the fantastic women that we've had on theCUBE who are also clients of yours and getting placed in board seats, which is terrific news. We're happy to highlight some of these terrific individuals, as you said, they're not just women or people of color, they're fantastic people first, and terrific executives and kind of representatives of the company. So, really excited for you and what you're doing to help put some really qualified people in places where they can make a difference. >> Yes, well, it's a wonderful job I created for myself and as I say, I only talk to successful people, because unsuccessful ones aren't available to be interviewed for board roles. >> (chuckles) All right, well, we will leave it at that. So Beth, thanks a lot and have a terrific week. >> Thank you, same to you. Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, she's Beth, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

absolutely build on some of Ben's comments because I think what he articulated is one of the killer use cases of VMware cloud on a to us that I think is driving that momentum right which is we think it's one of the best solutions in the marketplace and customers have told us this to enable them to migrate and modernize right so let's talk about the migrate piece first right you have customers that have these tremendous enterprise class applications running on vSphere and their data centers they're built on top of that platform they depend upon it for performance availability everything else with VMware Club a native us we can migrate those applications with zero downtime no refactoring no additional cost in a matter of weeks or months as opposed to if you had to refactor everything to take years and millions of dollars right so that cloud migration use case I would say is that is the killer for us and that's you know exactly what Ben was we're definitely seeing that and I think that's the thing that really got me excited about a year ago was watching enterprises make that transition and say you know what the center of gravity has gone from architectures inside the on-prem data center is now moved to in the cloud I mean that shift has happened it happened to people talked about it five years ago but they didn't mean it and now when you talk to enterprises they are actually moving into the cloud not just talking about it and they're saying where that is the center of gravity and what's interesting to me was I think even just the tone of Andy Jesse today and what he was talking about was it's once you define what your architecture is you push it everywhere so cloud 1.0 and 2.0 was really more about taking my architecture that was on prem and pushing it into the cloud so let me take virtual appliance a virtual router basically my hardware router packaged it up put it on the cloud that's not cloud native it's cloud naive as we talk right and so what's the chase has happened is now everybody realizes the center of gravity is in the cloud and you start seeing things like outposts you see things like wavelength you see things like you know tgw network manager things getting pushed out the architecture of the cloud now actually pushing out and extending out into on-premises I've been at it for a couple of decades so in the beginning there was a lot of evangelism that this is safe it's consumable by the enterprise it's not some kind of crazy idea to bring open-source you're not going to lose your intellectual property or things like that those days I mean I I'm sure you can find an exception but those days are largely over in this in the sense that open-source has gone mainstream so I would say open-source is one most large enterprises have an open-source strategy they consider open source as critical to not only how they source software from vendors but also how they build their own applications so the world has really really evolved and now it's really a question of where are you partnering with vendors to build infrastructure that's critical to your business but not your differentiator and where are you leveraging open-source internally for your to differentiate your business I think that's a more sophisticated view it's not the safety question it's not is it is it legally you know that you're bringing legal concerns into the picture it's really a much different conversation and people in the enterprise are looking how can we contribute to these projects so that's really it's pretty exciting actually both are a great place for startups right they're not meters cluesive so I think if you go horizontal the amount of data being created by your applications your infrastructure your sensors time series data ridiculously large amount right and that's not going away anytime soon I recent did investment ain't chronosphere did you guys covered over at coupon a few weeks ago that's talking about metrics and absorbedly data time series data so they're gonna handle that horizontal amount of data petabytes and petabytes how can it query this quickly deeply with a lot of insight that's one play right cheaper better faster at scale the next play like you said is vertical it's how do I own data or slice the data the more contacts they know as can have we talked about like the virtual cycle of data right this the system of the tile well bye own set of da to be healthcare government or self-driving car data that no one else has I can build a solution and to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography you can go either way it's hard to do both though it's hard for start-up any big company it's very few companies can do two things well starves especially succeed by doing one thing very well I'm impressed they got two CEOs the CEO of goldman sachs david solomon the CEO of Cerner coming to the show that's kind of rare that the CEO of your customer comes to the show I guess the second thing I'd say is you know Amazon is not a rinse and repeat company at these shows although they are when it comes to shock and awe so they ticked the Box on shock and awe but you're right John they're talking a lot about transformation I would sort of think of it as a disruption here's what I would say to that Amazon has a dual disruption agenda one is its disrupting the horizontal technology stack and two it's disrupting industries it wants to be the platform of which startups in particular but also incumbents can disrupt industries and it's in their DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA and I think it's the last thing I'll say as Amazon is the retai Amazon retail is the you can buy anything here store and now to your point Justin Amazon Web Services is you can get AWS anywhere at the edge and a little mini data centers that they're built on outpost and of course in the cloud absolutely you know I'd say primarily were most kind of pleased with the variety of workloads and these cases the customers are bringing us into you know I think when we started out on this journey we saw a tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the aw psycho system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud what we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS it's a lot of customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flush arrays into right so that's their Tier one you know mission-critical environments there VMware workloads their Oracle workloads or safety workloads they're also looking at us from everything from you know to do lifts and shifts test and dev in the cloud as well as dr right and and that again i think you know speaks to a couple things it speaks to the durability the higher level of service that were able to deliver in AWS but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and you know have it operate in exactly the same way on prime in the cloud because it's look if you're gonna dr the last time you know the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a dr failover and so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases the customers are bringing us into I think we're delighted you know Mike obviously and I've been friends for years he's had some connections with VMware in his past that that that certainly helped in setting up this partnership so we're grateful to Mike and Andy and the team for that and it's you know two and a half to three years now since we announced it tremendous amount of customer interest listen you know we said at the beginning of this when you take sort of the king of the public cloud and the king the private cloud together and don't force customers to say these have to be separate doors you can do them both together customers like that message and what we've been really doing over the course the last 12 18 months is perfecting use cases for this platform I think to us the key word is migrations cloud migrations when people are moving their workloads of an app off vmware vsphere or our cloud foundation we want this to be the best place for it to land we are more cloud and AWS for migration opportunity and anything short of that refactoring app would be you know not something that would be a good use of people's time and money because they should be then modernizing with all the wonderful services that Amazon's built once they've migrated so we've really perfected our message in the course the last six 12 months to two ms migrated and modernized migrated modernized so we could migrate you into this avenue and then modernized with a set of container and other services so that mess is working we put on stage at VMware and there are many of them here too big Amazon customers VMware cloud and Amazon Freddie Mac and IHS market and they were telling are tens of thousands customers at those shows and similarly many of them here that that's the best option to be able to do things yeah so if you know public sector public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it and so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize for example one is Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will go out of support and so we have a great new offering with technology that can help them to not refactor but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019 because both of those will go out of support in January and Dave mentioned you know cloud first strategies but we're also seeing a lot of movement around data you know data is really powerful Andy mentioned this as well yesterday but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from we had on stage Avis yeah hey this not public sector customer but what they're doing is the the gentleman said you know your car can now talk to you and that data is now being given to local state officials local city officials they can use it for emergency response systems so that public and private use of data coming together is also a big trend that we're seeing it's all about breaking down I mean if devops is all about breaking down silos between Devon operations and in other parts of the business Deb sack ops or secure dev ops or whatever we want to call it is just bringing more people into the fold and helping security join that party and get at things earlier in the cycle so we can catch it before it you know before before there's a breach that's in the news so you know I think there's going to continue to be convergence between Amazon business in AWS over time and in the marketplace we offer kind of a goods marketplace they offer a software marketplace and a services marketplace and so I think we're still working on how do we harmonize that experience better and we've got a lot of work to do there we have a saying at Amazon that it's always day one and that's a great example where we still have a lot of work to do but one of the things that is another one of our partners Koopa which is a procure-to-pay a platform and a longtime Amazon business partner we've done some pretty creative things to improve the user experience and make it easier for customers use both Koopa and Amazon business and in concert together Koopa announced a couple months ago they've built an integration to the AWS marketplace and so that's a pretty exciting opportunity where people who are provisioning services via AWS be a Dobis marketplace can have that that transaction flows seamlessly into their prepare to pay solution and let you know the user who's provisioning that focus on what they want to do which is developing new solutions to serve customers I mean the spectrum is massive so the our biggest challenge is keeping up with everything and continuing to innovate with all the things that are happening but again the benefits of the platform that we have enables us to do that and the enhancements we weight made this year this year now that our platform is is more open we can connect a collect data from multiple entities not just the New Relic agents that we've that we were built on so the concept of observability and being able to observe the entire application environment it is built on the fact that data's got to come from all these different places then we need to turn that around and curate it into the right experience in the right use case that the customer is looking for so all I can say is that our company's built on innovation we try and stay on the cutting edge of all that trying to stay current with that and meet the customers needs as as everyone here is innovating like crazy at scale well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and you know when we were thinking about land that people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build this serverless event-driven computing a lot of people were keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of technology you always build things and people say well that's going to cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that they ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customer look I mean the the SHA this show estate Volante says amazon always delivers with the shock and awe you know broadest and deepest so many pieces here you know I took a selfie with many people and the biggest celebrity of the show AWS outpost the rack it's over in the corner there and people asking me about all the gear inside I said you should stop asking about that because you will never touch it only AWS will so put a curtain around it it's managed as a service and that's what I think people are still trying to understand we've been talking about cloud for what 15 years now but Amazon's positioning on cloud is still different than everyone else's when I think back to some of the waves there's that buzzword and there's one or two that really architectural er different in deliver and Amazon laid out their strategy even more and through the geeky pieces and transformation was the theme you [Music]

la from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Vinum care along with its ecosystem partners hello everyone welcome to the cube we're here live in Las Vegas for AWS reinvent 2019 I'm John Farrar your host is silicon Angles flagship the cube we're extract a signal noise leader in event coverage with day Volante my co-host and justin warren tech analysts Forbes contributor guru of cube host guys keynote for J&E jassie first of all I don't know how he does it he's just like continues hissing Marc loved the live music in there but a slew of announcements this is a reinvention of AWS you can tell that they're just essentially trying to go the next level on what the cloud means how they're gonna bring it to customers and you know they've been criticized for you know kind of nut I won't say falling behind I could say Microsoft's been probably praised more for catching up and it's been a lot of discussion around that the loss of the Jedi contract variety of enterprise wins Microsoft has the field Salesforce Google's just kind of retooling but Amazon clearly the leader with a little pressure for the first time in the rearview mirror they've got someone on their on their tail win and Microsoft's far back but this isn't a statement from from chassis and Amazon of okay you want to see the Jets we're gonna we're gonna turn on the Jets and blow pass everybody Jesse gets cocky self Justin what do you think yeah so a lot of signaling to enterprise that it's safe to come here it's this is where you can have everything that you need to get everything that you need done you can get all of it in one place so there there is a real signal there to say Enterprise if you want to do cloud there's only one place to do cloud enterprise customers they tried out some big names Goldman Sachs not a small enterprise they had all the classic born in the cloud but you know we put out this concept on I'm on our Silicon angle post called reborn in the cloud almost born-again enterprise you start to see the telegraphing of what their core message is which is transform just don't kick the tires and fall into the Microsoft trap go with em is on and transform your business model transform your miss not just run IT a better way than before well yeah I mean I'm impressed they got two CEOs the CEO of Goldman Sachs David Solomon the CEO of Cerner coming to the show it's kind of rare that the CEO of your customer comes to the show I guess the second thing I'd say is you know Amazon is not a rinse and repeat company at these shows although they are when it comes to shock and awe so they ticked the Box on shock and awe but you're right John they're talking a lot about transformation I sort of think of it as disruption here's what I would say to that Amazon has a dual disruption agenda one is its disrupting the horizontal technology stack and 2 its disrupting industries it wants to be the platform of which startups in particular but also incumbents can disrupt industries and it's in their DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA and I think it's the last thing I'll say as Amazon is the reach a Amazon retailers the you can buy anything here store and now to your point Justin Amazon Web Services is you can get AWS anywhere at the edge and a little mini data centers that they're built on outpost and of course in the cloud all right I want to get you guys reactions a couple things I saw and I want to just analyze the keynote one as we saw Jesse come out with the transformation message that's really more of their posture to the market you should be transforming we're gonna take Amazon as a center of gravity and push it out to the edge without post so kind of a customer company posture there on the industry then you had the announcements and I thought that the sage maker studio was pretty robust a lot of data and announcements so you had the transformation message a lot of core data and then they kind of said hey we're open we got open source databases we got kubernetes and multiple flavors a couple steers from the Twitter crowd on that one and then finally outpost with the edge where they're essentially you know four years ago Dave they said no more data centers in ten years now they're saying we're gonna push Amazon to the your datacenter so you know a posture for the company a lot of data centric data ops almost program and build I'm also DevOps feel to it what's your reaction to that I think the most interesting part for me was the change there was a bit of a shift there I think he made the statement of rather than bringing the data to the computer we want to bring the compute to the data and I think that's that's acknowledging reality that data has gravity and it's very difficult for enterprises particularly if you've already invested a lot in building a data Lake so being able to just pick that up and then move it to any cloud nothing let alone AWS just moving that around is is a big effort so if you're going to transform your business you have to kind of rethink completely how you address some of these issues and one of that would be well what if rather than let's just pick everything up and move it to cloud what if we could actually do something a little bit better than that and we can pick and choose what we want to suit our particular solution and your point Dave I think that's where Amazon strength comes from is it they are the everything store so you can buy whatever you want be at this tiny little piece that only five companies need or the same thing that everyone else on the planet needs you can come and buy everything from us and that's what I think they're trying to signal to an organization that says look if you want to transform and you're concerned that it'll be difficult to do we've got you we've got something here that will suit your needs and we will be able to work with you to transform your business and we're seeing you know Amazon years ago we wouldn't talk about hybrid and now they're going really all-in on hybrid and it's not outpost is no longer just this thing they're doing with VMware it's now a fundamental piece of their infrastructure for the edge and I think the key point there is the the edge is going to be one with developers and Amazon is essentially bringing its development platform to the edge without posts as the the underpinning and I like the strategy much much better than I like what I'm seeing from some of the guys like HP and Dell which is they're throwing boxes you know over the fence with really without a strong developer angle your thoughts I mean my my big takeaway was I think this is key knows about a next-generation shift on the business model but that's the transformation he didn't come out and say it I said it in my post but I truly believe if you're not born in the cloud or reborn in the cloud you'll probably be out of business and as a startup were to ask them of the VCS this question how do you go after and target some of those people who aren't gonna be reborn in the cloud to have the scale advantage but the data announcements was really the big story here because we look at DevOps infrastructure as code programming infrastructure we've seen that that that's of now an established practice now you start to see this new concept around data ops some people call it AI ops whatever but Dana now the new programmability it's almost a devops culture - data and I think what got my attention the most was the IDE for stage maker which kind of brings in this cool feature of what everyone was which is I want machine learning but I can't hire anybody and I got to make I got a democratized machine learning I got to make application developers get value out of the data because the apps need to tap the data it's got to be addressable so I think this is a stake in the ground for the next five to ten years of a massive shift from increasing the DevOps mission to add a layer making that manageable multiple databases he's totally right on that it's not one database if you want time series for real-time graph for you know network constructs it's pick your database you know that shouldn't be it inhibitor at all I think the data story is real that's the top story in my mind the data future what that's going to enable and then the outpost is just a continuation of Amazon realizing that the center of the cloud is not the end game it's just the center of gravity and I think you gonna start to see edge become really huge I mean I count ten into ten purpose-built databases now and jesse was unequivocal he said you gotta have the right database tool for the right job you're seeing the same thing with their machine learning and AI tools it's been shocking dozens and dozens of services each with their own sort of unique primitives that give you that flexibility and so where you can disagree with the philosophy but their philosophy is very clear we're gonna go very granular and push a lot of stuff out there I think there's two bits at play there that I can see you know I think you're right on the data thing and something that people don't quite realize is that modern data analysis is programming like it's code your data scientists know how to code so there was a lot of talk there about notebooks going in there like they love their notebooks they love using different frameworks to solve different problems and they need to be able to use for this one I need tens of flow for another one I might need MX net yeah so if you couple that that idea that we need to it's all about the data and you couple that with developers and AWS knows developers really really well so you've got modern enterprises lot wanting to do more with the data that they have the age or business problem of I've got all this information I need to process I need to do be out bi I need to do data analysis and you couple that with the Pala that iws has with developers I think it's a pretty strong story then you know in my interview with Jesse I asked him the question and I stole the line from Steve Moe Mulaney from aviatrix you take the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive and I think what I've been seeing is a lot of customers have been naive about what cloud is and it's actually been buying IT and so they really don't are not sensitive to the capabilities message so I asked Jeff see I'm like you got these capabilities that's cool if you want to go to the store and buy everything or look at everything and buy what you want and construct and transform check no problem I buy that however some customers just want a package solution and Amazon has not always been great on having something packaged for customers so he kind of addressed that and this might be an Achilles heel for Amazon as Microsoft has such entrenched sales sales presence that they might be pushing a solution that frankly customers might not care about capabilities we did see one bit where there was a little bit of a nudge towards is fees and and systems integrators and I think that that really for me is there needs to be a lot more work done by Amazon there because that's what Enterprise me enterprise is used to dealing with systems integrators that will help them to use the raw materials that ados provides to solve that promote you said there are two segments of developers and customers one that wants all the low level building blocks and others want simpler faster results with abstractions aka packaging so they're going down the road but again they're not shy don't like hey we're just going to continue to build we're not going to try to move off our trajectory they're gonna stay with adding more power and frankly some digs at snowflake I fought with red shift and I thought the dig to the kubernetes community with we code our own stuff wink wink we don't have to slow down was a nice jab at the CN CF I thought because he's saying hey you know what we're not in committees deciding features which is the customers and implementing them so a kind of a jab well sure that's gonna rapid a I would say the snowflake is sort of a copycat separating compute from stores that's what snowflakes has been doing forever but he did take direct jabs at IBM Oracle and obviously Microsoft with with Windows so I like to see that you know usually Jessie doesn't do that it's good take the gloves so much so many announcements out there you got to go to silk and angled comm will have all the stories but one of the top stories coming into the reinvent that we didn't hear anything about but if you squint through and connect the dots on Jessie's keynote it is pretty evident what the strategy is and that's multi-cloud so I'll see multi-cloud is a word that Amazon is not using at all onstage as you can tell they don't really they're in well they're one cloud they don't really care about the other clouds but their customers do so guys multi cloud is a legit conversation how they get multi cloud is debatable acquisition sprawl by the end of the day multiple clouds is reality I think Jessie was kind of predicting and laying down some early narratives around the multi cloud story by saying hey we have more capabilities we're faster we're doing more stuff so I think he's trying to cede the base on the concept of hey if you want to go look at other clouds try to go apples to apples NIT that other than that he didn't really address at all multi-cloud what do you guys think about multi cloud yeah what it's pretty much that if you're gonna have multiple clouds at least one of them's gonna be AWS so they're gonna get some of your money if we came a bi can't get all your money I'll get at least get some of your money that's reasonable but I think part of the multi cloud conversation is that enterprises are actually trying to clarify their existing way of doing things so cloud isn't a destination it's not like a it's not a physical location it's a state of mind it's a way of operating things an enterprise that that's that's the transformation part that enterprises are trying to do so transform the way that they operate themselves to be more cloud like so part of the multi cloud piece I think that people are kind of missing is well it's not just Amazon or some of its competitors its existing on-site infrastructure and making that into a cloud which i think is where something like outpost becomes a really strong proposition and I've said a million times multiplied cloud is more of a symptom than it is a strategy that'll start to change they will see an equilibrium there you know right cloud for the right job but today it's a problem that CIOs are asked being asked to clean up the crime scene all right let's wrap up by summarizing the keynote each of you guys give me your take on I'll start I think this was a inflection point for AWS and Jesse in the sense of they now know they have to go the next gen loud it's Amazon enterprise it's data it's outpost it's all these things it's truly next-gen I think this is going to be all about data it's all gonna be about large-scale infrastructure and data scaling and with edge and outpost I think is really an amazing move for them in the sense that's gonna probably put in motion another five to ten years of continuing architectural reshipping and I think that if you're not born in the cloud or reborn in the cloud you're gonna be naive to the fact that you're not gonna have the capabilities to be success when I think that's going to be an opportunity for entrepreneurs and for companies pivoting into enterprises so I think this goes will go might go down as one of the most pax keynotes but I think it'll look back as one of the instrumental transitions for Amazon so I think he did a good job beginning and to rush 30 announcements in three hours marathon but overall I thought he did a great job I think I would agree Jesse always does a good job he's giving a message to you know CEOs as opposed to the CIO and he had two CEOs on stage I thought there was quite a gap between you know that message of transformation and then sort of geeking out on all the new services so there's still some work to be done there but I think it's a lot of developers in the audience I'm seeing them tell your boss to get on the train it's a very hard keynote to serve both audiences but so it's a start but there's a lot of work to be done there Justin yeah I agree with that I think this is probably one of the first keynotes maybe last year but certainly this year there's like AWS is very serious about enterprise and is trying to talk to enterprise a lot more than it ever has it still talks to developers but we didn't see anywhere near as much interesting in kind of the startup ecosystem it's like no no cloud is for serious companies doing serious work and I think that we're just going to see Amazon talking about that more and more and more because that's where all the money is yeah next-generation cloud new architectures all about the enterprise guys this is the cube opening day for three days of wall-to-wall coverage keynote analysis from Andy Jessie and Amazon Andy Jessie will be on Thursday at 3 o'clock we got a lot of top Amazon executives will who'll help us open and unpack all these to make mega announcements stay with us for more cube coverage and go to Silicon angle comm cube net for the videos be back back after this short break [Music]